Essential reading for scholars and students in critical theory, psychoanalysis, and gender studies. How does the self care for itself in the posthumanist era? What psychic processes might allow the postmodern subject to find meaning and value in its life? Is it possible to delineate a theory of psychic potentiality that is compatible with poststructuralist models of fluid, decentered, and polyvalent subjectivity? Reinventing the Soul offers a new perspective on what it means to be a human being and to strive in the world despite the wounding effects of the socialization...
Essential reading for scholars and students in critical theory, psychoanalysis, and gender studies. How does the self care for itself in th...
How are our lives meaningful? What is the relationship of loss to creativity? How can we best engage and overcome our suffering? From Socrates to Foucault, Western philosophers have sought to define "the art of living"--the complex craft of human existence that elicits our thoughtful participation, and the idea that even though death escapes our control, life is not something that simply happens to us in a passive manner but is instead a process that invites our active and lively engagement. A World of Fragile Things offers a distinctly psychoanalytic perspective on "the art of living," one...
How are our lives meaningful? What is the relationship of loss to creativity? How can we best engage and overcome our suffering? From Socrates to Fouc...
We are conditioned to think that love heals wounds, makes us happy, and gives our lives meaning. When the opposite occurs and love causes fracturing, disenchantment, and existential turmoil, we suffer deeply, especially if we feel that love has failed us or that we have failed to experience what others seem so effortlessly to enjoy. In this eloquently argued, psychologically informed book, Mari Ruti portrays love as a much more complex, multifaceted phenomenon than we tend to appreciate--an experience that helps us encounter the depths of human existence. Love's ruptures are as important...
We are conditioned to think that love heals wounds, makes us happy, and gives our lives meaning. When the opposite occurs and love causes fracturing, ...
The Singularity of Being presents a Lacanian vision of what makes each of us an inimitable and irreplaceable creature. It argues that, unlike the "subject" (who comes into existence as a result of symbolic prohibition) or the "person" (who is aligned with the narcissistic conceits of the imaginary), the singular self emerges in response to a galvanizing directive arising from the real. This directive carries the force of an obligation that cannot be resisted and that summons the individual to a "character" beyond his or her social investments. Consequently, singularity expresses something...
The Singularity of Being presents a Lacanian vision of what makes each of us an inimitable and irreplaceable creature. It argues that, unlike the "sub...
The Singularity of Being presents a Lacanian vision of what makes each of us an inimitable and irreplaceable creature. It argues that, unlike the "subject" (who comes into existence as a result of symbolic prohibition) or the "person" (who is aligned with the narcissistic conceits of the imaginary), the singular self emerges in response to a galvanizing directive arising from the real. This directive carries the force of an obligation that cannot be resisted and that summons the individual to a "character" beyond his or her social investments. Consequently, singularity expresses...
The Singularity of Being presents a Lacanian vision of what makes each of us an inimitable and irreplaceable creature. It argues that, unlike...
We trust our sciences to operate on a plane of objectivity and fact in a world of subjectivity and cultural ideologies, but should we? In The Age of Scientific Sexism, philosopher Mari Ruti offers a sharp critique of the gender profiling tendencies of evolutionary psychology, untangling the insidious threads of various gender mythologies that have infiltrated-or perhaps even define-this faux-science.
Selling stereotypes as scientific facts, evolutionary psychology continually brings retrograde models of sexuality into mainstream culture: it insists that men and women live in...
We trust our sciences to operate on a plane of objectivity and fact in a world of subjectivity and cultural ideologies, but should we? In The Ag...
Levinas and Lacan, two giants of contemporary theory, represent schools of thought that seem poles apart. In this major new work, Mari Ruti charts the ethical terrain between them.
At first glance, Levinansian and Lacanian approaches may seem more or less incompatible, and in many ways they are, particularly in their understanding of the self-other relationship. For both Levinas and Lacan, the subject's relationship to the other is primary in the sense that the subject, literally, does not exist without the other, but they see the challenge of ethics quite differently: while Levinas...
Levinas and Lacan, two giants of contemporary theory, represent schools of thought that seem poles apart. In this major new work, Mari Ruti charts ...
In Feminist Film Theory and Pretty Woman, Mari Ruti traces the development of feminist film theory from its foundational concepts such as the male gaze, female spectatorship, and the masquerade of femininity to 21st-century analyses of neoliberal capitalism, consumerism, postfeminism, and the revival of "girly" femininity as a cultural ideal. By interpreting Pretty Woman as a movie that defies easy categorization as either feminist or antifeminist, the book counters the all-too-common critical dismissal of romantic comedies as mindless drivel preoccupied with trivial "feminine"...
In Feminist Film Theory and Pretty Woman, Mari Ruti traces the development of feminist film theory from its foundational concepts such as the m...
In Feminist Film Theory and Pretty Woman, Mari Ruti traces the development of feminist film theory from its foundational concepts such as the male gaze, female spectatorship, and the masquerade of femininity to 21st-century analyses of neoliberal capitalism, consumerism, postfeminism, and the revival of "girly" femininity as a cultural ideal. By interpreting Pretty Woman as a movie that defies easy categorization as either feminist or antifeminist, the book counters the all-too-common critical dismissal of romantic comedies as mindless drivel preoccupied with trivial "feminine"...
In Feminist Film Theory and Pretty Woman, Mari Ruti traces the development of feminist film theory from its foundational concepts such as the m...
Mourning Freud analyses Freud's experiences and theories of mourning as the basis for exploring changes in psychoanalytic theories and practices over the course of the 20th century.
The modernist Freud of the early 20th century has ceded to the postmodern Freud of the 21st. Madelon Sprengnether examines this phenomenon from the perspective of Freud's self-analysis in relation to his generation of theory, the challenges and transformations wrought by feminism, cultural studies and postmodernism, and the speculations of contemporary neuroscience concerning the unreliability of...
Mourning Freud analyses Freud's experiences and theories of mourning as the basis for exploring changes in psychoanalytic theories and pract...
