For they know not what they do: enjoyment as a political factor  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

vanishing mediator

For they know not what they do: enjoyment as a political factor is a book by Slavoj Zizek, published by Verso Books in 2008.

Blurb from Verso

Psychoanalysis is less merciful than Christianity. Where God the Father forgives our ignorance, psychoanalysis holds out no such hope. Ignorance is not a sufficient ground for forgiveness since it masks enjoyment; an enjoyment which erupts in those black holes in our symbolic universe that escape the Father's prohibition.
Today, with the disintegration of state socialism, we are witnessing this eruption of enjoymnet in the re-emergence of aggressive nationalism and racism. With the lid of repression lifted, the desires that have emerged are from from democratic. To explain this apparent paradox, says Slavoj Zizek, socialist critical thought must turn to psychoanalysis.
For They Know Not What They Do seeks to understand the status of enjoyment within ideological discourse, from Hegel through Lacan to these political and ideological deadlocks. The author's own enjoyment of “popular culture” makes this an engaging and lucid exposition, in which Hegel joins hands with Rossellini, Marx with Hitchcock, Lacan with Frankenstein, high theory with Hollywood melodrama.
“The most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged from Europe in some decades.” — Terry Eagleton

“Slavoj Zizek, the Giant of Llubljana ... provides the best intellectual high since Anti-Oedipus.” – Voice Literary Supplement



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "For they know not what they do: enjoyment as a political factor" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools