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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.

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.