Shakespeare and Theory: Special Issue II

The latest issue of English Studies

Jobsite Theater’s production of Macbeth, starring Giles Davies (Macbeth) and Dahlia Legault (Lady Macbeth). Photo: Crawford Long

Shakespeare and Theory: Special Issue II
Guest Editors: François-Xavier Gleyzon and Johann Gregory

The latest issue of English Studies (94.7, 2013) is a special issue on Shakespeare and Theory.

Contents

(Vol. 94.7)

Listening to the Body …: Transitioning to Shakespeare and Theory (Special Issue II)
François-Xavier Gleyzon (University of Central Florida) and Johann Gregory (Cardiff University)

Performing Disability and Theorizing Deformity
Katherine Schaap Williams (Rutgers University)

Ship of Fools: Foucault and the Shakespeareans
Richard Wilson (Kingston University)

“Untimely Ripp’d”: On Natality, Sovereignty and Unbearable Life
Arthur Bradley (Lancaster University)

Syllogisms and Tears in Timon of Athens
Drew Daniel (Johns Hopkins University)

Opening the Sacred Body or the Profaned Host in The Merchant of Venice
François-Xavier Gleyzon (University of Central Florida)

For more information, visit Cardiff Shakespeare [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Shakespeare and Theory: Special Issue II
• Girls and Girlhood in Adaptations of Shakespeare
• Toni Morrison on Joyce and Shakespeare
• Shakespeare, Justice and Modern Law
• Shakespeare's Hamlet: Polonious on Conduct

Shakespeare and Theory: Special Issue I

The latest issue of English Studies

Pete Postlethwaite plays the lead in a production of Shakespeare's King Lear

Shakespeare and Theory: Special Issue I
Guest Editors: François-Xavier Gleyzon and Johann Gregory

The latest issue of English Studies (a Taylor and Francis journal) is a special issue on Shakespeare and Theory.

Contents

(Vol. 94.3)

Thinking through Shakespeare: An Introduction to Shakespeare and Theory
Johann Gregory and François-Xavier Gleyzon

Shakespeare by Design: A Flight of Concepts
Julia Reinhard Lupton and C.J. Gordon (University of California)

Of Cause
Madhavi Menon (American University)

“After the Takeover”: Shakespeare, Lacan, Žižek and the Interpassive Subject
Étienne Poulard (Cardiff University)

Wordplay in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Accusation of Derrida’s “Logical Phallusies”
Johann Gregory (Cardiff University)

Storm at Sea: The Tempest, Cultural Materialism and the Early Modern Political Aesthetic
Christopher Pye (Williams College)

A second issue on Shakespeare and Theory, also guest edited by François-Xavier Gleyzon and Johann Gregory, will be published in the November issue of the same journal volume. This issue will include contributions from Arthur Bradley (Lancaster University), Drew Daniel (Johns Hopkins University), François-Xavier Gleyzon (University of Central Florida), Katherine Schaap Williams (Rutgers University) and Richard Wilson (Kingston University) [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Girls and Girlhood in Adaptations of Shakespeare
• Toni Morrison on Joyce and Shakespeare
• Shakespeare, Justice and Modern Law
• Shakespeare's Hamlet: Polonious on Conduct

Simon Critchley on Contemporary Art

An article for The Brooklyn Rail

Al Held, 'The Big A' (1962)

Philosopher Simon Critchley shares his thoughts on contemporary art: '[...] despite such confusions of reference and the horrors of the contemporary art business model—or perhaps even because of it—I want to defend contemporary art, up to a point. It is simply a fact that contemporary art has become the central placeholder for the articulation of cultural meanings—good, bad, or indifferent. I am middle-aged enough to remember when literature, especially the novel, played this role and when cultural gatekeepers were literary critics, or social critics, often from literary backgrounds. That world is gone. The novel has become a quaint, emotively life-changing, and utterly marginal phenomenon. The heroic critics of the past are no more. I watched this change happen slowly when I still lived in England in the sensation-soaked 1990s and recall, as a kind of cultural marker, the opening of Tate Modern in 2000 and immensely long lines queuing up to see a vast spider by Louise Bourgeois in the Turbine Hall. It was clear that something had shifted in the culture.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• Francis Bacon: Five Decades
• Damien Hirst on Francis Bacon
• David Lynch on BBC's The Culture Show

'Authenticity': Postgraduate Symposium Call for Papers

University of York · 31 May 2012

'Authenticity': Call for Papers

University of York Centre for Modern Studies Postgraduate Second Annual Symposium
Bowland Auditorium, Humanities Research Centre, Thursday 31 May 2012

The signs of authenticity pervade our everyday interactions with the world, from the authentic takeaway to the historical television re-enactment and the claimed impartiality of the commercial press. In response to the British riots in the summer of 2011, Tudor historian David Starkey made the distinction between the authentic and inauthentic citizenry. Those who partook in looting and affray were figured as outside authentic structures of legal and moral behaviour, ‘feral’ even. The insidious and barely concealed attribution of inauthenticity to what in London was a predominantly black community set off racial tension that for many years now has been thought of as behind us. Authenticity, then, had become the buzzword in the reenlivened discourses of politics, race, class and culture.

