Zizek

In Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), we watch the film’s protagonist, Theodore, as he struggles with the end of his marriage and a growing attachment to his artificially intelligent operating system, Samantha. While the film remains unique in its ability to cinematically portray the Lacanian contention that “there is no sexual relationship,” this article explores how our digital non-relationships can be re-approached through the medium of comedy. Specifically, when looked at through a comic lens, notable scenes from Her are examined for the potential they provide in affording a self-decentrement which allows us to traverse the fantasies that structure our non-relations.

2017 marks the centenary of an artwork judged to be the single most influential of the twentieth century: Marcel Duchamp’s famous “readymade” entitled Fountain. The final verdict on Fountain has been widely accepted, despite the fact that the circumstances surrounding “Mr. Richard Mutt” have never resembled an open-and-shut case. On the contrary, since Fountain’s appearance in 1917, when it was rejected as “a plain piece of plumbing” only to be subsequently celebrated as a work of conceptual art, numerous questions remain unanswered, several facts remain unexplained.
Now, one hundred years later, Robert Kilroy attempts to answer these questions by examining the evidence with fresh eyes. Central to the investigation is the primary witness – Duchamp himself – whose statements are forensically analyzed. The facts themselves are interrogated using the methodology of a detective: precisely speaking, an art historical approach with a critical edge sharpened by a new interpretation of psychoanalytic theory.
In weaving an alternative narrative, Kilroy shows us that, not only has Fountain been fundamentally misunderstood, this very misunderstanding is central to the work’s significance. The final verdict, he argues, was strategically stage-managed by Duchamp in order to expose the apparatus underpinning Fountain’s reception, what he terms “The Creative Act.” By suggesting that a specific aesthetic “crime” has gone unnoticed, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: One Hundred Years Later asks the reader to radically reassess his/her precise contribution to “the creation of art.” This urgent, if somewhat troubling question, could have far-reaching implications for the field of scholarship, the course of contemporary art and the discipline of Art history.

Dirt is evoked to signify many important facets of mountain bike culture including its emergence, history and everyday forms of practice and affect. These significations are also drawn upon to frame the sport's (sub)cultural and counter-ideological affiliations. In this article we examine how both the practice of mountain biking and, specifically, mountain bike trail building, raises questions over the object and latent function of dirt, hinting at the way that abjection can, under certain circumstances, be a source of intrigue and pleasure. In doing so, we suggest a re-symbolization of our relationship with dirt via a consideration of the terrestrial.

The thesis of this essay can be stated quite directly: Slavoj Žižek, despite having little to say about mashup and remixing in any direct way, engages this new media phenomena in both theory and practice, providing contemporary culture with both a conceptual understanding of the mashup and a carefully executed illustration of its methodology. The examination of this will proceed by way of two movements. The first investigates how Žižek's work, especially his general interest in "short circuiting," provides theoretical insight for understanding the mashup and its cultural significance. The second turns things around, demonstrating how the mashup explains and describes Žižek's own compositional practices. In other words, the first part explains the mashup by way of Žižek, while the second explains Žižek by way of the mashup.

Introduction to a special issue of the International Journal of Zizek Studies on Zizek and Art.  Four different introductions are presented, each revolving around articulating what we refer to as "arts-based philosophy". Each introduction places the context and contents of the issue in play, but from different points of view. One being to suggest art and philosophy form a necessary parallax, a productive space that gives license to those who wish to resist the performance imperative of philosophy in writing, but remain within its productive engagement with the ideas associated with philosophy (hence our arts-based philosophy and ‘new lines of sight’).  The first introduction might be considered as ‘empirical’ in nature, the second ‘philosophical,’ the third ‘descriptive,’ and last ‘contextual.’  This performance imperative not only includes the format of the International Zizek Studies Conference held in April 2014 itself, but also, here in this space, the academic journal. ‘Philosophical performance,’ i.e. reading written work at conferences, writing theory in traditional formats, adhering to discourse conventions as ‘styles of exposition’ (of which is being performed now in this written introduction), and the motions of thought conditioned by ‘ready-made philosophical events’ needs to be shaken up, turned askew, given new points of view, given parallaxes.  The two co-editors of this special issue were tasked with creating space for proposals by scholars who engage in theory articulated in forms other than writing. That endeavor took seriously two related questions. 1. ‘What are the possibilities for theory today articulated in a form other than writing?” and 2. What needs to ‘happen’ in the formatting of an academic conference to accelerate productive encounters to answer the first question? In short, we wanted to shift the idea of academic conference into new territories by inserting art as a form of philosophical articulation on par with philosophical writing - creating a new ‘line of sight’ for philosophical inquiry. This issue represents a selection of the work presented at the conference that engaged in what we have coined ‘arts-based philosophy.’ Borrowing from literature in qualitative research and art education, we intend to expand upon what is referred to as arts-based research (ABR).

