Sensitive subject: Absence of the center of political ontology

Author: Slavoj ?i?ek (Slovenia)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-01-01
Features: Since Descartes proposed the "ghost of the subject" with "I think," all academic forces have joined the sacred alliance aimed at driving away this ghost: from modern obscurantism and postmodern structuralism, to Habermasian communicative theorists and Heideggerian defenders of the thought of existence, to cognitive scientists and deep ecologists, and then to critical (post)Marxists and feminists. This book seeks to reaffirm Descartes' subject, discussing subjectivity across three main areas: the German Idealist tradition; post-Althusserian politics; and the "deconstructivist" transformation from the (capitalized) subject to diverse subject positions and the likelihood of subjectivation. It raises the challenging question of how to reconstruct a left-wing anti-capitalist political project in an era of global capitalism and its ideological complement, namely cultural pluralism of liberal democracy. The book reasserts the concept of Descartes' subject by employing psychoanalytic theory as a weapon.