Through this interdisciplinary conference, the Centre for Modern Studies Post-Graduate Forum seeks to explore and question the associations and assumptions that have come to coalesce around the concept of the ‘authentic’. From the art historian Hal Foster’s charting of the ‘Return of the Real’, through its philosophical instantiations in Marx, Sartre, Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Adorno, by way of the pop/mass culture debate in Cultural Studies, to the notion of performative ‘masquerade’ in theories of gender and sexuality - issues of authenticity thread through much recent work in the humanities and the social sciences. For example, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s recent exhibition on postmodernism aims to historicise a discourse famous for its slippery employment of replication, reproduction and rearrangement into a compartment of the authentic academic canon.

We therefore invite abstracts for papers from post-graduates working in the humanities and social sciences disciplines in the modern period (1850-present). We would welcome interdisciplinary papers, and submissions from panels. Possible topics for papers include but are not limited to:

• The authenticity debate in twentieth century philosophy
• Critical Counterfactualism
• Hoaxes, deceptions and counterfeiting
• Documentary film and television
• Photography
• Journalism
• Cuisine
• Digital authentication and access
• Intellectual property and copyright
• Identity: race, class, gender, sexuality
• Mimesis and verisimilitude
• Materiality / immateriality – replication, the virtual / digital (gaming)
• Fantasy / utopia / visionaries / spiritualities / sci-fi
• Costume, cross-dressing / beauty industry and cosmetics
• Geographies of authenticity – i.e. ‘native’ and ‘indigenous’ vs. ‘foreigner’ ‘alien’
• Immigration / migration

Abstracts for papers should be 300 words in length, and the deadline for submissions is Monday 26th March 2012 at 5.00pm. Please send abstracts to cmods-pgforum@york.ac.uk - if you would like more information about the symposium or the CMODS Postgraduate Forum, don't hesitate to contact us at this address, or visit our website.

Seán Sheehan, Žižek: A Guide for the Perplexed

A new title from Continuum

Seán Sheehan, Žižek: A Guide for the Perplexed

Another interesting new title from Continuum: 'One of the most widely-read thinkers writing today, Slavoj Žižek’s work can be both thrilling and perplexing in equal measure. Žižek: A Guide for the Perplexed is the most up-to-date guide available for readers struggling to master the ideas of this hugely influential thinker. Unpacking the philosophical references that fill Žižek’s writings, the book explores his influences, including Lacan, Kant, Hegel and Marx. From there, a chapter on 'Reading Žižek' guides the reader through the ways that he applies these core theoretical concepts in key texts like Tarrying With the Negative, The Ticklish Subject and The Parrallax View and in his books about popular culture like Looking Awry and Enjoy Your Symptom! Major secondary writings and films featuring Žižek are also covered.' The Continuum website includes an online preview of the book, and endorsements from Donagh Brennan, Editor of the Irish Left Review [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Slavoj Žižek on Philosophy
• Alain Badiou on Slavoj Žižek
• Alain Badiou on discovering Beckett
• Alain Badiou on Krapp's Last Tape
• Slavoj Žižek on Ridley Scott's Alien
• Slavoj Žižek on life, happiness and Hegel
• Slavoj Žižek on Samuel Beckett

Simon Critchley on Shakespeare and Theory

Tilburg Philosophy Summer School · July 2012

Richard Burton in a production of William Shakespeare's Hamlet

Simon Critchley is to give a series of lectures that read Shakespeare in light of philosophy and contemporary critical theory: 'Simon Critchley will give a series of lectures on Hamlet which will deal with various ‘outsider’ interpretations of the play, notably those of Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Schmitt, Benjamin and Lacan as well as providing a close textual engagement with the play itself.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• Simon Critchley's How to Read Series
• Simon Critchley/Tom McCarthy Panels
• Simon Critchley on Critical Theory
• How to Stop Living and Start Worrying

Simon Critchley's How to Read Series

Monographs on philosophy, theory, politics and religion

Brain Pickings offers a summary of Simon Critchley's series, How to Read: 'Each of the books tackles one of humanity’s great texts of literature, philosophy, science and religion, from Shakespeare to Freud to Darwin to the Bible, and enlists a leading scholar in that subject to break down the classic in a way that facilitates, deepens and enriches your understanding of it.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• How to Stop Living and Start Worrying
• Simon Critchley on Critical Theory

Verso and The Essential Žižek

Verso publish new volumes in The Essential Žižek series

Slavoj Žižek's Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? and Revolution at the Gates

As part of Verso's Essential Žižek series, two new volumes are scheduled for publication on 29 August 2011: Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? and Revolution at the Gates.

Press Release

Slavoj Žižek, the maverick philosopher, is the author of over 30 books, most recently Living in the End Times. Acclaimed as the ‘Elvis of cultural theory,’ he is today’s most controversial public intellectual. His work traverses the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory, taking in film, popular culture, literature and obscene jokes—all to provide acute analyses of the complexities of contemporary ideology as well as a serious and sophisticated philosophy. His recent films The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema and Žižek! reveal a theorist at the peak of his powers and a skilled communicator.

Now these two classic titles, that stand as the core of his ever-expanding life’s work, are being made available as the latest new editions in The Essential Žižek series in addition to The Sublime Object of Ideology, The Ticklish Subject, The Plague of Fantasies and The Fragile Absolute, which reflect the four pillars of his work: Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegelian philosophy, a Marxist theory of ideology, and Christian theology.

Each is beautifully repackaged, including new introductions from Žižek himself. Simply put, they are the essential texts for understanding Žižek’s thought and thus cornerstones of contemporary philosophy.

Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?

Totalitarianism has always had a precise strategic function: to guarantee the liberal-democratic hegemony by dismissing the Leftist critique of liberal democracy as the two-faced twin of Right-wing dictatorships. Instead of providing yet another systematic exposition of the history of this notion, Žižek looks at totalitarianism in a way that Wittgenstein would approve of—finding it a cobweb of family resemblances.

He reveals the consensus view of totalitarianism, in which it is invariably defined in terms of four things: the holocaust as the ultimate, diabolical evil; the Stalinist gulag as the alleged truth of the socialist revolutionary project; the recent wave of ethnic and religious fundamentalisms to be fought through multiculturalists tolerance; and the deconstructionist idea that the ultimate root of totalitarianism is the ontological closure of thought. Žižek concludes that the devil lies not so much in the detail but in what enables the very designation totalitarian: the liberal-democratic consensus itself.

Revolution at the Gates

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 Lenin-in-becoming: not yet Lenin-the-Soviet-institution, but Lenin thrown into an open, contingent situation.

In Revolution at the Gates, Slavoj Žižek locates the 1917 writings in their historical context, while his afterword tackles the key question of whether Lenin can be reinvented in our era of “cultural capitalism.” Žižek is convinced that, whatever the discussion—the forthcoming crisis of capitalism, the possibility of a redemptive violence, the falsity of liberal tolerance—Lenin’s time has come again.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Alain Badiou on Slavoj Žižek
• Slavoj Žižek on Ridley Scott's Alien
• Slavoj Žižek on Samuel Beckett
• Slavoj Žižek on Philosophy
• Slavoj Žižek on life, happiness and Hegel

Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy

Badiou dissects the work of the towering twentieth century philosopher

Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy

Verso has published Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, a new book by Alain Badiou, translated with an introduction by Bruno Bosteels.

“A figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us!” — Slavoj Žižek

“An heir to Jean-­Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser” — New Statesman

About the book

• Alain Badiou is one of France’s most influential radical thinkers – one of the ‘last men standing’ out of the great generation who witnessed the revolution of 1968. Best known for his political philosophy, he has recently been engaged with re-orientating the radical left with his Communist Hypothesis. He has also written several plays and a novel, and various volumes of cultural criticism, the latest of which is Five Lessons on Wagner.
• Now he turns his attention to Ludwig Wittgenstein, legendary maverick thinker and one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. He was part of Bertrand Russell’s Cambridge circle in the early 20th century and became one of the key figures of analytic philosophy and standard-bearer of the “linguistic turn”. His work was hailed by many as ‘the end of philosophy’ and indeed he referred to himself as the ‘last philosopher’.
• Wittgenstein’s great work was Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Written in his twenties, it had a huge impact on modern thought, and in particular the use of language and logic in analytic philosophy. Badiou dissects the Tractacus, and finds Wittgenstein to be an exemplar of antiphilosophy.
• Antiphilosophy is defined by Badiou as a way of doing philosophy which questions or attacks the very basis of philosophy itself. Other key antiphilosophers would include Nietszche, Kierkegaard and Lacan.
• Badiou addresses the crucial seventh proposition in Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus where Wittgenstein argues that “what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence”. Badiou argues that this mystical act reduces logic to rhetoric, truth to an effect of language games, and philosophy to a set of esoteric aphorisms.
• In the course of his interrogation of Wittgenstein’s antiphilosophy, Badiou sets out and refines his own definitions of the universal truths that condition philosophy. Antiphilosophy shows the philosopher what he is: a political militant, hated by the powers that be and their servants; an aesthete; a lover, whose life is capable of capsizing for a woman or a man; and a savant. It is in this effervescent rebellion that philosophers produce their ideas.
• Bruno Bosteels’ introduction shows that this encounter with Wittgenstein is central to Badiou’s overall project – and that a dialogue with the exemplar of antiphilosophy is crucial to the continuing development of modern thought.

