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"Discussing Hegel and Lacan is like breathing for Slavoj." -- Judith Butler "The Ticklish Subject may be his most focused and most political book to date." -- Lingua Franca "Slavoj Zizek's argument is subtle, witty and impassioned, and this book - his fourteenth in nine years - confirms his status as one of the most innovative and exciting contemporary thinkers of the left." - Times Literary Supplement
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A spectre is haunting Western academia, the spectre of the Cartesian subject. Deconstructionists and Habermasians, cognitive scientists and Heidiggerians, feminists and New Age obscurantists ...all are united in their hostility to it. The Ticklish Subject seeks to undermine the common presuppositions of all these crititiqes by posing a provocative question: What if there is a subversive core of the Cartesian subject to be unearthed, a core that provides the indispensable philosophical point of reference of any genuinely emancipatory politics.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This book might be a really big deal...,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Ticklish Subject: Absent Centre of Political Ontology (Wo es War) (Hardcover)
Slovenian author Slavoj Zizek has been rearing his head for awhile, but this might be his big break-through. In "The Ticklish Subject", he is actually outlining an argument for the return of the Cartesian subject, the universal subject, whose presence he claims is "a spectre haunting Western academia...". He argues that the rejection of this cogito is what unites an astounding array of intellectual thinking just before the milennium. The book consists mainly of three parts, which can be categorized broadly as engagements with German idealism and anti-idealism, then French post-...political thought, then with Anglo-American modes of "cultural studies" and multiculturalism. Specifically, in this last part, he engages with Judith Butler in the most respectable critique of her work I've ever read. In short, I think the publication of this book could mark the first major break with postmodernism in its myriad forms. This feels like an "insider" critique-- there are no kind of typical reactions against postmodern jargon, inaccessability, etc. Zizek comes from a hardcore Lacanian viewpoint, but his major task in this book is to put forth an essentially political standpoint in the era of global capitalism. As always, Zizek is funny and anecdotal, drawing from pop culture enough to incite me to say he's "keepin it real". Good book, likley to become very important.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Heidegger, Badiou and Butler in the context of Hegel and Lacan,
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This review is from: The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (Essential Zizek) (Paperback)
At the heart of this monster-sized tome, Zizek takes on 2 colleagues from the European Graduate School - Alain Badiou and Judith Butler. Up for discussion is Badiou's famous thesis of 'being and event' and Judith's Butler's ideas about sexualisation. The author comes well armed with the writings of Hegel, Lacan, Freud and Marx. Hegel is the supreme, Godlike figure who is approached with great caution and reverence, revered by Zizek as the greatest philosopher of all time. Marx has obvious links to Hegel, and whilst Freud and Lacan are obviously linked through the discipline of psychoanalysis, a lot of their work that Zizek picks up on in this book can be traced back to Hegel. Zizek is able to successfully challenge both Badiou and Butler in the context of these great thinkers, with reference to such tried and tested ideas as death drive, transcendental imagination and negation of negation. Both Badiou and Butler seem to pale in comparison with the strength of Zizek's arguments and Butler in particular emerges as someone who, according to Zizek, doesn't fully understand the Lacan text she is criticizing. Other philosophers who feature in the book include Kant, who is treated with a critical respect. It is he who is shown as the 'mother', as it were of the concept of transcendental imagination, even if Hegel was the 'midwife' who bought it fully into the world. Heidegger comes across as a rather bumbling figure, whose philosophy was stopped in its tracks when confronted with this same concept. Most of the text is fairly hard to read, but there is some lighter material about halfway through and towards the end, involving a discussion of the contemporary political situation - including a damning critique of multiculturalism and the 'Risk' society. It is at these times when Zizek departs from safe theoretical ground when us mere mortals will perhaps feel that we can offer some critical responses. The denouement of the book presents a strong advocation of 'The Act', be it in terms of political revolution or true sexual passion. This seems to be a similar phenemena to death drive and perhaps Neitzsche's 'will to power'. In his discussion of the latter, Zizek comes out in sympathy with the infamous Mary Kay Letourneau, who was convicted for raping one of her 12 year old students in 1997. In the end Zizek presents us with 2 choices - either to indulge in our instinctive love of 'jouissance' (as a 'Ticklish Subject'), or to renounce this very kernel of our being by 'traversing the fantasy'. The book will take a long time to read but is really worth the while, even if it is clear that the last 40 pages or so still need a lot of editing ie. errors which cannot simply be attributed to discoveries of ontological inconsistency. Did nobody bother to read the book thoroughly to the end?
8 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Watch out, here comes Zizek,
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This review is from: The Ticklish Subject: Absent Centre of Political Ontology (Wo es War) (Hardcover)
This is one of Zizek's better books, but also one of the most fragmentary. It's supposed to be a case for the Cartesian subject, but it turns out to be a series of snippets in which Zizek mobilises Lacanian analysis across a broad range of subjects. Of course, the Lacanian subject - constitutively incomplete because haunted by a constitutive lack - is not the Cartesian subject - present to itself through the gesture of knowing - and this makes the entire premise for the book rather implausible. Perhaps Zizek has found yet another way to annoy his intellectual rivals; among the trendy, Cartesianism is very passe, and Zizek is always one for trying to make the unfashionable into the latest style.Anyway, there's plenty here to get you thinking, if you can follow the often dense prose and if you "get" the reference-points scattered across pop culture and critical theory. Zizek is certainly smart, and often quite original, but ultimately there are huge problems with what he's trying to do. He wants to produce a critique of capitalism without abandoning the often speculative methodologies of cultural studies and psychoanalysis, and he wants to produce a theory of revolutionary change without renouncing the Lacanian idea that alienation is constitutive and should be accepted as such. The result - the concept of the "Act" - is less of a contribution to radical politics than a kind of therapeutic gesture aimed at self-purging through self-flagellation. The resulting politics is rather nihilistic, and is almost empty at the level of form, a problem Zizek only papers over with attempts to articulate it to Marxism, Christianity and anything else he can find. The book is definitely worth reading, but more for its critiques than for the theories it offers.
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