In The Ticklish Subject, Žižek argues that the Hegelian concrete universal is not the organic comprehensive totality that it is often assumed to be. Rather, he argues that Hegel's concrete universality is defined in its very concretion by an irreducible rupture, gap, or trauma that not only neither closes it off from otherness nor assimilates otherness within the same, but forever opens it to otherness, constituting it as such exposure. However, by understanding the function of negativity in Hegel's argument in a foundational way, Žižek posits as final what is merely a transitional stage. As a result, he not only misconstrues concrete universality and substitutes for it a particularized universal which, as such, remains abstract, but in doing so he passes by the implications in his own account that could lead to a positive conception of concrete universality above and beyond the strictly negative and empty formality he takes it to be. By avoiding Žižek's foundationalist way of framing the category of universality we can thereby articulate a logic of implications in it that leads us out of the still abstract shape, to which Žižek limits it, to its truly (in Hegel's view) concrete form. Furthermore, the latter contains political implications that are lost in Žižek's version.

This thesis examines the ways in which political journalists in the USA and UK talk about issues of truth and power as it relates to journalism’s role as the Fourth Estate. The theoretical basis comes from a critique of the two major structures underpinning the Fourth Estate, that of epistemology (the study of truth) and ideology (broadly, the study of power and ideas). This involves unpacking and critically examining the ability of news media to convey ‘true’ information and the ideological formations in which the news media production practice is situated. The epistemological theories of Realism, Pragmatism, Antirealism and Hyperrealism will first be elucidated in an in-depth theoretical discussion, focusing on the contributions of Baudrillard. Four major theories of ideology, that of personal ideological bias, chaos, control, and ideology as fetishistic disavowal will be examined, this time focusing on the work of Žižek.
This theoretical discussion is complimented by an analysis of interview questions relating to epistemological concerns and to ideology. The empirical data consists of twenty interviews conducted with political correspondents in the USA and UK. A version of critical discourse analysis is used to examine the ways in which journalists talk about the issues raised by the questions, what is termed their ‘discursive strategies.’ The categories for analysis are grounded in the discursive strategies used by the journalists themselves, examined to elaborate not simply the explicit content, but the deeper implicit meanings inherent in the way they answer.
This provided both an original theoretical discussion and an original set of empirically-derived data. It also allows us to further understand the role of journalism as the Fourth Estate, the types of ‘truth’ it brings to us, the types of ideologies that underpin the news production process via news media professionals, and how the system is maintained despite its inherent contradictions.

In what ways is comedy subversive? This vital new book critically considers the importance of comedy in challenging and redefining our relations to race and racism through the lens of political correctness.

By viewing comedy as both a constitutive feature of social interaction and as a necessary requirement in the appraisal of what is often deemed to be ‘politically correct’, this book provides an innovative and multidisciplinary approach to the study of comedy and popular culture. In doing so, it engages with the social and cultural tensions inherent to our understandings of political correctness, arguing that comedy can subversively redefine our approach to ‘PC Debates’, contestations surrounding free speech and the popular portrayal of political correctness in the media and society. Aided by the work of both Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič, this unique analysis adopts a psychoanalytic/philosophical framework to explore issues of race, racism and political correctness in the widely acclaimed BBC ‘mockumentary’, The Office (UK), as well as a variety of television comedies.

Drawing from psychoanalysis, social psychology and philosophy, this book will be highly relevant for postgraduate students and academic researchers studying comedy, race/racism, multiculturalism, political correctness and television/film.

