Explores the philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic significance of film endings.

Editing has been called the language of cinema, and thus a film's ending can be considered the final punctuation mark of this language, framing everything that came before and offering the key to both our interpretation and our enjoyment of a film. In Cinematic Cuts, scholars explore the philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic significance of film endings, analyzing how film endings engage our fantasies of cheating death, finding true love, or determining the meaning of life. They examine how endings offer various forms of enjoyment for the spectator, from the momentary fulfillment of desire in the happy ending to the pleasurable torment of an indeterminate ending. The contributors also consider how film endings open onto larger questions relating to endings in our time. They suggest how a film ending's hidden counternarrative can be read as a political act, how our interpretation of a film ending parallels the end of a psychoanalytical session, how film endings reveal our anxieties and fears, and how cinema itself might end with the increasing intervention of digital technologies that reorient the spectator's sense of temporality and closure. Films by Akira Kurosawa, Lars von Trier, Joon-Hwan Jang, Claire Denis, Christopher Nolan, Jane Campion, John Huston, and Spike Jonze, among others, are discussed.

Everything you wanted to know about the Lacanian critique of deconstruction, but were afraid to ask the Coen Brothers.

The Coen Brothers' films are rife with figures of absence. In The Big Lebowski, the Dude does nothing. He is put on the trail of a kidnapping that never happened, and solves the crime when he realizes that he paid the ransom with "a ringer for a ringer." The Hudsucker Proxy features a dupe who draws zeros throughout the film, enthusiastically proclaiming, "You know, for the kids!" Barton Fink is a film that revolves around the absence of a film. In Apropos of Nothing, Clark Buckner appeals to these and other figures of the void in the Coen Brothers' films in order to articulate the close proximity and ultimate opposition between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean deconstruction. In the process, he situates both theories in relationship to Heidegger's existential phenomenology, and undertakes a comparative analysis of the negativity in death, language, drive, anxiety, visual perception, paternity, and the unconscious. Formulating one of the most theoretically rigorous readings of the Coens' oeuvre to date, Buckner also offers a readable overview of some central debates in late twentieth-century continental philosophy.

Brings Lacan and Nietzsche together as part of a common effort to rethink the tradition of Western ethics.

Bringing together Jacques Lacan and Friedrich Nietzsche, Tim Themi focuses on their conceptions of ethics and on their accounts of the history of ethical thinking in the Western tradition. Nietzsche blames Plato for setting in motion a degenerative process that turned ethics away from nature, the body, and its senses, and thus eventually against our capacities for reason, science, and a creative, flourishing life. Dismissing Plato's Supreme Good as a "mirage," Lacan is very much in sympathy with Nietzsche's reading. Following this premise, Themi shows how Lacan's ethics might build on Nietzsche's work, thus contributing to our understanding of Nietzsche, and also how Nietzsche's critique can strengthen our understanding of Lacan.

Psychoanalytic perspectives on Kristeva's fiction.

With published work spanning more than forty years, Julia Kristeva's influence in psychoanalysis and literary theory is difficult to overstate. In addition to this scholarship Kristeva has written several novels, however this portion of her oeuvre has received comparatively scant attention. In this book, Kristeva scholars from a number of disciplines analyze her novels in relation to her work in psychoanalysis, interrogating the relationships between fiction and theory. The essays explore questions including, what is the value of experimental writing that escapes easy definition and classification, putting ideas at the same level as character, pacing, plot, suspense, form, and style? And, how might such fiction help its readers overcome the psychological maladies that affect contemporary society? The contributors make a compelling case for understanding Kristeva's fiction as a crucial influence to her wider psychoanalytic project.

A psychoanalytic theory of biopolitics.

Although both share a focus on human life as it is inscribed by power, Foucauldian biopolitics and Lacanian psychoanalysis have remained isolated from and even opposed to one another. In Being, Time, Bios, A. Kiarina Kordela aims to overcome this divide, formulating a historical ontology that draws from Spinoza, Marx, Heidegger, and Sartre to theorize the changed character of "being" and "time" under secular capitalism. With insights from film theory, postcolonial studies, and race theory, Kordela's wide-ranging analysis suggests a radically new understanding of contemporary capitalism-one in which uncertainty, sacrifice, immortality, and the gaze are central.

Reframes the terms of cultural analysis with a fresh take on transference theory in Freud and Lacan and a critical engagement with the philosophy of Alain Badiou.

Both Freud and Lacan defined the transference as the ego's last stand-its final desperate attempt to keep the truth of the unconscious at bay. Both also viewed the transference as a social phenomenon.

In The Structures of Love James Penney argues that transference is the concept with which psychoanalysis thinks through the unconscious demands that circumscribe and can sabotage our creative initiatives in the arts and politics. Penney suggests a method of cultural analysis that enables us to identity the transformative potential of genuine artistic and political acts. He stages a dialogue between Lacan's psychoanalysis and the philosophy of Alain Badiou; includes chapters on Frantz Fanon and Jean Genet, Chantal Akerman and Lucien Freud; and explores the aesthetic, political, and ethical consequences of the transference idea, pushing it into exciting new territory.