Praise for Alain Badiou

Scarcely any other moral thinker of our day is as politically clear sighted and courageously polemical, so prepared to put notions of truth and universality back on the agenda… Badiou has launched a transformative new intervention, which deserves to provoke a persisting response.

Terry Eagleton

Badiou is at his strongest in pointing to the inconsistencies of a facile multiculturalism, the pluralism of the food court and the shopping mall, which wilts in the face of any genuine expression of cultural hostility to liberal values.

Radical Philosophy

Alain Badiou could be the most important philosopher alive today

Irish Left Review

Badiou is by turns speculative, provocative…and droll.

Times Literary Supplement

Literature and Culture: Catherine Belsey

A special issue of Textual Practice, dedicated to the work of Catherine Belsey

Literature and Culture: The Work of Catherine Belsey
Edited by Neil Badmington and Jürgen Pieters

About the Issue

For more than a quarter of a century, the work of Catherine Belsey has shaped and reshaped how we read literature and culture. This special issue of Textual Practice – the first of its kind – addresses the difference that Belsey’s work has made.

The collection is not a Festschrift; it is, rather, a series of theoretical, literary, and cultural investigations that take different aspects of Belsey’s work as a starting point. The engagement, moreover, is critical: if the volume works in the wake of Belsey’s writings, it regularly does so with a view to pushing her findings in new directions. Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s contribution, for instance, discusses Belsey and Žižek on Lacan’s concept of the real, establishes their differences, and then proceeds, drawing upon Marx, to move ‘beyond Belsey’. Alan Sinfield, meanwhile, looks back to Critical Practice, Belsey’s first book, and reconsiders the place of Pierre Macherey in Belsey’s radical challenge to traditional accounts of reading. In doing so, and in comparing the first and second editions of Critical Practice, Sinfield draws attention to the turn to ‘undecidability’ in Belsey’s work and questions its place in the practical realm of politics. For Sinfield, undecidability is not wholly satisfactory, and, like Lecercle, he calls for a move beyond the account offered in Belsey’s work.

Other contributions to the volume draw upon Belsey’s writings to discuss, among other things: Shakespeare and death; fairy tales and Roland Barthes; visual culture; psychoanalysis; non-human cultures and the limits of cultural analysis; tragedy and subjectivity; and New Historicism.

Contributors

Neil Badmington, Catherine Bernard, John Drakakis, Indira Ghose, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Jürgen Pieters, Kris Pint, Alan Sinfield, and Julia Thomas. The collection closes with an afterword by Catherine Belsey.

Contents

Editors’ Foreword
Neil Badmington; Jürgen Pieters

Danger! Keep out!: exploring culture with Catherine Belsey (and other animals)
Neil Badmington

When the real matters: interpreting the visual with Catherine Belsey
Catherine Bernard

Revisiting The Subject of Tragedy
John Drakakis

Jesting with Death: Hamlet in the Graveyard
Indira Ghose

An old Bolshevik of theory, or: welcome to the abundance of the Belseyan real
Jean-Jacques Lecercle

‘I was never a new historicist’: Catherine Belsey's ‘history at the level of the signifier’
Jürgen Pieters

Kissing the text: performing the motif of Sleeping Beauty
Kris Pint

Reading Critical Practice and Macherey
Alan Sinfield

Illustrations by Belsey
Julia Thomas

Afterword
Catherine Belsey

Website: Literature and Culture: The Work of Catherine Belsey, Textual Practice

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Catherine Belsey on the difficulty of reading Derrida
• Neil Badmington on Roland Barthes and Mythologies

Benoît Peeters, Derrida

A new biography explores the life of the renowned French philosopher

Jacques Derrida. Photograph: Richard Melloul/Sygma/Corbis

Elisabeth Roudinesco takes a look at Benoît Peeters' Derrida, a new biography of the French philosopher:

In addressing a philosopher of the importance of Jacques Derrida, whose massive output – about 60 volumes not including his as yet unpublished seminars – has been translated and debated the world over, Benoît Peeters has quite rightly chosen not the origins or content of the work itself, but the life of the man behind it. In short, he has written an excellent biography entirely in keeping with Anglo-Saxon traditions. He is the first to have gained access to the writer's records at France's Institute of Contemporary Publishing Archives and the Langson Library at the University of California, Irvine. He also interviewed around 100 essential figures.

