Operas are about the meaning of love and life, and also very much about the meaning of death. Opera as a form, however, might even be dead itself. The last great operas are said to be those written around 1900.
But, the psychoanalytic critic and philosopher Slavoj Zizek is quick to point out, 1900 is also the year in which Freud 'invents' psychoanalysis. Can this be a coincidence? Opera's Second Death is a passionate exploration of opera---the genre, its masterpieces, and the nature of death. Using a dazzling array of tools, Slavoj Zizek and coauthor Mladen Dolar explore the strange compulsions that overpower characters in Mozart and Wagner, as well as our own desires to die and to go to the opera.
Mozart's understanding of psychoanalysis and Wagner's sense of humor are but two of the many surprises in Zizek and Dolar's operatic tour de force. Opera's Second Death is an extended aria on a subject that is far from dead.

Operas are about the meaning of love and life, and also very much about the meaning of death. Opera as a form, however, might even be dead itself. The last great operas are said to be those written around 1900.
But, the psychoanalytic critic and philosopher Slavoj Zizek is quick to point out, 1900 is also the year in which Freud 'invents' psychoanalysis. Can this be a coincidence? Opera's Second Death is a passionate exploration of opera---the genre, its masterpieces, and the nature of death. Using a dazzling array of tools, Slavoj Zizek and coauthor Mladen Dolar explore the strange compulsions that overpower characters in Mozart and Wagner, as well as our own desires to die and to go to the opera.
Mozart's understanding of psychoanalysis and Wagner's sense of humor are but two of the many surprises in Zizek and Dolar's operatic tour de force. Opera's Second Death is an extended aria on a subject that is far from dead.

Ernst Lubitsch, the great author of Hollywood comedy and pioneer of such genres as thesophisticated romantic comedy, the musical, and the screwball comedy, is a relatively overlooked figure in mainstream film theory. In this collection, renowned world thinkers and philosophers position Lubitsch as the premium director of subversive cinema, reflecting on his attitude toward love and politics which correspond to contemporary issues.Followers of the Hegelian, Marxist, Freudian, Lacanian, and Deleuzian traditions discuss thephilosophical, political, and ethical dimensions of Lubitsch's late Hollywood work. They focus on love as stealing, the ethics of style, and comedy in times of austerity in the director's masterpiece, "Trouble in Paradise" (1932); answer the question of why comedy is always polygamous; discuss links between masochism, melancholia, and ideology in "Ninotchka"(1939); celebrate the ethical gesture of comedy in "To Be or Not to Be" (1942); and promote the revolutionary comic spirit of Lubitsch's last directorial effort, "Cluny Brown" (1946). These essays' witty, subversive, and provocative approaches highlight Lubitsch's unique understanding of love, sex, comedy, and politics and idiosyncratic conception of totalitarian"nightmares" and capitalistic "paradise," countering the non-dialectic and politically correct discourse of mainstream and independent cinema today.

In the contemporary world, voices are caught up in fundamentally different realms of discourse, practice, and culture: between sounding and nonsounding, material and nonmaterial, literal and metaphorical. In The Voice as Something More, Martha Feldman and Judith Zeitlin tackle these paradoxes with a bold and rigorous collection of essays that look at voice as both object of desire and material object. Using Mladen Dolar's influential A Voice and Nothing More as a reference point, The Voice as Something More reorients Dolar's psychoanalytic analysis around the material dimensions of voices--their physicality and timbre, the fleshiness of their mechanisms, the veils that hide them, and the devices that enhance and distort them. Throughout, the essays put the body back in voice. Ending with a new essay by Dolar that offers reflections on these vocal aesthetics and paradoxes, this authoritative, multidisciplinary collection, ranging from Europe and the Americas to East Asia, from classics and music to film and literature, will serve as an essential entry point for scholars and students who are thinking toward materiality.

Responding to the ongoing "objectal turn" throughout contemporary humanities and social sciences, the eleven essays in Subject Lessons present a sustained case for the continued importance—indeed, the indispensability—of the category of the subject for the future of materialist thought. Various neovitalist materialisms and realisms currently en vogue across a number of academic disciplines (from New Materialism and actor-network theory to speculative realism and object-oriented ontology) advocate a flat, horizontal ontology that renders the subject just another object amid a "democracy of objects." By contrast, the dialectical materialism presented throughout Subject Lessons maintains that subjectivity is crucial to grasping matter’s "vibrancy" and continual "becoming" in the first place. Approaching matters through the frame of Hegel and Lacan, the contributors to this volume—many of whom stand at the forefront of contemporary Hegel and Lacan scholarship—agree with neovitalist thinkers that material reality is ontologically incomplete, in a state of perpetual becoming, yet they do so with one crucial difference: they maintain that this is the case not in spite of but rather because of the subject. Incorporating elements of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary and cultural studies, Subject Lessons contests the movement to dismiss the subject, arguing that there can be no truly robust materialism without accounting for the little piece of the Real that is the subject.

