A theoretical examination of veiling, shame, and modesty in the films of the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami through the lenses of Islamic philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis.In Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran, Joan Copjec examines the films of the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. The key to these films, she argues, lies in the image of a fragile yet sheltering tree that appears in several of his films. This simple image depicts a central concept of...

In Read My Desire, Joan Copjec stages a confrontation between the theories of Jacques Lacan and those of Michel Foucault, protagonists of two powerful modern disciplines-psychoanalysis and historicism. Ordinarily, these modes of thinking only cross paths long enough for historicists to charge psychoanalysis with an indifference to history, but here psychoanalysis, via Lacan, goes on the offensive. Refusing to cede history to the historicists, Copjec makes a case for the superiorit...

Rossini'ye en büyük bestecinin kim olduğunu sormuşlar, o da "Beethoven" diye yanıtlamış. "Peki Mozart?" denince Rossini, serinkanlı bir şekilde cevabı yapıştırmış: "Mozart en büyük besteci değil, tek besteci." Aynısı Joan Copjec için de söylenmeli: Amerikalı Lacancıların "en büyüğü" değil, çok daha radikal anlamda Amerikalı tek Lacancı o. Bu yeni kitabı herhangi bir ölçüte göre "büyük" değil, "büyüklük" ölçütlerini yeniden tanımlıyor. Kitapta Lacancı psikalaniz ve feminizm her iki alanı da...

Deciding what is and what is not political is a fraught, perhaps intractably opaque matter. Just who decides the question; on what grounds; to what ends—these seem like properly political questions themselves. Deciding what is political and what is not can serve to contain and restrain struggles, make existing power relations at once self-evident and opaque, and blur the possibility of reimagining them differently. Political Concepts seeks to revive our common political vocabulary—both eve...

Jacques Lacan is the foremost psychoanalytic theorist after Freud. Revolutionising the study of social relations, his work has been a major influence on political theory, philosophy, literature and the arts, but his thought has so far been studied without a serious investigation of its foundations. Just what are the influences on his thinking, so crucial to its proper understanding?In Lacan: The Silent Partners Slavoj Zizek, the maverick theorist and pre-eminent Lacan schol...