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Slices of Cake

Gilberto Perez: Alfred Hitchcock, 19 August 1999

Hitchcock’s Secret Notebooks: An Authorised and Illustrated Look Inside the Creative Mind of Alfred Hitchcock 
by Dan Auiler.
Bloomsbury, 567 pp., £20, May 1999, 0 7475 4490 5
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... admirers, it has never been much of a critical favourite. ‘What’s wrong with The Wrong Man?’ Slavoj Zizek asks at the start of the concluding essay in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). Zizek accepts Rohmer and Chabrol’s Catholic – or more precisely Jansenist – view of ‘Hitchcock’s ...

Kettles boil, classes struggle

Terry Eagleton: Lukács recants, 20 February 2003

A Defence of ‘History and Class Consciousness’: Tailism and the Dialectic 
by Georg Lukács, translated by Esther Leslie.
Verso, 182 pp., £10, June 2002, 1 85984 370 0
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... which divide John Rees, who has written an erudite, illuminating introduction to this book, and Slavoj Žižek, who has provided a characteristically provocative ‘postface’ for it. Roughly speaking, Rees seeks rather stiffly to reclaim Lukács for a certain Marxist orthodoxy, whereas the more imaginative ...

When the barracks were bursting with poets

David A. Bell: Napoleon, 6 September 2001

Napoleon the Novelist 
by Andy Martin.
Polity, 191 pp., £45, December 2000, 0 7456 2536 3
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... Ginsberg, or officers in Nato’s Balkan forces engaging in a philosophical correspondence with Slavoj Žižek. But Napoleon was not the only French officer of his day to devote himself to literature. As the historian Dena Goodman has observed, the barracks were bursting with would-be poets and philosophes. Another famous underemployed artillery ...

Straight to the Multiplex

Tom McCarthy: Steven Hall’s ‘The Raw Shark Texts’, 1 November 2007

The Raw Shark Texts 
by Steven Hall.
Canongate, 368 pp., £12.99, March 2007, 978 1 84195 902 3
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... to his own semi-sister, affirms the very law that prohibits incest. Benchley’s shark, as Slavoj Žižek points out in The Plague of Fantasies, embodies both the Communist threat stalking America and America’s own capitalist propensity for consumption; and plenty more besides. And don’t get me started on Melville’s whale. All these things ...

Normal People

Sheila Fitzpatrick: SovietSpeak, 25 May 2006

Everything Was For Ever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation 
by Alexei Yurchak.
Princeton, 331 pp., £15.95, December 2005, 0 691 12117 6
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... the story of a milieu rather than a person. But the disguise is heavy. Homi Bhabha, Claude Lefort, Slavoj Žižek, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Lacan, Tzvetan Todorov, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler: an extraordinary range of theorists is included. Derrida, Bourdieu, Habermas, De Certeau and Althusser are not forgotten, and even Freud (though not Marx) makes ...

Stiffed

David Runciman: Occupy, 25 October 2012

The Occupy Handbook 
edited by Janet Byrne.
Back Bay, 535 pp., $15.99, April 2012, 978 0 316 22021 7
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... prominent figures associated with Occupy Wall Street are quite happy with this line of thought. Slavoj Žižek is unabashed about the movement’s revolutionary implications. He sees it as a harbinger of the coming transformation, ‘a message from the communist future’. But for all Žižek’s brilliance as a ...

Building with Wood

Gilberto Perez: Time and Tarkovsky, 26 February 2009

Tarkovsky 
by Nathan Dunne.
Black Dog, 464 pp., £29.95, February 2008, 978 1 906155 04 9
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Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema 
by Robert Bird.
Reaktion, 255 pp., £15.95, April 2008, 978 1 86189 342 0
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... imagine her facing the director as he looks at her from behind the camera, finding her wanting. Slavoj Zizek, in ‘The Thing from Inner Space’, argues that Tarkovsky’s work is ‘intensely male centred’ and caught up in the opposition between the maternal and the sexual woman, the mother and the whore: ‘For Tarkovsky, the moment a woman accepts the ...