Situates Lacan's theory of the subject within contemporary philosophical debates over freedom and agency.

In Signifiers and Acts, Ed Pluth examines Lacan's views on language and sexuality to argue that Lacan's theory of the subject is best read as a theory of freedom and agency-a theory that is especially compelling precisely because of its structuralist and seemingly antihumanist framework. Presenting new aspects of Lacan's work and commenting extensively on the important yet unpublished seminars that still make up the majority of his contribution to contemporary thought, the book aims to make a Lacanian intervention into contemporary theory. In addition to Saussure, Sartre, Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy, Pluth discusses works in political theory and identity theory by Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Zðizûek.

Maintains that Lacanian psychoanalysis is the proper continuation of the line of thought from Spinoza to Marx.

Opposing both popular "neo-Spinozisms" (Deleuze, Negri, Hardt, Israel) and their Lacanian critiques (Zðizûek and Badiou), Surplus maintains that Lacanian psychoanalysis is the proper continuation of the Spinozian-Marxian line of thought. Author A. Kiarina Kordela argues that both sides ignore the inherent contradictions in Spinoza's work, and that Lacan's reading of Spinoza-as well as of Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Wittgenstein-offers a much subtler balance of knowing when to take the philosopher at face value and when to read him against himself. Moving between abstract theory and tangible political, ethical, and literary examples, Kordela traces the emergence of "enjoyment" and "the gaze" out of Spinoza's theories of God, truth, and causality, Kant's critique of pure reason, and Marx's pathbreaking application of set theory to economy. Kordela's thought unfolds an epistemology and an ontology proper to secular capitalist modernity that call for a revision of the Spinoza-Marx-Lacan line as the sole alternative to the (anti-)Platonist tradition.

Melds philosophical analysis with early cinematic history to develop a fresh theory of the notion of comedy.

The Comedy of Philosophy brings modern debates in continental philosophy to bear on the historical study of early cinematic comedy. Through the films of Mack Sennett, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and the Marx Brothers, Lisa Trahair investigates early cinema's exploration of sense and nonsense by utilizing the contributions to the philosophy of comedy made by Freud and Bataille and by examining significant poststructuralist interpretations of their work. Trahair explores the shift from the excessive physical slapstick of the Mack Sennett era to the so-called structural comedy of the 1920s, and also offers a new perspective on the importance of psychoanalysis for the study of film by focusing on the implications of Freud's theory of the unconscious for our understanding of visuality.

Explores the conceptualization of the Freudian uncanny in various late-twentieth-century theoretical and critical discourses (literary studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, art history, trauma studies, architecture, etc.).

The Unconcept is the first genealogy of the concept of the Freudian uncanny, tracing the development, paradoxes and movements of this negative concept through various fields and disciplines from psychoanalysis, literary theory and philosophy to film studies, genre studies, sociology, religion, architecture theory, and contemporary art. Anneleen Masschelein explores the vagaries of this 'unconcept' in the twentieth century, beginning with Freud's seminal essay 'The Uncanny,' through a period of conceptual latency, leading to the first real conceptualizations in the 1970s and then on to the present dissemination of the uncanny to exotic fields such as hauntology, the study of ghosts, robotics and artificial intelligence. She unearths new material on the uncanny from the English, French and German traditions, and sheds light on the specific status of the concept in contemporary theory and practice in the humanities. This essential reference book for researchers and students of the uncanny is written in an accessible style. Through the lens of the uncanny, the familiar contours of the intellectual history of the twentieth century appear in a new and exciting light.

Explores the connections between sexual difference and political structure in ancient Greek tragedy.

This collection offers a vibrant exploration of the bonds between sexual difference and political structure in Greek tragedy. In looking at how the acts of violence and tortured kinship relations are depicted in the work of all three major Greek tragic playwrights-Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides-the contributors shed light on the workings and failings of the Greek polis, and explore the means by which sexual difference and the city take shape in relation to each other. The volume complements and expands the efforts of current feminist interpretations of Antigone and the Oresteia by considering the meanings of tragedy for ancient Athenian audiences while also unveiling the reverberations of Greek tragedy's formulations and dilemmas in modern political life and for contemporary political philosophy.

Explores why American Romantic writers and contemporary continental thinkers turn to art when writing about ethics.

This book explores the relationship between literature and ethics, showing how literature and art work to open up a part of ethics that resists traditional philosophy. Focusing on three American Romantic texts-Wieland, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and The Marble Faun-Robert Hughes demonstrates how each dramatizes the ethical, psychological, and existential imperative to put the experience of our own traumatic limits (death, mortality, and being) into poetic language. To develop the theoretical stakes of these literary readings, Hughes also draws on four twentieth-century continental thinkers-Jacques Lacan, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Alain Badiou-each of whom, in his own way, proposed aesthetics or art as an approach to this dimension of ethics. The book also points to an overlooked common lineage, descending from German Romanticism, between American Romanticism and contemporary post-Romantic continental thought: a shared supposition about the limits of reason as a mode of presenting the essence of art and ethics, and a shared faith in the promise of literature to speak to, or open up, this subjective space of foundational ethics

Offers a constructive new approach to the debate between hermeneutics and deconstruction.

