Film theory is in crisis. The dominant psychoanalytical paradigm is contested by cognitive models and post-theory. In the background is a wider crisis in cultural studies, particularly as regards the public role of the politically engaged intellectual.
In this major new study Slavoj Zizek challenges both cognitivist-historicist accounts of cinema and conventional film theory. Arguing that the reading of Lacan operative in the '70s and '80s was particularly reductive, Zizek asserts that there is "another Lacan," in reference to whom film theory, cultural studies, and critical thought as...

Jacques Lacan is the foremost psychoanalytic theorist after Freud. Revolutionising the study of social relations, his work has been a major influence on political theory, philosophy, literature and the arts, but his thought has so far been studied without a serious investigation of its foundations. Just what are the influences on his thinking, so crucial to its proper understanding?
In "Lacan: The Silent Partners" Slavoj Žižek, the maverick theorist and pre-eminent Lacan scholar, has marshalled some of the greatest thinkers of our age in support of a dazzling re-evaluation of...

The idea of a Lenin renaissance might well provoke an outburst of sarcastic laughter. Marx is OK, but Lenin? Doesn t he stand for the big catastrophe which left its mark on the entire twentieth-century?
Lenin, however, deserves wider consideration than this, and his writings of 1917 are testament to a formidable political figure. They reveal his ability to grasp the significance of an extraordinary moment in history. Everything is here, from Lenin-the-ingenious-revolutionary-strategist to Lenin-of-the-enacted-utopia. To use Kierkegaard s phrase, what we can glimpse in these writings is...

In this new book, Slavoj Zizek and Glyn Daly engage in a series of entertaining conversations which illustrate the originality of Zizek's thinking on psychoanalysis, philosophy, multiculturalism, popular/cyber culture, totalitarianism, ethics and politics.

• An excellent introduction to one of the most engaging and controversial cultural theorists writing today.
  
• Zizek is a Slovenian sociologist who trained as a Lacanian and uses Lacan to analyse popular culture and politics.
  
• Illustrates the originality of Zizek's thinking on...

Modern audiovisual media have spawned a 'plague of fantasies', electronically inspired phantasms that cloud the ability to reason and prevent a true understanding of a world increasingly dominated by abstractions--whether those of digital technology or the speculative market.

Into this arena, enters Žižek: equipped with an agile wit and the skills of a prodigious scholar, he confidently ranges among a dazzling array of cultural references--explicating Robert Schumann as deftly as he does John Carpenter--to demonstrate how the modern condition blinds us to the ideological basis...

The gaze entices, inspects, fascinates. The voice hypnotizes, seduces, disarms. Are "gaze "and "voice" part of the relationship we call love . . . or hate? If so, what part? How do they function? This provocative book examines love as the mediating entity in the essential antagonism between the sexes, and "gaze" and "voice" as love's medium. The contributors proceed from the Lacanian premise that "there is no sexual relationship," that the sexes are in no way complementary and that love figured in the gaze and the voice embodies the promise and impossibility of any relation between them....

Hinter dem bekannten Bild Hitchcocks als eines groen kommerziellen Entertainers, hinter dem Meister des Suspense, gibt es einen anderen Hitchcock, der auf eine vllig neuartige Weise Ideologiekritik betreibt. Die Pointe der Analysen besteht darin, diesen anderen Hitchcock sichtbar zu machen und ihn so fr ein progressives Denken und eine progressive Praxis zu retten.

Ein Gespenst geht um in der akademischen Welt. Es ist das Gespenst des cartesianischen Subjekts. Kognitivisten und Psychoanalytiker, Dekonstruktivisten und Anhänger des New Age, Heideggerianer und Habermasianer, Feministinnen und Postmarxisten, Ökologen und Enthusiasten des Cyberspace alle haben sie das Ziel, dem westlichen Denken dieses Gespenst auszutreiben, das vermeintlich für alle Plagen der Menschheit verantwortlich ist, von der ökologischen Bedrohung bis zur politischen Unterdrückung. i ek hingegen verteidigt das philosophisch und politisch subversive Erbe des cartesianischen...