He has reconstructed the events that prompted a young, non-practising Jew, born in 1930 in Algeria and banned from his lycée in 1942 by the Vichy government, to move to Paris in 1949 to study at the Lycée Louis le Grand, subsequently graduating to the Ecole Normale Supérieure.

In 1966, after acquainting himself with the work of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, Derrida took part in the celebrated symposium on structuralism organised by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore that brought together Roland Barthes, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Jean Hyppolite, René Girard and Jacques Lacan, among others. A year later he met Paul de Man, a theorist of modernist literary criticism, who introduced him to several US universities. He was soon rewarded with considerable success, particularly after the publication of De la Grammatologie (Of Grammatology) and L'Ecriture et la Différence (Writing and Difference). Over the next 10 years he found his place between two generations of brilliant thinkers, engaging in constant dialogue with Emmanuel Lévinas, Maurice Blanchot, Jean Genet, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Louis Althusser.

Meanwhile, he worked hard on research, teaching and publication. In 1983, with several fellows, he founded the International College of Philosophy, then took up a post at the Graduate School of Social Sciences. His fame spread and his virulent critique of Marxism, structuralism and a certain ideal of overturning the established order – mistakenly seen as "1968" thinking – percolated down through French public opinion. From 1986 he increasingly came under attack. The tide of hatred grew so strong as to dash any hopes of election to the Collège de France.

In fact, Derrida remained a social democrat opposed to colonialism and capital punishment, a feminist, a true Enlightenment scholar, attached to republican values, and an admirer of De Gaulle and Mandela. But from around 1987, as Peeters points out, he was successively depicted as an anti-democratic nihilist and an adept of two Nazi theorists – Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger – whose work he had investigated, then as an extreme leftwinger, on account of Spectres de Marx (Spectres of Marx), a major work on the concept of revolution. Finally he was accused of being a Nazi, after making a clumsy attempt to defend his friend De Man, whose murky past working on an antisemitic Belgian newspaper had emerged after his death.

Peeters sheds light on all this nonsense while revealing the many facets of a passionate thinker who travelled widely and invented a new language of philosophy. This explains his interest in a wide range of subjects (literature, law), social situations (exclusion, homosexuality) and struggles against suffering and discrimination (racism, antisemitism). [Read more]

Elisabeth Roudinesco, 'Derrida by Benoît Peeters'

Guardian Weekly, 2 November 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Jacques Derrida
• Derrida: Great thinker of 'our time'
• Deconstructing Derrida: Mikics' Intellectual Biography
• Why read Derrida?

How to Stop Living and Start Worrying

Simon Critchley's philosophical antidote to the self-help manual

Simon Critchley, How to Stop Living and Start Worrying

Since when did happiness, wisdom and contentment become the cornerstones of a fulfilling life? Whatever happened to doubt? Instability? Melancholia? This month, Polity Press are releasing How to Stop Living and Start Worrying, a collection of interviews with Simon Critchley which playfully parodies the conventional self-help manual. Through a series of conversations with Carl Cedeström, Critchley sketches an alternative view of the role philosophy plays in our lives today, covering an ambitious range of topics: from science and religion, to poetry and politics, love and humour, life and death.

Critchley, a philosophy professor who teaches in New York, takes us step-by-step through the major themes of his work in an entertaining and accessible way. Each interview takes the form of an informal, improvised chat on a theoretical topic, elucidating terms and concepts with helpful metaphors and memorable anecdotes. Jokes also play a key role in the overall tone of the book, illuminating central ideas with a lightness of touch.

How to Stop Living and Start Worrying begins with a biographical sketch of Simon Critchley’s early life and career. He relates his fascination with the radicalism of the 1970s punk music scene, and acknowledges his debt to the Penguin Modern Classics series (Orwell, Huxley, Sartre). His introduction to philosophy is cast in social and economic terms, where the work of Lois Althusser, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida were inseparable from the demands of political activism. Critchley’s interest in philosophy is also characterized by unexpected events, from traumatic physical injuries to the death of his father. Philosophy is valued as an everyday practice that we can all pursue, enabling reflections on the world and ourselves.

