Michael Sorkin's iconic list is now in a handsome printed package, a perfect gift for any architect, student of architecture, or design-savvy urbanist. By turns poetic and humorous, practical and wise, this book is a joyful celebration of the craft of architecture. A posthumous book by critic, architect, urban theorist, and educator, Michael Sorkin (1948-2020), 250 Things An Architect Should Know is filled with details that architects love to obsess over, from the expected (golden ratio and the seismic code) to the unexpected (the heights of folly and the prismatic charms of Greek islands.)

Umbr(a) was one of the most important US theory journals of the 1990s and early 2000s, publishing work by some of the greatest philosophers, psychoanalysts and theorists of our era. In every regard, it was ahead of the curve - in content, design, and style - often introducing thinkers who have subsequently become globally influential. This anthology presents a selection of the very best of Umbr(a), including contributions from Joan Copjec, Sam Gillespie, Charles Shepherdson, Russell Grigg, Alenka Zupan?i?, Slavoj i ek, Mladen Dolar, Catherine Malabou, Tim Dean, Steven Miller, Dominiek Hoens, Petar Ramadanovic, Sigi Jottkandt, Colette Soler, Jelica Sumi? and A. Kiarina Kordela.

The giant of Ljubljana marshals some of the greatest thinkers of our age in support of a dazzling re-evaluation of Jacques Lacan.
It is well known that Jacques Lacan developed his ideas in dialogue with major European thought and art, past and present. Yet what if there is another frame of reference, rarely or never mentioned by Lacan, which influenced his thinking, and is crucial to its proper understanding? Zizek focuses on Lacan's "silent partners," those who provide a key to Lacanian theory, discussing his work in relation to the Pre-Socratics, Diderot, Hegel, Nietzsche, Holderlin, Wagner, Turgenev, Kafka, Henry James, Artaud and Kiarostami.
As Zizek says, "The ultimate aim of the present volume is to instigate a new wave of Lacanian paranoia: to push readers to engage in the work of their own and start to discern Lacanian motifs everywhere, from politics to trash culture, from obscure ancient philosophers to contemporary Iranian filmmakers."
Contributors include Alain Badiou, Bruno Bosteels, Joan Copjec, Mladen Dolar, Fredric Jameson, Silvia Ons, and Alenka Zupancic.

A psychoanalytic and philosophical exploration of sublimation as a key term in Jacques Lacan's theories of ethics and feminine sexuality. Jacques Lacan claimed that his theory of feminine sexuality, including the infamous proposition, "the Woman does not exist," constituted a revision of his earlier work on "the ethics of psychoanalysis." In Imagine There's No Woman, Joan Copjec shows how Freud's ragtag, nearly incoherent notion of sublimation was refashioned by Lacan to become the key term in his ethics. To trace the link between feminine being and Lacan's ethics of sublimation, Copjec argues, one must take the negative proposition about the woman's existence not as just another nominalist denunciation of thought's illusions about the existence of universals, but as recognition of the power of thought, which posits and gives birth to the difference of objects from themselves. While the relativist position currently dominant insists on the difference between my views and another's, Lacan insists on this difference within the object I see. The popular position fuels the disaffection with which we regard a world in a state of decomposition, whereas the Lacanian alternative urges our investment in a world that awaits our invention. In the book's first part, Copjec explores positive acts of invention/sublimation: Antigone's burial of her brother, the silhouettes by the young black artist Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, and Stella Dallas's final gesture toward her daughter in the well-known melodrama. In the second part, the focus shifts to sublimation's adversary, the cruelly uncreative superego, as Copjec analyzes Kant's concept of radical evil, envy's corruption of liberal demands for equality and justice, and the difference between sublimation and perversion. Maintaining her focus on artistic texts, she weaves her arguments through discussions of Pasolini's Salo, the film noir classic Laura, and the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination.

A collection of essays by theorists in culture and politics. Experts from a variety of fields re-examine the origins of the subject as understood by Descartes, Kant and Hegel, and consider contemporary ideas that revive the subject, including queer theory and national identity. Contributors include Parveen Adams, Etienne Balibar, Homi Bhabha, Slavoj Zizek, Joan Copjec, Juliet Flower MacCannell, Charles Shepardson, Mikkei Borch-Jacobsen, Elizabeth Grosz and Miaden Dolar.

For this was the summer when, after the hiatus of the Second World War, French critics were again given the opportunity to view films from Hollywood. The films they saw, including "The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity. Laura, Murder, My Sweet," and "The Woman in the Window," prompted the naming and theorization of a new phenomenon: "film noir."
Much of what has been written about the genre since has remained within the orbit of this preliminary assessment. While sympathetic towards the early French critics, this collection of original essays attempts to move beyond their first fascinated look. Beginning with an autonomy of that look--of the '"poujadist"' climate that nourished it and the imminent collapse of the Hollywood studio system that gave it its mournful inflection--"Shades of Noir" re-explores and calls into question the object first constructed by it. The impetus for this shift in perspective comes from the films themselves, viewed in the light of contemporary social and political concerns, and from new theoretical insights.
Several contributions analyze the re-emergence of noir in recent years, most notably in the hybrid forms produced in the 1980s by the merging of noir with science fiction and horror, for example "Blade Runner" and "Angel Heart," and in films by black directors such as "Deep Cover, Straight out of Brooklyn, A Rage in Harlem" and "One False Move." Other essays focus on the open urban territory in which the noir hero hides out; the office spaces in "Chandler," and the palpable sense of waiting that fills empty warehouses, corridors and hotel rooms.
Finally, "Shades of Noir" pays renewed attention to the lethal relation between the sexes; to the femme fatale and the other women in noir. As the role of women expands, the femme fatale remains deadly, but her deadliness takes on new meanings.
Contributors: Janet Bergstrom, Joan Copjec, Elizabeth Cowie, Manthia Diawara, Frederic Jameson, Dean MacCannel, Fred Pfeil, David Reid and Jayne L. Walker, Marc Vernet, Slavoj Žižek.

In Read My Desire, Joan Copjec stages a confrontation between the theories of Jacques Lacan and those of Michel Foucault, protagonists of two powerful modern disciplines-psychoanalysis and historicism. Ordinarily, these modes of thinking only cross paths long enough for historicists to charge psychoanalysis with an indifference to history, but here psychoanalysis, via Lacan, goes on the offensive. Refusing to cede history to the historicists, Copjec makes a case for the superiority of Lacan's explanation of historical processes and generative principles. Her goal is to inspire a new kind of cultural critique, one that is "literate in desire," and capable of interpreting what is unsaid in the manifold operations of culture.

"Giving Ground" is prompted by two phenomena whose paradoxical convergence is currently altering our experience and conception of urban relations and city planning. On the one hand, forces of globalisation push towards conditions of homogenisation and deterritorialisation, while, on the other, a surging politics of identity barricades various groups behind particular claims and ignites violent persecutions. The covert relation between these phenomena, wherby territory/ground is both disavowed or abstracted "and" jealously reclaimed, is the focus of the essays in this volume, at the heart of these investigations are the notions of propinquity and neighbourliness whose redefinitions and redeployments serve widely divergent ends: from the fortification of the 'new urbanist' fantasy about the possibility of re-creating small towns, to the validation of the exclusionary tactics of 'sanitization' that guide zoning decisions, to assisting in the reimagination of an ethical and reasonable urbanism. Directed against the contracting limits of tolerance, this volume attempts to reinvent the troubled notion of the 'right to the city'.
The individual contributions range from examinations of the crises in specific cities--Jerusalem, New York, and the network of 'global cities' throughout the world--to considerations of specific urban issues, such as the physical instrumentalities by which people a brought into physical proximity and the implementation of 'new urbanist' projects; and reworkings of physical concepts, such as Levina's notion of the face-to-face, Lacan's notion of sublimation, in urbanist terms. Several focus on the relation between cities and sexuality, which figures, for different reasons, as the 'eternal irony' of urbanity.