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Heidegger Entry, Zizek Dictionary

The Žižek Dictionary, edited by Rex Butler, features many of the most important interpreters of Žižek’s work, each offering a short critical article about an aspect of that work central to their own interpretation. On the strength of my approach from Žižek and Heidegger: the Question Concerning Techno-Capitalism (Continuum, 2008), Butler asked me to do an entry on “Heidegger,” one that would both recount the main points of my critical reading and consider Žižek’s development since my book’s publication. The result is the following article.

Following Atheism: on a Debate in Contemporary Psychoanalytic Theory

Setting out from a debate between two contemporary Lacanians (Adrian Johnston and Slavoj Žižek) about the religious significance of psychoanalysis, this paper argues that what such analysis really has to offer to a discussion of religion is purloined by the current round of academic polemics about its “revival.” Originally published in the International Journal of Zizek Studies

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Laughing at finitude: Slavoj Žižek reads Being and Time

“Laughing at Finitude” interprets Slavoj Žižek’s intellectual project as responding to a challenge left by Being and Time. Setting out from discussions of Heidegger’s book in The Parallax View and The Ticklish Subject, the essay exfoliates Žižek’s response to the Heideggerian version of a “philosophy of finitude” – both finding the central insight of Žižek’s work in Heidegger’s radical proposal for “anticipatory resoluteness” and developing Žižek’s critique of Being and Time as indicating Heidegger’s retreat from that proposal within the very book where it appears.

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The failure of the radical democratic imaginary Žižek versus Laclau and Mouffe on vestigial utopia

Starting from the author’s critique of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, this essay offers a comprehensive interpretation of Slavoj Žižek’s political theory.

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Getting back into no place: On Casey, deconstruction and the architecture of modernity

This essay developed from a conference paper delivered at a session devoted to Edward Casey’s work on place, a session for which Casey himself served as commentator. It was part of an ongoing discussion about modernity, postmodernity and place in which I participated.

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Polemical Ambivalence: Modernity and Utopia in Žižek’s The Puppet and the Dwarf

Beginning from the hypothesis that Slavoj Žižek’s recent ‘theological’ writing really concerns issues in political theory — historicity, modernity and freedom — ‘polemical ambivalence’ uses a fundamental structural ambiguity in his recent book, The Puppet and Dwarf, to interpret his larger project as split about the utopian aspect of modernity.

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Missing the Point: Reading the Lacanian Subject through Perspective

Published in the online journal for the Jan van Eyck’ Academy’s “Circle for Ideology Critique,” this essay further develops my thought from Žižek and Heidegger on the relationship between the perspectival revolution that ushers in modernity and psychoanalysis.

Go to Line of Beauty to read the article or download the article.

Review of Linda Martín Alcoff’s Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory

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Review of Sense and Finitude: Encounters at the Limits of Language, Art, and the Political

Go to University of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews to read the article.

Tom Brockelman is Professor of Philosophy at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY. He is the former Director of the Core Curriculum and Interim Provost there.

Books by Tom Brockelman

Translations by Tom Brockelman

Cover of book Language and the Unconscious: Lacan's Hermeneutics of Psychoanalysis
Language and the Unconscious: Lacan's Hermeneutics of Psychoanalysis