But the interviews provide an interesting counterpoint to the traditional self-help manual. Casting out the assumption that we are free and autonomous individuals, Critchley and Cedeström discuss human experience in terms of finitude and contingency. Finitude defines individuals according to a limit, whether it is death, or the limit of perception; while contingency acknowledges that we are culturally-constructed by social forces.

If there is a feel-good pep-talk element, it takes the form of acknowledging one’s impotence and incapability, the contradictions and discrepancies that structure our identities, and our experience of the world. In a world where the self ‘can never achieve mastery or authenticity’, philosophy forms part of a continual process of emancipation from dominant social norms and values - a talking cure for existence that goes on as long as we do. For Critchley, philosophy accepts that we are ‘ontologically defective’, or, as Nietzsche puts it, Human, All Too Human.

Included among the discussions are reflections on love, examined for its transgressive potential, and humour, for its ability to disrupt and subvert Western cultural values. Critchley’s ideal self is one aware of their limits, able to see what is ridiculous about existence and so able to laugh at themselves. Relationships with others are also deemed essential, but not as an experience of contentment; rather, as ‘a trial and a struggle’, an experience of love as the ‘experience of infinite demand’ which ‘doesn’t know itself’.

There are fascinating observations on the work of Sigmund Freud, Samuel Beckett, Henrik Ibsen, and others; alongside broader reflections on suicide, suffering, mourning and immortality. In fact, few books include such a diverse range of references: from the Sex Pistols, Aristotle and Woody Allen, to Mozart, Kafka and Barack Obama. The collection spans the gap between high art and popular culture, sacred and profane, the academic and the everyday.

How to Stop Living and Start Worrying is an illuminating survey of Critchley’s work to date, and through a series of accessible dialogues examines the relevance of philosophy to our day-to-day lives. It’s a useful introduction for beginners, and an indispensable resource to anyone interested in Critchley’s writing. Stop what you’re doing, and start reading.

Simon Critchley's How to Stop Living and Start Worrying is released this month by Polity Press. [Read an extract]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley

Disjecta: This week's links

This week, Margaret Atwood boycotts the boycott, Mrs Dalloway celebrates her 85th birthday and Woody Allen reflects on ageing and death. A free academic has also been launched online, exploring Samuel Beckett's work in English and French. Alain de Botton has commissioned a series of modernist buildings to be used as British holiday homes. And graphic designer Roi Driscoll has contributed a desktop wallpaper to One Down, One Up, inspired by Miles Davis and Haruki Murakami. Enjoy!

Literature:

Margaret Atwood: Boycotter of Boycotts
Samuel Beckett: A new online and bilingual academic journal, Limit(e) Beckett
Samuel Beckett: What do Nick Clegg and Beckett have in common?
Samuel Beckett: Review of Conversations between Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde
Philip K. Dick: Film trailer for The Adjustment Bureau, based on a Dick short story
Don DeLillo: News on another film adaptation, this time David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis
Anthony Burgess: Celebrating the anniversary of A Clockwork Orange's publication
Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway celebrates 85th anniversary
James Joyce: Copy of Finnegans Wake goes on auction
Happy 50th Anniversary, Ambit Magazine
Wiki-Books: Creating customized books from Wikipedia
Is poetry still relevant?: From an anxiety of influence to an anxiety of relevance
Waterstones Bookstore Rebrand

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Jacques Lacan: Video lectures and discussion from Lacan.com
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne: A Philosopher of Life, Part 1
Cyborg Theory, Cyborg Practice

Theatre:

Samuel Beckett: Sir Ian McKellen mistaken for homeless man outside Godot

Film:

Woody Allen: Allen cheerfully reflects on the trauma of ageing and death
David Lynch: New commercial for Dior's Lady Blue Shanghai, starring Marion Cotillard

Music:

Jazz: The Dave Brubeck Quartet performs 'Take Five' in London, 1964
Jazz: Roi Driscoll's exclusive desktop wallpaper, designed for One Down, One Up
Joy Division: Peter Saville's design for Unknown Pleasures as audio visualizer

Art:

Architecture: Alain de Botton commissions modernist holiday homes
Avigdor Arikha: The Guardian profiles artist and friend of Samuel Beckett
J. G. Ballard: Simon O'Carrigan's digital montage, The Drowned World
Dear Diary Exhibition

Thank you to all link contributors, who can be found on the
A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

Disjecta: This week's links

[Image: Albert Exergian's modernist TV poster for Twin Peaks]

This week has seen new developments in the world of the e-book: Apple has introduced the new iPad, while Amazon has fallen out with Macmillan publishers over retail prices. Jonathan Safran Foer promotes his new book, Eating Animals. A new art exhibition pays homage to the work of J. G. Ballard. And Martin Amis makes the provocative but questionable statement that J. M. Coetzee has 'no talent'. The deaths of historian Howard Zinner and writer J. D. Salinger have also loomed large in this week's headlines, and a selection of links have been included below.

