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This book narrates the history of post-Marxism as the adventure of the symbolic. Post-Marxism involves a confrontation between the relatively rigid semiotic concept of the symbolic order and looser, less formulaic and less deterministic ideas of the symbolic. These more open concepts tap the complicated legacy of the symbolic turn, a history with roots deeper than the twentieth century. In the context of the convergence of Marxism's eclipse and the decline of foundational principles, this book evaluates the prospects for regenerating critical social and political philosophy beyond the Marxist framework, as well as the possibilities of creating and sustaining a positive emancipatory project. To do so, it draws on a series of historically and philosophically informed studies of several major thinkers who confront us with contrasting approaches to the challenges of political philosophy in the postfoundational and post-Marxist context. These figures include Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Marcel Gauchet, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj Žižek.

This chapter argues that a theology after Lacan is not a theology according to Lacan. The role of a theology that has been permeated by Lacanian and postmodern discourses is not that which Lacan assigns religion to cover up the Real. It is to engage it. The first part of the chapter analyzes Lacan’s claim that there is a true religion whose meanings will likely supplant psychoanalysis. The second part shows how a theology of language, rather than answering a wish or covering up what is wrong, can galvanize the force of disillusioned desire to act against passive acceptance of a symbolic order and its discontents. A theology of language, as a theology centered on an Other that it knows is an illusion, is a theology destined to desire to no end. This desire to no end is a rebellious force against the dulling of life as construed by and siphoned through an inherited normative linguistic reality. Read against the Lacanian backdrop of accession to the symbolic order, the rebellious desire to no end is understood heuristically as the power of neurotic dissent, the power of masochistic perversion, and the power of paranoiac doubt.

In “Skin Deep: Identity and Trauma in God Help the Child,” Shirley A. Stave argues that the novel plays surface off depth, unravelling the dichotomy as false through the lens of racism, which is predicated upon the gaze, the surface, but which profoundly disables the depth, leaving its victims traumatized. Morrison’s two main characters, Bride and Booker, both live fractured lives because of their attempt to avoid depth, choosing image and intellect as mechanisms to insulate themselves from further trauma. Bride’s ruptured skin, which exposes what lies beneath, begins her journey toward wholeness, which results in her leaving the Lacanian Mirror Stage and a misguided sense of her completeness to enter the Symbolic Order. Similarly, Booker embraces intellect as a way to isolate himself from human connection. Bride and Booker, through the agency of Booker’s aunt Queen, learn to open themselves to vulnerability and achieve the completeness they have resisted.

This chapter expands the discussion on the problematics of the critique of a totalizing modern social-symbolic order by turning to the novels of Paul Auster, Jerzi Kosinski, and Don DeLillo. Their novels reveal the old Enlightenment figure of the wild child reinvoked and reimagined. In these post-modern texts, the biologistic ideologies have fallen into disrepute, containing Rousseauean, utopian echoes of primal, innocent man who challenges the fallen social-linguistic order. Auster's City of Glass conflates a post-Babel linguistic condition of shifting signifiers with the economic and social crises of New York in the 1970s. In Kosinski's Being There, the Edenic, unfallen garden merges with the blankness of television broadcast, and Chance, the wild child, emerges from that mixed but homogenous domain. In DeLillo's White Noise, American consumer culture is presented as a Baudrillardian simulation whose surface cannot be punctured even by death.

Doors are architectural media that function as cultural techniques because they operate the primordial difference of architecture—that between inside and outside—and at the same time reflect this difference and thereby establish a system comprised of opening and closing operations. Taking Adorno’s lamentation that one does not know how to close a door anymore and Musil’s statement that doors are a thing of the past as points of departure, the chapter highlights epochs of the symbolic order as it is media historically connected to the history of the door. As confirmed by ethnography and historians of antiquity the door has always been linked to the law – be it the law of the city, divine or paternal law – an idea that culminates in Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” and in Jacques Lacan’s notion that the door is the symbol par excellence. In the Merode altar by Robert Campin (1425) thus the meaning of the door that processes the distinction between the sacred and the profane is transferred to the real unfolding of the triptych. The revolving doors and the automatic sliding doors of the twentieth century are no material implementations of the symbolic order anymore but thermodynamic and governmental machines that prefigure cybernetic machines in which the distinction between inside and outside as been replaced by the distinction between on and off.

