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Gaze and Voice as Love Objects

SIC 1

Slavoj Zizek editor Renata Salecl editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Duke University Press

Published:19th Sep '96

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Gaze and Voice as Love Objects cover

The gaze entices, inspects, fascinates. The voice hypnotizes, seduces, disarms. Are gaze and voice part of the relationship we call love . . . or hate? If so, what part? How do they function? This provocative book examines love as the mediating entity in the essential antagonism between the sexes, and gaze and voice as love's medium. The contributors proceed from the Lacanian premise that "there is no sexual relationship," that the sexes are in no way complementary and that love—figured in the gaze and the voice —embodies the promise and impossibility of any relation between them.

The first detailed Lacanian elaboration of this topic, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects examines the status of gaze, voice, and love in philosophy from Plato to Kant, in ideology from early Christianity to contemporary cynicism, in music from Hildegard of Bingen to Richard Wagner, in literature from Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence to Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, and in cinema from Michael Powell's Peeping Tom to Kieslowski's A Short Film on Love. Throughout, the contributors seek to show that the conflict between the sexes is the site of a larger battle over the destiny of modernity. With insights into the underlying target of racist and sexist violence, this book offers surprising revelations into the nature of an ancient enigma—love.

Contributors. Elisabeth Bronfen, Mladen Dolar, Fredric Jameson, Renata Salecl, Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupancic

“A marvelous collection of essays written by some of the most prominent figures working today from within a Lacanian paradigm. Though centered on the objects of the voice and the gaze and their status within the experience and structure of love, these essays range over an amazing topography of issues, from penitentiary fantasy and utilitarianism, to film theory and false memory syndrome.”—John Mowitt, University of Minnesota
“The volume is exemplary. The essays collected in it illuminate a range of subject—film and film history, literature and literary history, the figure of the blind man in Enlightenment writing, ‘love at first sight,’ Augustine on intellectuals and sexuality—and they all work together to explicate three crucial and difficult terms in the Lacanian vocabulary: object, voice, gaze.”—Marshall Grossman, University of Maryland
“A marvelous collection of essays written by some of the most prominent figures working today from within a Lacanian paradigm. Though centered on the objects of the voice and the gaze and their status within the experience and structure of love, these essays range over an amazing topography of issues, from penitentiary fantasy and utilitarianism, to film theory and false memory syndrome.” -- John Mowitt, University of Minnesota

ISBN: 9780822318064

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

264 pages