You can’t build a new society with a Stanley knife

Malcolm Bull: Hardt and Negri’s Empire, 4 October 2001

Empire 
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.
Harvard, 478 pp., £12.95, August 2001, 0 674 00671 2
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... is not the Marxist revolution to which Negri was once committed. Although hailed by Slavoj Žižek as ‘The Communist Manifesto for our time’, Empire is more Jeffersonian than Marxist. Like those who invoke The Declaration of Independence against the Federal Government, Hardt and Negri focus on the contradictions generated by ...

Clinging to the Sides of a Black, Precipitous Hole

James Davidson: Writes about The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens by Danielle Allen, 24 August 2000

The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens 
by Danielle Allen.
Princeton, 449 pp., £25, January 2000, 0 691 05869 5
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... Chaplin on a production line, Kafka on trial. Lacanians, particularly Jean-Claude Milner and Slavoj Žižek, have thought a lot about these adunata, and found them useful teaching aids with which to explore the comedy of desire and (impossible) satisfaction. In contrast to the Inferno, which seems merely an overheated location in which people get ...

Just don’t think about it

Benjamin Kunkel: Boris Groys, 8 August 2013

Introduction to Antiphilosophy 
by Boris Groys.
Verso, 248 pp., £16.99, April 2012, 978 1 84467 756 6
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... His recent Communist Postscript (2010) joins the efforts of other contemporary thinkers, notably Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou, to revive communism as a slogan of the left. The differences go further. Where Adorno insisted on the artist’s deep passivity and independence from politics, Groys declares the artistic impulse identical to the will to ...

Not No Longer but Not Yet

Jenny Turner: Mark Fisher’s Ghosts, 9 May 2019

k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher 
edited by Darren Ambrose.
Repeater, 817 pp., £25, November 2018, 978 1 912248 28 5
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... also a scary deep in Fisher, a darkness, a left-Lacanian Real which he accessed, presumably, via Slavoj Žižek: the idea of the ‘traumatic void’, the ‘unrepresentable X’ beyond language that it is the job of ordinary reality to suppress. One such Real, Fisher says, is capital itself, ‘the unnameable Thing’ in the Deleuze-Guattari ...

Against Passion

James Meek: Passionate Politics, 30 November 2017

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics 
by Mark Lilla.
Harper, 160 pp., £19, August 2017, 978 0 06 269743 1
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The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction 
by Mark Lilla.
NYRB, 166 pp., £9.99, September 2016, 978 1 59017 902 4
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... certain thinkers on the left – Derrida, Kojève, Alain Badiou, Jacob Taubes and, more recently, Slavoj Žižek. Schmitt’s appeal at this end of the spectrum is his evocation of a force that smashes the liberal façade of the dominant class, his endorsement of the virtue of antagonism when there is a ruling elite to be overthrown.In ...

Peace without Empire

Perry Anderson, 2 December 2021

Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union 
by Stella Ghervas.
Harvard, 528 pp., £31.95, March, 978 0 674 97526 2
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... be numbered such different figures as Dmitri Furman of Russia, Gáspár Tamás of Hungary and Slavoj Žižek of Yugoslavia, born in the 1940s; Jan Zielonka of Poland, born in the 1950s; and Ivan Krastev of Bulgaria in the 1960s.1 All save Zielonka were originally trained in philosophy, which – this being Eastern Europe – was no impediment to ...

The Life and Death of Juliano Mer-Khamis

Adam Shatz: A Death in Jenin, 21 November 2013

... on the left: Vanessa Redgrave, Maya Angelou, the film producer James Schamus, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Noam Chomsky and Elias Khoury. Juliano urged supporters from the West to come to Jenin. Romilly often stayed with him in his home in the camp. One night Israeli tanks rolled up at three in the morning, and ordered everyone out of their ...

Diary

Mark Mazower: In Thessaloniki, 22 November 2012

... Syriza’s leader, nobody thinks his time in student politics was a sufficient testing-ground. Slavoj Zizek’s appearance at the Syntagma Square rallies last year and his endorsement of Tsipras raised a bitter laugh: Zizek, it was said, parachuted into a situation he did not really understand, desperate to find revolutionary potential somewhere. An old ...

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