This chapter explores how Lacan appropriates an inverse Aristotelianism, as a way of challenging modern accounts of reality informed by Plato, Descartes, and Kant. In spite of its privileging of the soul as the form of the body, Aristotelian epistemology actually privileges the body as the formative influence on the soul. The body’s jouissance can be articulated as a site of discursive difference which invokes the spontaneity and immediacy of speech (parole) over and against the abstraction of the written word. Through the reanimation of the language of imagination and desire, the masculine subject of the symbolic is called into question by the speech of his corporeal, feminized, mystical, or hysterical other. The eternal significance of the resurrected body becomes a lens through which to explore these ideas and the challenge they pose to Thomas’s Aristotelianism. The chapter concludes with Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian interpretation of 1 Corinthians 13 in terms of love, knowledge, and emptiness.

This chapter studies the relationship between the subjective experience of psychotic illness and political subjectivity, and the madness of the psychotic and that of violent crowds in modern Indonesia. It reveals deep fractures in the symbolic ordering of sufferers' relation to families and the world of commodity capitalism and the medicoscientific order of reality. The chapter also shows how the experiences of acute psychoses are mixed up with Indonesia's current political and economic turmoil, and emphasizes the dissonances, ambiguities, and limitations of representing subjectivity in mental illness.

This and the next chapter concern the interior of the Kaʿba, both asking what and how the Kaʿba houses and thereby fulfils a basic function of architecture: to shelter and hold. This chapter argues that the total emptiness of the Kaʿba in terms of cultic content and its near emptiness in terms of material content are part of the Kaʿba’s function as a placeholder of the symbolic order of Islam – a function similar to the function of zero in cultures historically stamped by visualising technologies based on linear perspective. The chapter is divided into three parts. First, an account of what the early Islamic sources say the Kaʿba held before the advent of Islam, what they say this content was for, and what they allege the Prophet did with it upon his conquest of Mecca. Second, a discussion of the sources’ claim that the Prophet evacuated most of this content, and an analysis of pre-modern diagrammatic miniature paintings of the Kaʿba which substantiate this claim. Third, an interpretation of the resultant emptied Kaʿba as the placeholder of a void that is (1) functional in Islamic culture, anchoring the symbolic order of Islam, and (2) constitutive of the Kaʿba’s mystery.

This chapter explores more general questions that have come out of this investigation regarding the form and function of Chan genealogies that have been slowly generated and thickened. It assesses individual claims to having experienced Chan enlightenment, in any era, in the wake of seeing that Chan enlightenment, and the lineages that supposedly delivered it. The chapter emphasizes the whole promise of Religious Studies as a critical discipline, from the beginning, headed in the direction in which understanding the “all-too-human” origins of religions could also be grounds for a kind of liberating flexibility vis-à-vis symbolic orders, a flexibility born of recognizing how these orders were created and consumed. Understanding is required of the mechanisms by which humans devise systems of desire, belief, and closure and this requires being both inside them and outside them. Just this flexibility and irony vis-à-vis meaning and truth sets the stage for some rather profound reflections on human beings.

This chapter considers the claims of the book in terms of Jacques Lacan’s famous dictum that “the non-duped err.” It explores the political possibilities afforded to those who, rather than seek to overcome the duplicity of the Symbolic order by “seeing through” its deceit, allow themselves to be taken in, to be duped by it. It then examines this view via Roland Barthes’ distinction between two sorts of subjects, the cynic and the fool (or dupe) and suggests that fool is wise in avoiding the trap of believing that he or she can outsmart the efficiency of the symbolic ruse.

