A critique of the political theology of Slavoj Zizek

This chapter critiques the political theology of Slavoj Zizek as beset by social theoretical and strategic political problems. Political theology here is a privileged intellectual terrain on which to simultaneously resolve questions about liberating forms of social cohesion in a post-revolutionary political community and about cultural strategy in the radical program. In connection with the Marxist critique of religious ideology, Zizek’s work represents an important contribution to the research program that emerged from the Althusserian approaches to social theory. But although Zizek has the conceptual resources to generate a dialectical theory of the connection between religious ideology and political strategy, he instead opts for a theory of radical rupture with existing forms of life. Detoured through the encounter with Carl Schmitt, Zizek’s doctrine of radical rupture quickly becomes an inverted Schmittianism, freighted with the problems of the militarisation of politics and the arbitrary designation of enemies that he diagnoses in Schmitt, but does not transcend in his own response. Zizek’s figure of the “religious suspension of the ethical” brings the politics of rupture to its most problematic (and baroque) formulations, revealing the fundamental problem of the ideological representation of political structures.

Soluble fish : picture words in a limitless sea — surrealist poetics and a history of the unconscious

This article discusses the Surrealist text 'Soluble Fish' by Andre Breton against prevailing and dominant paradigms of language and the unconscious. Drawing on the theories of Freud, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, it considers desire as ‘lack’ versus desire as a productive force entirely necessary for life and ‘becoming’. In addition, using an extract of my own creative practice, I propose the taxonomy of ‘new Surrealism’—a contemporary interpretation of the Surrealist’s productive force, also known as the ‘Marvellous.’

Comedy and the agency of the letter in a midsummer night's dream

This chapter gives a Lacanian reading of the Shakespeare play A Midsummer Night's Dream. Part 1 looks at the structural Wiederholung underlying the comedy of the nocturnal world of the play, in the forests outside of Athens. Part 2 examines Puck's agency in light of Lacan's famous paper on "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious". We conclude with reflections on Lacan's gnomic comment that love is an essentially comic emotion, as this is reflected in the bard.

Hunting Plato's agalmata

In this essay I argue that to understand Plato's philosophy, we must understand why Plato presented this philosophy as dialogues: namely, works of literature. Plato's writing of philosophy corresponds to his understanding of philosophy as a transformative way of life, which must nevertheless present itself politically, to different types of people. As a model, I examine Lacan's famous reading of Plato's Symposium in his seminar of transference love in psychoanalysis. Unlike many other readings, Lacan focuses on Alcibiades' famous description of what caused his desire for Socrates: the supposition that beneath Socrates' Silenus-like language and appearance, there were agalmata, treasures, hidden in his belly. I argue that this image of Socrates can also stand as an image for how we ought to read and to teach Plato's philosophy: as harbouring different levels of insight, couched in Plato's philosophy as literature.

Person, persona

Person and persona are presented as conceptually at opposite ends of a spectrum. Person describes the internal dimensions of the self, while persona identifies the external and public presentations of the self. The article explores these ideas of person and public persona from their theoretical origins in media and communication research and how they are challenged and shifted by the way various communication technologies are used and deployed in contemporary culture.