Written in the aftermath of the deaths of the French philosophers Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) and Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), this book is an important and innovative study of the contentious relation between deconstruction and hermeneutics. Offering close readings of Derrida's and Ricoeur's writings on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, structuralist linguistics, and Levinasian ethics, Eftichis Pirovolakis introduces the motif of 'improbable encounters,' and explicates why the two thinkers may be said to be simultaneously close to each other and separated by an unbridgeable abyss. Pirovolakis complicates any facile distinction between these movements, which are two of the most influential streams of continental thought, and questions a certain pathos with respect to the distance separating them. Pirovolakis also translates Derrida's brief tribute to Ricoeur: "The Word: Giving, Naming, Calling," which appears here in English for the first time. The book is essential reading for anyone immersed in continental philosophy or literary theory.

Considers the social and political significance of Kristeva's oeuvre.

The social and political relevance of Julia Kristeva's work is perhaps the central question in Kristeva studies, and the essays in this collection provide a sustained interrogation of this complicated problematic from a variety of perspectives and across the various contexts and moments of Kristeva's forty-year writing career. Presenting Kristeva's thought as the sustained interrogation of a political problematic, the contributors argue that her use of psychoanalysis and aesthetics offers significant insight into social and political issues that would otherwise remain concealed. The collection addresses the entirety of Kristeva's oeuvre, from her earliest work on poetic language to her most recent work on female genius, and it includes two previously untranslated essays by Kristeva, as well as original contributions from scholars working in several countries and a variety of disciplines.

A comprehensive examination of Lacan's seminar on ethics.

In Eros and Ethics, Marc De Kesel patiently exposes the lines of thought underlying Jacques Lacan's often complex and cryptic reasoning regarding ethics and morality in his seventh seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960). In this seminar, Lacan arrives at a rather perplexing conclusion: that which, over the ages, has been supposed to be "the supreme good" is in fact nothing but "radical evil"; therefore, the ultimate goal of human desire is not happiness and self-realization, but destruction and death. And yet, Lacan hastens to add, the morality based on this conclusion is far from being melancholic or tragic. Rather, it results in an encouraging ethics that for the first time in history gives full moral weight to the erotic. De Kesel's close reading uncovers the real scope of Lacan's criticism regarding the moralizing ethics of our time, and is one of the rare books that gives the reader full access to the letter of the Lacanian text.

Feminist and psychoanalytic analysis of spectatorship.

Feminine Look shows how the Lacanian concept of sexuation makes possible a new account of the relationship among feminism, psychoanalysis, and spectatorship. Whereas previous studies have tended to ask how spectatorship may be influenced by sexual difference, Jennifer Friedlander asks how particular spectatorial encounters may engender different "sexuated" responses. In so doing, she traces a fresh path through Freud's account of the relationship between visual perception and sexual difference and rereads Freud's fable of castration anxiety, suggesting that sexual identity arises as a response to the symbolic order's indifference to the subject's need for a solid identity. She examines provocative and controversial artistic images by Jamie Wagg, Marcus Harvey, and Sally Mann to demonstrate how images not only create and embody social practices but also precipitate viewer anxieties and pleasures.

Clinical and philosophical perspectives on key issues and debates in Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Lacan, Language, and Philosophy explores the linguistic turn in psychoanalysis taken by Jacques Lacan. Russell Grigg provides lively and accessible readings of Lacan and Freud that are grounded in clinical experience and informed by a background in analytic philosophy. He addresses key issues in Lacanian psychoanalysis, from the clinical (how psychosis results from the foreclosure of the signifier the Name-of-the Father; the father as a symbolic function; the place of transference) to the philosophical (the logic of the "pas-tout"; the link between the superego and Kant's categorical imperative; a critique of Žižek's account of radical change). Grigg's expertise and knowledge of psychoanalysis produce a major contribution to contemporary philosophical and psychoanalytic debates.

Explores the relationship between disciplinarity and contemporary ethics of scholarship about the Holocaust.

Disciplining the Holocaust examines critics' efforts to defend a rigorous and morally appropriate image of the Holocaust. Rather than limiting herself to polemics about the "proper" approach to traumatic history, Karyn Ball explores recent trends in intellectual history that govern a contemporary ethics of scholarship about the Holocaust. She examines the scholarly reception of Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, the debates culminating in Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Lyotard's response to negations of testimony about the gas chambers, psychoanalytically informed frameworks for the critical study of traumatic history, and a conference on feminist approaches to the Holocaust and genocide. Ball's book bridges the gap between psychoanalysis and Foucault's understanding of disciplinary power in order to highlight the social implications of traumatic history.