This introductory chapter briefly describes the “disarticulate” and explores his functions. Defined as someone outside the linguistic loop, the disarticulate is a figure situated at the boundary of the social-symbolic order, or who is imagined to be there, and at that liminal place, there is no adequate terminology. One cannot even quite determine whether he is an object of desire or revulsion. As disarticulate, the figure is blocked from language, standing at the convergence of all of language's impasses: those of injury, trauma, neurological variation, socio-political silencing, and the working of language itself as language plots its own aporias. The chapter argues that the dys-/disarticulate is also a representation of a human being living as an individual subject in a social world. And as a person perceived and figured as “other,” he becomes the focus of ethical considerations.

This chapter explores the link between material objects and the different temporalities of post-Stalinist Soviet society. The chapter looks at the productivist language of late socialism as a discursive framework that inspired and produced Soviet elemental materialism and was itself inspired and reproduced by it. Productivist language linked a vision of the grand Soviet future with technological objects and sought a rational social organization along industrial production and scientific progress. It abducted the imagery of Soviet factories, machines, vehicles, and space rockets, immersed it into the hermetic space of visual and textual representations, and used it to define, for the Soviet symbolic order, the position of the USSR at the cutting edge of technological progress. In this discourse, technologies and technological objects secured the possession of the present and future of human history for Soviet society, as well as ensured the superiority of the USSR in its competition with the Western bloc. The perceived might and transformative agency of Soviet technological objects made them affective for the Soviet public, and they became translated into distinctive discursive practices — vernaculars of the Soviet Techno-Utopianism — that sought to transform the Soviet material world but instead represented rigorous forms of self-making. In addition to affect and its politics, the chapter introduces several other key themes that are discussed in the following chapters, including the idea of making oneself by making things, which Soviet educators and ideologists understood in terms of the development of creativity, and the performativity of objects.

Kieran Keohane and Carmen Kuhling analyse the transformation that the Irish subject has undergone, and is still undergoing, in connection with the period popularly dubbed the Celtic Tiger. Looking at the history and literature of the monstrous, the chapter posits connections between Celtic Tiger and 19th century vampires, 20th century native gombeen men, to the 21st century zombie slaves that we have become, in thrall to foreign paymasters and senior bondholders. Through a series of original readings of contemporary events as recurrences, of aspects of our troubled history, this chapter identifies a profound mutation of the symbolic order and imaginative structure of Irish individual and collective identity, one whereby we lose a sense of ourselves as citizens of a democratic Republic and become again as serfs in a neo-Feudal colony within a global order of Total Capitalism. Keohane and Kuhling's discussion and argument are framed in terms of mythic history derived from Joyce and Yeats, using monstrous tropes and figures from Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker, and Mary Shelley and from recent popular culture, all to contextualize the mutation of Irish identity into types of zombie slaves, with our souls possessed by bondholders. sent.

This chapter discusses the period from 1970 to 1974 known as “The Battle of Bayside.” During this period thousands of Lueken’s followers took to gathering at St. Robert Bellarmine’s Church in Bayside Hills. Their presence drew increasing hostility from the homeowner’s association as well as Church authorities, culminating in a legal ban on the vigils. Marian apparitions often involve struggles over physical space and the Battle of Bayside demonstrates the importance of sacred space as a source of authority for apparitional movements. Baysiders and residents were not only competing for who could use the area around St. Robert Bellarmine’s but also the symbolic significance of the space. For Baysiders, access to their sacred space was a “technology of power” that allowed them assert their own symbolic order onto the world.

Generation A women often speak of a time when the church was the social hub of their lives and how this has now become diminished, with fewer regular attendees and less-involved priests. Nevertheless, the women have a strong appetite for socializing and all the attendant activities of preparation, decoration, serving, eating and drinking, games, and raffles. The food rituals of preparation reflect routine, pattern, and symbolic order. They involve more people than strictly necessary, and are therefore ‘inefficient’ compared to commercial practices, but are highly productive means of creating and maintaining church relationships. It is the routine of the regulars that dominates. Harsh realities of keeping the churchgoing are understood by Generation A and form a major part of what they consider to be their duties. The notion of a ‘self-circulating economy’ is introduced to explain the detailed method of income generation created and sustained by Generation A.