Posts Tagged ‘Zizek’

I recently read two reviews of recent books on German Idealism. The first was a review by Dean Moyar of Brady Bowman’s fascinating sounding Hegel and the Metaphysics of Absolute Negativity while the second was Sebastian Gardner’s review of Markus Gabriel’s Transcendental Ontology (which has been out for a while but only recently released in paper back). Both of […]


FWJ von Schelling closes his essay on human freedom in the following way: “We have the greatest respect for the profundity of historical investigations, and believe to have shown that the almost universal opinion of man only gradually arose from the dullness of animal instinct to rationality it not our own. Yet we believe the […]


There a quite a few interesting philosophy and theory conferences coming up in the next few months so I thought I’d do a post here: Feminism, Science and Materialism Feb 14-15, 2013 Keynote: Karen Barad CUNY, NYC 1000 w abstracts due November 1, 2012 Duquesne Graduate Conference in Philosophy (Philosophy and Nature) Feb 23, 2013 […]


I found Ray Brassier’s recent talk on Sellars and Brandom quite interesting. What was particularly striking was Brassier’s comment that Sellars is a thinker of stratified processes, a project sounds utterly fascinating given my own attempts at trying to adequately (if speculatively) describe the relation of thought to nature. Furthermore, a critical focus of the […]


Zizek’s Unbehagen In Der Nature addresses current discussions surrounding ecology and nature. Right off the bat however Zizek’s conceptualization of nature is limited – seeming to be nature as it appears to us, nature as we can manipulate it. The anxieity or uneasiness that Zizek discusses seems more to be more about the loss of […]


It would be hard not to notice the numerous rapid descents in the Dark Knight which, while uncommon for filmic representations of superheroes, seem particularly frantic and well done. I would argue that this is indicative of the film’s content as well as its form: the Dark Knight is not so much the recognizable ‘descent […]


Let us make a decision – cut one half of the vicious fluid from the other – for our purposes slime is an organic substance and is different from waste in that waste is what the organic sheds to shed whereas slime harbors a stronger claim to the core of the organism – it’s functions […]


Following Nick of The Accursed Share’s brilliant remarks on Brassier’s reading of Deleuze, I wish to return to the following passage from Nihil Unbound: “In Zizek’s Hegelianism, the subject achieves its autonomy by retroactively positing/reintegrating its own contingent material determinants: freedom is the subjective necessity of objective contingency. But by dissolving the idea of a […]


Several points in the post are indebted to discussions here and here. Derrida’s notion of language play and the purported death of the transcendental signifier seems to have anchored narratology, as it is understood in cultural studies and many veins of literary studies, in the swamp of post-structuralism. Furthermore, the phenomenological and post-Kantian articulation of […]