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Slavoj Zizek is no ordinary philosopher. Approaching critical theory and psychoanalysis in a recklessly entertaining fashion, Zizek's critical eye alights upon a bewildering and exhilarating range of subjects, from the political apathy of contemporary life, to a joke about the man who thinks he's a ...

Slavoj Zizek is no ordinary philosopher. Approaching critical theory and psychoanalysis in a recklessly entertaining fashion, Zizek's critical eye alights upon a bewildering and exhilarating range of subjects, from the political apathy of contemporary life, to a joke about the man who thinks he's a chicken, from the ethicial heroism of Keanu Reeves in Speed , to what toilet designs reveal about the national psyche. Tony Myers provides a clear and engaging guide to Zizek's key ideas, explaining the main influences on Zizek's thought (most crucially his engagement with Lacanian psychoanalysis) using examples drawn from popular culture and everyday life. Myers outlines the key issues that Zizek's work has tackled, including:* What is a Subject and why is it so important?* The Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real* What is so terrible about Postmodernity?* How can we distinguish reality from ideology?* What is the relationship between men and women?* Why is Racism always a fantasy? Slavoj Zizek is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the thought of the critic whom Terry Eagleton has described as "the most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged in Europe for some decades.

What place do ethical concerns have in intellectual life today? Why do ethical issues so often intrude in discussions of literature, criticism, and culture? And why are ethical issues so often unresolved? In short, why does ethics seem to be both urgent and problematic? In this book noted critic ...

What place do ethical concerns have in intellectual life today? Why do ethical issues so often intrude in discussions of literature, criticism, and culture? And why are ethical issues so often unresolved? In short, why does ethics seem to be both urgent and problematic? In this book noted critic Geoffrey Galt Harpham seeks to transform the contemporary understanding of ethics by arguing that it not only "shadows" other discourses but is itself "shadowed".

For Harpham, ethics is not a source of rules or norms, but a way of structuring questions. Ethics, he argues, involves the stresses and conflicts that arise in confrontation with an "other" -- a human other, but also an otherness within ethics itself. A conflicted discourse, ethics marks the point where literature becomes conceptually rigorous and theory becomes humanized. In addition to deeply original meditations on such subjects as rationality, aesthetics, and "enlightenment", Shadows of Ethics contains probing accounts of the work of such contemporary thinkers as Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, Jacques Derrida, Noam Chomsky, Geoffrey Hartman, Robert Nozick, and Martha Nussbaum. In a final essay called "Imagining the Center", Harpham attacks the current academic obsession with marginality and challenges critics to occupy -- imaginatively and theoretically -- a position of political and intellectual power.

Shadows of Ethics will interest literary critics, scholars in philosophy and postmodernism, and theorists interested in the relationship between ethics and their discipline.