Per) Versions of Love and Hate [Anglais] [Broché]

In an effort to examine why love and hate are often connected in literature, film and life, Salecl (The Spoils of Freedom) crafts an argument that draws heavily from Lacan and sparingly from her own thoughts. The book is flawed by academic language and frequent dips into the well of indigestible theory. According to Salecl, love and hate are forever interlinked because both emotional states contain elements of attraction and repulsion. She cites such novels as Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (both of which have been turned into films) to strengthen her argument. But she also veers into digressions on multiculturalism, hate speech, body mutilation and Oleg Kulik, a performance artist who acts like a dog and bites members of his audience. Salecl is such an avidly far-ranging cultural critic that she buries her original points in a quagmire of lit crit, obscure quotations and Freudian thought. Navigating from mythological sirens to Douglas Coupland's Microserfs, all on a raft of Lacanian philosophy, Salecl manages to address a dizzying number of topics, ultimately leading not to a clarifying insight but to a theory hangover. Readers interested in the pleasure of cultural criticism grounded in psychoanalytic theory would do much better by turning to Louise Kaplan's Female Perversions.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

The theme was Oscar Wilde's, that each of us kills the thing we love. Through forests of psychoanalytical theory, the East European author pursues it formidably . . . this is challenging, moving and thought-provoking stuff.

Renata Salecl examines the disturbing and complex relationships between love and hate, violence and admiration, libidinal and destructive drives, through an investigation of phenomena as diverse as the novels The Age of Innocence and Remains of the Day, Hollywood melodramas, the Siren song, Ceauescu's Rumania and the Russian performance artist Oleg Kulik, who acts like a dog and bites his audience. Perversions of Love and Hate presents a unique and timely interruption in contemporary debates by questioning the legitimacy of the calls for tolerance and respect by multiculturalists and exploring practices such as body-mutilation as symptoms of the radical change that has affected subjectivity in contemporary society.

In (Per)Versions of Love and Hate, Renata Salecl explores the disturbing and complex relationships between love and hate, violence and admiration, libidinal and destructive drives, through investigation of phenomena as diverse as the novels The Age of Innocence and The Remains of the Day, classic Hollywood melodramas, the Sirens' song, Ceausescu's Romania, and the Russian performance artist Oleg Kulik, who acts like a dog and bites his audience. For Salecl - who questions the legitimacy of the calls for 'tolerance and respect' by multiculturalists - practices such as body multilation are symptoms of the radical change that has affected subjectivity in contemporary society. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Renata Salecl is a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her previous books include The Spoils of Freedom and, edited with Slavoj Zizek, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects.