Archive for 2009

From Zizek’s reading of Hegel, Marx, and Lacan, can we learn about Zizek, not the complex entanglement of Hegelian, Marxian, and Lacanian theories? What is Zizek’s own theory, his own philosophical, political, and psychoanalytic theory? What does Zizek want to say to us, borrowing Lacan’s (or Marx’s and Hegel’s) voice – as if he is… »

What is an image? What is picture? Rather, what is the relationship between image and idea, image and word, the visual and the verbal, or the visible and the sayable? What is the relation of pictures and language? Is the one superior to the other, or each of them belongs to the different realm? The… »

(Reading: Slavoj Zizek’s How to Read Lacan; http://www.lacan.com/zizhowto.html)
At the very moment when others see the death of psychoanalysis, Zizek witnesses instead the return of it. Thus the aim of this book (How to Read Lacan) is, according to him, “to demonstrate that it is only today that the time of psychoanalysis has come”(2). Zizek wants… »

Deborah P. Britzman, Novel Education: Psychoanalytic Studies of Learning and Not Learning
What is the relationship between psychoanalysis and education? Why does Britzman connect or arrange in parallel these two (or more) ways of presentation in terms of storytelling – whether novel or narration? Who narrates and who invites one to be a narrator? Why is the… »

In the Middle Ages, it was believed that melancholy was caused by an excess of black bile and related with Saturn. People’s interests in melancholy have persisted and amplified to the extent that it has been regarded as a virtue for the cultivated. Furthermore, it has been exalted as a sort of cultural symbol in… »

- Adriana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl, Princeton UP, 2002.
- Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Duke UP, 1999.

How do self and social identities change in a state of transition? How does the relationship between individuals and the state change in a rapid or gradual social crisis? How… »

Against Subjectivation and Signification: Alain Badiou’s “Sex in Crisis”
In the book, The Century, in which this article “Sex in Crisis” is included, Alain Badiou analyzes the twentieth century by asking whether the past century has reached to the historical stage where our essential values and ideas such as humanity and freedom are fully developed and… »

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Sheila Jasanoff, The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers, Harvard Univ. Press, 1990.
Under the democratic constitution, it is generally and traditionally recognized that there are three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial) as we know already. With the expansion and complexity of modern society, people’s needs of the fourth branch have been brought up…. »

Dona J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, 1991.

This book might be one of the most original, thought-provoking, and influential books in the history of social studies of science and technology since the 1980s, transversing from feminist theories and SF literatures to primate studies and military communication technology. Haraway tries to… »