Literature:

Philip Roth: In praise of phone books (and Philip Roth)
Jonathan Safran Foer: On his new book, Eating Animals
Will Self: An introduction to the Book of Revelation
Gabriel Josipovici: New story, 'Love Across the Borders'
J. M. Coetzee: Amis claims Coetzee has 'no talent'
J. G. Ballard: An art exhibition pays homage
Don DeLillo: On DeLillo's 'glacial aesthetic'
J. D. Salinger 1919-2010: More on A Piece of Monologue
Literary Journals: Are literary fiction magazines and journals in decline?
Bookshelves: Lee Rourke on building your own
Amazon/MacMillan: Amazon pulls Macmillan titles in e-book skirmish
Apple iPad: First review of new e-book reader
William Burroughs: John Coulthart on Burroughs The Movie

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Jean Baudrillard: L'Espirit du Terrorisme

Slavoj Žižek: Welcome to the Desert of the Real

Fredric Jameson: The Dialectics of Disaster

Slavoj Žižek: The world according to Žižek

Jacques Lacan: Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet

Howard Zinn 1922-2010: Renowned American historian

Music:

Bob Dylan: Dylan to perform at the White House
Krautrock: BBC documentary, 'Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany'

Television:

Modernist TV Posters

Art:

Harry Diamond 1924-2009: Photographer of Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon

Etc.:

Garry Kasparov: The Chess Master and the Computer
Holocaust Memorial Day

Thank you to all link contributors, who can be found on the A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

In Theory: Barthes' Death of the Author

Andrew Gallix unravels one of Roland Barthes' best known ideas

Founder of 3:AM Magazine begins a new series of articles on literary theory for The Guardian website. He begins with Roland Barthes influential essay, 'The Death of the Author':

I have chosen to inaugurate this series with a few considerations on "The Death of the Author" because of its truly iconic nature: it symbolises the rise of what would come to be known as "theory". Even if he never names them, Roland Barthes (like Proust before him) launches an attack on the traditional biography-based criticism à la Sainte-Beuve or Lanson which still dominated French academia in the sixties. The paradox, of course, is that this essay – with its symbolic slaying of the paternal "Author-God" – could lend itself to a textbook psychological reading given that Barthes lost his own father before his first birthday. The "Death of the Author" theme itself takes on added meaning, in hindsight, when you consider that Barthes's critical career was, at least in part, a displacement activity to avoid writing the novel he dreamed of. Does any of this invalidate his theories? I'll let you be the judge of that...

In 2002, the prestigious Pompidou Centre in Paris devoted a major exhibition, not to an artist, philosopher, scientist or novelist, but a literary critic: Roland Barthes. Now that the "theory wars" – which had once torn apart literature departments on both sides of the Atlantic – were largely over, it served as a reminder of a time when a posse of structuralists and post-structuralists superseded the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre as France's premier intellectual icons. Many of them were primarily philosophers, anthropologists, historians, linguists or psychoanalysts – Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva et al – but the locus of this intellectual revolution was undoubtedly literary criticism.

La nouvelle critique was flavour of the month, much like its culinary counterpart, nouvelle cuisine, albeit more of a mouthful. Critics-cum-thinkers such as Barthes himself – who was equally at home at the lofty Collège de France or down the trendy Le Palace nightclub – achieved bona fide celebrity status. Their works often became bestsellers in spite of their demanding and iconoclastic nature. Soon, NME journalists were peppering their articles with arcane references to Baudrillard while Scritti Politti dedicated a postmodern ditty to Jacques Derrida. The whole movement seemed as provocative, and indeed exciting, as Brigitte Bardot in her slinky, sex kitten heyday. Its defining moment was the publication of a racy little number called "The Death of the Author". [Read the Article]

Andrew Gallix, 'In theory: The Death of the Author'

guardian.co.uk, 13 January 2010

Open Yale Courses: Theories of Literature

A selection of free online podcasts

Mike Johnduff at Working Notes has drawn attention to a series of free lectures offered at the Open Yale Courses website. The lectures, presented by Professor Paul H. Fry, comprise an Introduction to Theory of Literature, and include class sessions on some of the key concerns of contemporary critical theory. For instance, among the titles available for download are: Freud and Fiction, Jacques Lacan in Theory, The Postmodern Psyche and Derridean Deconstruction I and II.

The series promises a solid foundation to some of the central concepts in literary theory, from structuralism, historicism, formalism and psychoanalysis to recent theoretical developments in feminism, Queer theory, postcolonialism and postmodernity:

This is a survey of the main trends in twentieth-century literary theory. Lectures will provide background for the readings and explicate them where appropriate, while attempting to develop a coherent overall context that incorporates philosophical and social perspectives on the recurrent questions: what is literature, how is it produced, how can it be understood, and what is its purpose?

Introduction to Theory of Literature with Professor Paul H. Fry

All audio downloads are free, and vary in length from forty to fifty minutes.

Links

• Open Yale Courses: Introduction to Theory of Literature
• Open Yale Courses: Syllabus
• Open Yale Courses: Class Sessions
• Open Yale Courses: Downloads
• Working Notes: Paul Fry's Theory Course

Slavoj Žižek on Ridley Scott's Alien

Lacanian critical theorist assesses landmark Hollywood blockbuster

Slavoj Žižek speculates that psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's concept of the lamella resembles the monstrous creature of Ridley Scott's horror masterpiece, Alien:

Lacan’s description not only reminds one of the nightmare creatures in horror movies; more specifically, it can be read, point by point, as describing a movie shot more than a decade after he wrote those words, Ridley Scott’s Alien. The monstrous “alien” in the film so closely resembles Lacan’s lamella that it cannot but evoke the impression that Lacan somehow saw the film before it was even made. Everything Lacan talks about is there: the monster appears indestructible; if one cuts it into pieces, it merely multiplies; it is something extra-flat that all of a sudden flies off and envelops your face; with infinite plasticity, it can morph itself into a multitude of shapes; in it, pure evil animality overlaps with machinic blind insistence. The “alien” is effectively libido as pure life, indestructible and immortal.

Slavoj Žižek, 'Troubles with the Real: Lacan as a viewer of Alien'

excerpted from How to Read Lacan

Slavoj Žižek on Samuel Beckett

Cultural theorist analyses the work of the experimental Irish writer

'If there ever was a kenotic writer, the writer of the utter self-emptying of subjectivity, of its reduction to a minimal difference, it is Beckett.'

Slavoj Žižek, 'Beckett with Lacan'

Lacan.com is currently featuring two parts of an article by Slavoj Žižek on Samuel Beckett's work in relation to psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan. Simply entitled 'Beckett with Lacan', it begins by classifying the Irish writer's artistic relation to James Joyce, reformulating the stylistic and aesthetic move from intellectual excess to impoverishment via a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework:

'[...] the “true” Becket [sic.] constituted himself through a true ethical act, a CUT, a rejection of the Joycean wealth of enjoy-meant, and the ascetic turn towards a “minimal difference,” towards a minimalization, “subtraction,” of the narrative content and of language itself [...]'

Slavoj Žižek, 'Beckett with Lacan'

I often have the impression that Žižek writes his academic papers and journal articles in much the same way that many of us write (or read!) blog postings: in-between busy work commitments, and sometimes in a haphazard and rushed manner. He misspells, misquotes and makes a hash of some of the simplest of names - even Beckett's on one occasion. His style is often sloppy and slapdash. But the momentum of his writing still has the ability to hold a reader's attention, and it isn't long before Žižek is back on track exploring Beckett's work in the context of contemporary philosopher Alain Badiou. (I say 'exploring', but perhaps 'lightly skimming the surface' is closer to the truth.)

Žižek perceives Beckett's Texts for Nothing as a kind of postscript to the Three Novels (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable), whilst simultaneously breaking free from the influence of their somewhat self-contained literary project; while he raises some interesting points, it is not a particularly original idea. Žižek asks 'what do Texts for Nothing register, a possibility or a contingency? A possibility, definitely – a possibility to “cease writing,” to betray fidelity, to cease going on,' and concludes they 'are an optimistic work – their message is that one cannot but “go on” as an immortal bodiless drive, as a subject without subjectivity'.

The article touches upon issues of the subject existing without subjectivity, draws on the critical approaches of Jonathan Boulter, before lunging into an analysis of Beckett's Not I read through Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytical work. It's not recommended over a morning cup of coffee, but it certainly has its moments - and although hectic and chaotic, Slavoj Žižek certainly has a gift for adapting critical theoretical texts to popular culture in a generally accessible way. (It's not surprising, for instance, that he manages to weave a reference to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds into part 2.)

You can read both parts of the text at Lacan.com, or find them directly by selecting the links below.

• Slavoj Žižek, 'Beckett with Lacan', Part 1.
  
• Slavoj Žižek, 'Beckett with Lacan', Part 2.