Each of the contributors addresses the theoretical questions by pursuing a definite artistic problem, including a close look at the relation between the image and the object in Hitchcock's Vertigo, the sexual aesthetics of Caravaggio, the artistic pen of Barthes, and how Cronenberg's film Crash functions as a sinthome.

There has long been a politics around the way in which women are represented, with objection not so much to specific images as to a regime of looking which places the represented woman in a particular relationship to the spectator's gaze. Artists have sometimes avoided the representation of women altogether, but they are now producing images which challenge the regime. How do these images succeed in their challenge ? The Emptiness of the Image offers a psychoanalytic answer. Parveen Adams argues that, despite flaws in some of the details of its arguments, psychoanalytic theory retains an overwhelming explanatory strength in relation to questions of sexual difference and representation. She goes on to show how the issue of desire changes the way we can think of images and their effects. Throughout she discusses the work of theorists, artists and filmmakers such as Helene Deutsch, Catherine MacKinnon, Mary Kelly, Francis Bacon, Michael Powell and Della Grace. The Emptiness of the Image shows how the very space of representation can change to provide a new way of thinking the relation between the text and the spectator. It shows how psychoanalytic theory is supple enough to slide into and transform the most unexpected situations.

There has long been a politics around the way in which women are represented, with objection not so much to specific images as to a regime of looking which places the represented woman in a particular relationship to the spectator's gaze. Artists have sometimes avoided the representation of women altogether, but they are now producing images which challenge the regime. How do these images succeed in their challenge?
The Emptiness of the Image offers a psychoanalytic answer. Parveen Adams argues that, despite flaws in some of the details of its arguments, psychoanalytic theory retains an overwhelming explanatory strength in relation to questions of sexual difference and representation. She goes on to show how the issue of desire changes the way we can think of images and their effects. Throughout she discusses the work of theorists, artists and filmmakers such as Helene Deutsch, Catherine MacKinnon, Mary Kelly, Francis Bacon, Michael Powell and Della Grace.

Each of the contributors addresses the theoretical questions by pursuing a definite artistic problem, including a close look at the relation between the image and the object in Hitchcock's Vertigo, the sexual aesthetics of Caravaggio, the artistic pen of Barthes, and how Cronenberg's film Crash functions as a sinthome.

British-Iranian photographer and filmmaker Mitra Tabrizian creates an unsettling imagery out of ordinary daily life. Atmospherically, she evokes almost unreal scenes, which push reality and its inhabitants into the sublime realm of a fathomless emotional interior. She addresses the incidental and mundane, yet her agenda reaches deeper. With a unique perspective, she inquires the complex social roles of the individual. By revealing too often unnoticed phenomena of contemporary living she challenges our established conceptions of the world. The book presents all of her works since 2012.

Essays and interviews that span Mary Kelly's career highlight the artist's sustained engagement with feminism and feminist history. When Mary Kelly's best-known work, Post-Partum Document (1973-1979), was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1976, it caused a sensation-an unexpected response to an intellectually demanding and aesthetically restrained installation of conceptual art. The reception signaled resistance to the work's interrogation of feminine identity and the cultural mythologizing of motherhood. This volume of essays and interviews begins with this foundational work, offering an early statement by the artist, a subsequent interview, and an essay situating the work within a broader broader discourse of art and social purpose in the early 1970s. Throughout, the collection addresses such themes as labor, war, trauma, and the politics of care, while emphasizing the artist's sustained engagement with histories of feminism and generations of feminists. The contributions also consider such specific works as Kelly's Interim (1984-1989), the subject of a special issue of October; Gloria Patri (1992), an installation conceived in response to the first Gulf War; The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi (2001), an extensive project including a 200-foot narrative executed in the medium of compressed lint and the performance of a musical score by Michael Nyman; and two recent works, Love Songs (2005-2007), which explores the role of memory in feminist politics, and Mimus (2012), a triptych that parodies the House Un-American Activities Committee's 1962 investigation of the pacifist group, Women Strike for Peace. Essays and Interviews by Parveen Adams, Emily Apter, Rosalyn Deutsche, Hal Foster, Margaret Iversen, Mary Kelly, Helen Molesworth, Laura Mulvey, Mignon Nixon, Griselda Pollock, Paul Smith

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.