Lacan The Silent Partners

by Zizek, Slavoj; Badiou, Alain; Bosteels, Bruno; Bozovic, Miran; Chiesa, Lorenzo

• ISBN13: 9781844675494
• ISBN10: 1844675491
• Edition: 00
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-04-17
• Publisher: VERSO

Summary

The giant of Ljubljana marshals some of the greatest thinkers of our age in support of a dazzling re-evaluation of Jacques Lacan. It is well known that Jacques Lacan developed his ideas in dialogue with major European thought and art, past and present. Yet what if there is another frame of reference, rarely or never mentioned by Lacan, which influenced his thinking, and is crucial to its proper understanding? Zizek focuses on Lacan's "silent partners," those who provide a key to Lacanian theory, discussing his work in relation to the Pre-Socratics, Diderot, Hegel, Nietzsche, Holderlin, Wagner, Turgenev, Kafka, Henry James, Artaud and Kiarostami. As Zizek says, "The ultimate aim of the present volume is to instigate a new wave of Lacanian paranoia: to push readers to engage in the work of their own and start to discern Lacanian motifs everywhere, from politics to trash culture, from obscure ancient philosophers to contemporary Iranian filmmakers." Contributors include Alain Badiou, Bruno Bosteels, Joan Copjec, Mladen Dolar, Fredric Jameson, Silvia Ons, and Alenka Zupancic.

Author Biography

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include Living in the End Times, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, In Defense of Lost Causes, four volumes of the Essential Žižek, and many more.

Alain Badiou teaches philosophy at the École normale supérieure and the Collège international de philosophie in Paris. In addition to several novels, plays and political essays, he has published a number of major philosophical works, including Theory of the Subject, Being and Event, Manifesto for Philosophy, and Gilles Deleuze. His recent books include The Meaning of Sarkozy, Ethics, Metapolitics, Polemics, The Communist Hypothesis, Five Lessons on Wagner, and Wittgenstein’s Anti-Philosophy.

Bruno Bosteels, Professor of Romance Studies at Cornell University, is the author of Badiou and Politics, Marx and Freud in Latin America, and The Actuality of Communism. He is also the translator of several books by Alain Badiou: Theory of the Subject, Can Politics Be Thought? and What Is Antiphilosophy? Essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Lacan. He currently serves as the General Editor of Diacritics.

Joan Copjec is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture at the State University of New York, Buffalo.

Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has over the last three decades developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture’s relation to political economy. He was a recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Cultural Turn, A Singular Modernity, The Modernist Papers, Archaeologies of the Future, Brecht and Method, Ideologies of Theory, Valences of the Dialectic, The Hegel Variations and Representing Capital.

Alenka Zupan?i? is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, Ljublijana

Table of Contents

Introduction: Lacan with (x)	1	(4)
I Thought	5	(164)
1 Lacan and the Pre-Socratics	7	(10)
Alain Badiou
2 The Omniscient Body	17	(17)
Miran Božovic
3 Ghosts of Substance Past: Schelling, Lacan, and the Denaturalization of Nature	34	(22)
Adrian Johnston
4 Truth and Contradiction: Reading Hegel with Lacan	56	(23)
Timothy Huson
5 Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan	79	(11)
Silvia Ons
6 May '68, the Emotional Month	90	(25)
Joan Copjec
7 Alain Badiou's Theory of the Subject: The Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism?	115	(54)
Bruno Bosteels
II Art	169	(229)
8 The 'Concrete Universal,' and What Comedy Can Tell Us About It	171	(27)
Alenka Zupancic
9 The Familiar Unknown, the Uncanny, the Comic	198	(19)
Robert Pfaller
10 Burned by the Sun	217	(14)
Slavoj Žižek
11 The Politics of Redemption, or, Why Richard Wagner Is Worth Saving	231	(39)
Slavoj Žižek
12 Forfeits and Comparisons: Turgenev's 'First Love'	270	(18)
Sigi Jöttkandt
13 Kate's Choice, or, the Materialism of Henry James	288	(24)
Slavoj Žižek
14 Kaflca's Voices	312	(24)
Mladen Dolar
15 Lacan with Artaud: j' ouis-sens, jouis-sens, jouis-sans	336	(29)
Lorenzo Chiesa
16 Lacan and the Dialectic: A Fragment	365	(33)
Fredric Jameson
Notes on Contributors	398	(2)
Index	400