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.

Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) has justly attracted great respect and attention for its account of Western perceptions and representations of the Orient, but the English-speaking world has for too long been unaware of another classic in the same field which appeared in France only a year later. Alain Grosrichard's The Sultan's Court is a fascinating and careful deconstruction of Western accounts of "Oriental despotism" in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing particularly on portrayals of the Ottoman Empire and the supposedly enigmatic and opaque structure of the despot's power and his court of viziers, janissaries, mutes, dwarfs, eunuchs and countless wives. Drawing on the writings of travelers and philosophers such as Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire, Grosrichard goes further than merely cataloguing their intense fascination with the vortex of capriciousness, violence, cruelty, lust, sexual perversion and slavery which they perceived in the seraglio. Deftly and subtly using a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework, he describes the process as one in which these leading Enlightenment figures were constructing a fantasmatic Other to counterpose to their project of a rationally based society. The Sultan's Court seeks not to refute the misconceptions but rather to expose the nature of the fantasy and what it can reveal about modern political thought and power relations more generally.

Gregor Moder’s Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity is a lively entry into current debates surrounding the issues raised by Hegel’s readings of Spinoza, from the Lacanians and Deleuzians to the Althusserians and Heideggerians. Hegel and Spinoza have inspired generations of scholars and sparked two of the most influential philosophical traditions that persist in theoretical debates to this day. Just as German Idealism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries legitimated itself through its attempt to transcend the determinacy of Spinoza’s system by reserving within it a place for the freedom of the subject, so one may also say that the twentieth-century French materialism of Althusser, Deleuze, and others legitimated itself by deploying Spinoza as the champion of anti-Hegelian materialism. This alternative, or rather a mutual theoretical rejection, is perhaps nowhere quite as evident as in the controversies between contemporary Deleuzians and Lacanians. Contemporary materialist philosophy is either Spinozist or Hegelian—it either abolishes the concepts of the subject and negation, arguing for pure affirmation, that is, the vitalistic production of differences, or it makes a case for the productiveness of concepts of the negative, nothingness, and death. Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity both traces the historical elements of the alternatives and explains contemporary discussions as its variation, persuasively demonstrating throughout that the best way to read Hegel and Spinoza is not in opposition or contrast, but together: as Hegel AND Spinoza.

Hitchcock gets onto the analyst s couch in this extraordinary volume of case studies. The contributors bring to bear an unrivaled enthusiasm and theoretical sweep on the entire Hitchcock oeuvre, analyzing movies such as Rear Window and Psycho. Starting from the premise that everything has meaning, the authors examine the films ostensible narrative content and formal procedures to discover a rich proliferation of hidden ideological and psychic mechanisms. But Hitchcock is also a bait to lure the reader into a serious Marxist and Lacanian exploration of the construction of meaning. An extraordinary landmark in Hitchcock studies, this new edition features a brand-new essay by philosopher Slavoj i ek, presenter of Sophie Fiennes s three-part documentary The Pervert s Guide to Cinema. Contributors: Pascal Bonitzer, Miran Bo ovi, Michel Chion, Mladen Dolar, Fredric Jameson, Stojan Pelko, Renata Salecl, Alenka Zupan i and Slavoj i ek.

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.

A new, philosophically grounded theory of the voice-the voice as the lever of thought, as one of the paramount embodiments of the psychoanalytic object. Plutarch tells the story of a man who plucked a nightingale and finding but little to eat exclaimed: "You are just a voice and nothing more." Plucking the feathers of meaning that cover the voice, dismantling the body from which the voice seems to emanate, resisting the Sirens' song of fascination with the voice, concentrating on "the voice and nothing more": this is the difficult task that philosopher Mladen Dolar relentlessly pursues in this seminal work. The voice did not figure as a major philosophical topic until the 1960s, when Derrida and Lacan separately proposed it as a central theoretical concern. In A Voice and Nothing More Dolar goes beyond Derrida's idea of "phonocentrism" and revives and develops Lacan's claim that the voice is one of the paramount embodiments of the psychoanalytic object (objet a). Dolar proposes that, apart from the two commonly understood uses of the voice as a vehicle of meaning and as a source of aesthetic admiration, there is a third level of understanding: the voice as an object that can be seen as the lever of thought. He investigates the object voice on a number of different levels-the linguistics of the voice, the metaphysics of the voice, the ethics of the voice (with the voice of conscience), the paradoxical relation between the voice and the body, the politics of the voice-and he scrutinizes the uses of the voice in Freud and Kafka. With this foundational work, Dolar gives us a philosophically grounded theory of the voice as a Lacanian object-cause.