Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism

by Belsey,Catherine

• ISBN13: 9780415252898
• ISBN10: 041525289X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2004-12-30
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

What makes us the people we are? Culture evidently plays a part, but how large a part? Is culture alone the source of our identities? Some have argued that human nature is the foundation of culture, others that culture is the foundation of human identity. Catherine Belsey now calls for a more nuanced, relational account of what it is to be human, and in doing so puts forward a significant new theory of culture. Culture and the Realexplains with Professor Belsey's characteristic lucidity the views of recent theorists, including Jean-Francois Lyotard, Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek, as well as their debt to the earlier work of Kant and Hegel, in order to take issue with their accounts of what it is to be human. To explore the human, she demonstrates, is to acknowledge the relationship between culture and what we don't know: not the familiar world picture presented to us by culture as 'reality', but the unsayable, or the strange region that lies beyond culture, which Lacan has called 'the real'.Culture, she argues, registers a sense of its own limits in ways more subtle than the theorists allow. This volume builds on the insights of Belsey's influentialCritical Practiceto provide not only an accessible introduction to contemporary theories of what it is to be human, but a major new contribution to current debates about culture. Taking examples from film and art, fiction and poetry,Culture and the Realis essential reading for those studying or working in cultural criticism, within the fields of English, Cultural Studies, Film Studies and Art History.

Author Biography

Catherine Belsey is Distinguished Research Professor at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University.

Table of Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS	viii
GENERAL EDITOR'S PREFACE	ix
PREFACE	xi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS	xvi
1 What's Real? Butler, Fish, Lyotard	1	(19)
2 Psychoanalysis Beyond Idealism: Hegel, Lacan, Freud	20	(18)
3 The Lacanian Real	38	(14)
4 Žižek Against Lacan	52	(12)
5 Culture's Magic Circle	64	(17)
6 Making Space: Perspective Vision and the Real	81	(19)
7 Desire and the Missing Viewer	100	(19)
8 The Real and the Sublime: Kant, Lyotard, Lacan	119	(20)
9 Sublime or Sublimation? Towards a Theory of Culture	139	(18)
FURTHER READING	157	(3)
NOTES	160	(3)
REFERENCES	163	(6)
INDEX	169