Search Results

Everyone knows that The Merchant of Venice is all about money, but if the characters of the play know it too, they do their best to avoid saying so. This chapter examines the variety of ways in which the play's characters seek to articulate extramonetary values for the objects of their desires, and so disavow the centrality of the three thousand ducats through which their desires contend. The mechanism of disavowal is that of dividing and regrouping the play's central problematic into not only different problems, but different kinds of problem: the twofold dilemma (as between justice and mercy, or Jew and Christian), the unitary mystery of the self to the self, the triplicate riddle of the three caskets. In the play's cynical assessment of the relation of its individuals to its society, self-knowledge is willfully mystified in order to validate the institution that, by its own consensual disavowal, holds the Venetian commonwealth together: its money.

Zizek's thoughts on capitalism, ‘the radical act’, and the ethico-political example of Antigone, are often presented as integral parts of a Lacan-inspired radical political philosophy. Hence, the main theme examined in the third chapter is the relation between negativity (the negative ontology of Lacanian theory) and the more positive, utopian and heroic political attitude implied by Zizek. The central hypothesis explored is that in Zizek's recent work Lacanian negativity is ultimately disavowed and a positive politics of the act as miracle takes its place. Thus, the problem here is symmetrically opposite to the one associated with discourse theory (ch. 2) and analogous with the one encountered in the work of Castoriadis (ch. 1). We reach then a full circle in this theoretical exploration of the Lacanian Left. The question, of course, is whether the circle is vicious or not. Does such an orientation have a place within the Lacanian Left? How does it relate to Lacan's teaching and to Zizek's earlier work?

Using Bad Boys II, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Alexander, Spider-Man 3 and 300 as illustrative case studies, this chapter maps out homosexuality's status as both structuring presence and structuring absence in contemporary action cinema, as well as documenting how action movies speak to this presence/absence. After a brief history of homosexual screen representations, the chapter argues that the imposition or regulation of a straight-gay binary remains readable in contemporary action cinema, and that as a violent, risk-filled homosocial space the action ?lm provides a fertile ground for the anxieties about losing one's proper gender that Judith Butler has described. Representation of and performance of homosexuality, current practices of presenting and policing homosocial space, and patterns of knowing avaowal and disavowal, are historicized and analysed. The chapter explores how homosexuality operates as metaphor in the superhero action cycle, and as an indicator of villainy in films like Gamer, 300 and Watchmen, and also points up the persistent invisibility of female homosexuality in contemporary action cinema.

While recent commemorative histories mythologise fervent devotion to the faith as a distinctive attribute of the post-war migrant experience, catholic observers at the time feared migrants were ‘falling away from the church’. This chapter explores the changing place of religion in migrants’ lives in England and the complex agency of catholic ideals in shaping religious selfhoods over the migration journey. Where contemporary observers feared the secularising effects of urban culture upon migrants, the chapter shows how continuity and change articulated simultaneously within the evolution of migrants’ religious identities. Regulatory religious ideals offered some migrants a model of virtuous and socially respectable settlement in which they could recognize aspects of their own fears, ambitions and aspirations, while other, often later migrants, drew on a public critique of clerical power to narrate a story of renunciation and personal transformation. Irrespective, however, of whether or not individuals embraced or derogated their religious heritage, narratives of religious change always registered disavowal as an ambivalent process, involving the management of conflicting desires for autonomy from and conformity to deeply internalised religious prohibitions.

Focusing on the memory of a single racially-charged event, namely the 1996 Manchester bomb, this chapter analyses how three migrants negotiate problems self-positioning and belonging dramatized by the effects of the Troubles in England. The event of the bomb, it is argued, serves as a lens through which to illuminate the wider workings of Irish communal memory of the conflict, including its dynamic relation to English societal narratives on the Troubles and the processes of personal memory production. Attending to the articulation of these dynamics, the chapter explores how the ambivalence of English discourse was mirrored in the internal divisions of Irish communal memory, and how individuals’ personal histories of adaption over the life course conditioned how these divisions were interpreted and incorporated into the self. Personal memories of the bomb were thus not unmediated recollections of the event or its aftermath, but embodied attempts to negotiate this complex discursive landscape in order to manage or resolve the contradictions of identification which the Troubles dramatized. As such, they shine a light upon the Troubles as a significant identity problem for the Irish in post-war England, revealing of the complex, variegated and mutating nature of Irish belongings during the period.

This introductory chapter asks how speciesism engenders the bestialization of racial and sexual others. How does the stereotype of the black ape work to disavow the Darwinian principle of a universally shared human apehood? To what extent are both racist and antiracist discourses predicated on a shared repudiation of animality? How might we comprehend animality in nonpejorative terms? Analogous to the racialization of animality, the homophobic claim that granting civil rights such as marriage to gays and lesbians would also require the state to sanction bestiality denies the animality inherent in all sexuality by portraying homosexuality as a bestial act. If negative stereotypes about nonhuman animals are the condition of possibility for negative stereotypes about social and political minorities, then avowing human animality would seem to hold much political promise. Against some recent trends in “posthumanism,” however, this chapter asserts that an anti-discriminatory politics cannot be founded on a simple reversal of humanism. Human animality cannot be fully avowed. Rather, we must cultivate a weaker disavowal of difference that resonates with what Jacques Derrida characterizes as a “lesser violence,” which acknowledges our unavoidable implication in systems of exclusion.

This chapter sheds light on how Salafists try to distance themselves from the rest of French society and with what they see as un-Islamic. Through an internal hijra (religious salutary migration), they attempt to build a countersociety based on respect for pure religious norms. Through an external hijra, they leave France and the West in order to settle in an Islamic society: Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, or elsewhere. There are two types of Hijra. One that is temporary and allows to get familiar with a Muslim society for a relatively short amount of time. One that is designed to be forever entitling a spiritual and social rebirth in a Muslim country.