Sensitive subject (absence center of political ontology)

Author: Slavoj ?i?ek (Slovenia)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-01-01
Features: The sensitive subject may be ?i?ek's most concise and politically charged work to date. — Lingua Franca
?i?ek is the remarkable advocate of psychoanalysis that has emerged in Europe in recent decades, and in fact of a broader cultural theory. — Terry Eagleton
For ?i?ek, discussing Hegel and Lacan is like breathing freely. — Judit Butler
Since Descartes introduced 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 defenders of Heideggerian existential thought, to cognitive scientists and deep ecologists, and even to critical (post)Marxists and feminists. This book seeks to reaffirm Descartes' subject, discussing subjectivity from 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. The book 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, cultural pluralism of liberal democracy. Armed with psychoanalytic theory, the book reaffirms the Cartesian concept of the subject.