In Marvel Studios’, WandaVision, we are transported to a familiar television location: suburbia – in fact, we’re almost given a history of suburbia on-screen. In episode one, we watch Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) live out a post-war serenity: a 1950’s North American suburban town called ‘Westview’, where, early events see the couple manage nosy neighbours, frustrating bosses and a troublesome ‘talent show’ performance. However, as soon becomes clear, all is not what it seems. Indeed, as we travel through a history of sitcom – each episode fast-forwards ten years, with episode two occurring in the 1960s; episode three/four, the 1970s; episode five, the 1980s; and, episode six, the 1990s/2000s – it becomes clear that the everyday concerns of a young suburban family goes far beyond the episodic trials and tribulations that usually impact our television sitcom families. Something’s up – and it looks like Wanda has ‘taken over’ an actual US town, controlling its residents through a form of mind control that keeps them trapped within the sitcom narratives that she seemingly writes and directs. Wanda is the director to her own sitcom, and it’s clear that she is doing this to escape from a number of past traumas (the death of her brother, ‘Pietro’, and Vision). It is in managing this trauma that I believe the show’s suburban location proves notable.

A Short Informal Talk

Tenet is a film by Christopher Nolan. We relate it to the Syntheses of the Unconsicous of Deleuze and Guattari, Zizek's non-orientable surfaces, and the kinds of Being as well as the Aspectual Field.

Draft Diagrams are included.

Audio File TenetTalk20210425Sterio4CH000I_NormedEdited01
See https://www.mediafire.com/file/jq42bqqpwdk04sd/TenetTalk20210425Sterio4CH000I_NormedEdited01.mp3/file (some places difficult to hear)

The rising number of non-status migrants is one of the central political issues of our time. This essay argues that if we want to understand the political and philosophical importance of this phenomenon, the contributions of Alain Badiou, his militant group L'Organisation politique (OP), and the struggle of the sans-papiers movement in France are absolutely crucial. This is the case because, I will argue, Badiou, the OP, and the sans-papiers created a new kind of migrant justice struggle in the mid-1990s that in many ways remains at the practical and theoretical roots of much of non-status migrant organizing today. However, this essay also argues that Badiou's theoretical and political work with the sans-papiers also needs to be revised and updated in light of certain developments in more recent migrant justice struggles.

FROM THE BACK COVER: What is the essential nature of meaning? . . . . . This book answers by examining interpretive theories from the past and present. It finds that an historical struggle with meaning has been underway since the Reformation, a struggle that reaches crisis proportions in the 20th century. On the one hand, this crisis is mollified by Heidegger's hermeneutical phenomenology, which argues that we are always already in a meaningful relationship to the objects of the world. On the other hand, this crisis is exacerbated when phenomenology, structuralism, and aesthetic theory directly make meaning into an object of study. . . . . . . . . These historical developments culminate with the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose non-hermeneutical phenomenology delimits a cause of meaning said to be closely linked to the core of subjectivity. Intriguingly, Lacan's work reveals meaning to be sexual in nature. By integrating his notion of sexual difference with his work in discourse theory and topology, this book demonstrates how the subject's struggle with meaning can be suspended.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . GENERAL DESCRIPTION: Broadly speaking, the majority of books on Jacques Lacan focus on the earlier periods of his career. They also tend to target the psychoanalytic clinical community, or else discuss his work in various political, social, and cultural contexts. But in almost all cases these books refrain from a detailed exegesis of his actual texts. They instead prefer to comment on his theoretical apparatus as a whole before turning to its practical implications. . . . . . This book positions itself against this grain. Firstly, it closely analyzes some half-dozen key Lacanian texts. This analysis is organized under a single thematic – the question of meaning – in order to advance the reader's understanding of the trajectory of Lacan's thought across his entire career, as well as to promote the book's thesis that the field of meaning can be suspended. Accordingly, an initial chapter takes up the hermeneutical tradition from Flacius onward. This is then supplemented by a chapter which surveys phenomenological, structuralist and aesthetic theories of meaning and their differing methods of textual analysis. Together these two chapters provide a unique context for the sustained analysis of Lacan's texts which begins in the third chapter, an analysis that forms the bulk of the book's content. This contextualization potentially widens the book's appeal to any scholar wishing to explore his relationship to those textual objects he interacts with on a daily basis. And because this book assumes the reader has little to no familiarity with Lacan, the reader will find patient explanations of the basics of his theories before slowly being led up to the more difficult theories of his late years. Again the argument is that Lacan has something to offer all scholars. His work is not just reserved for psychoanalysts. . . . . . It is with his late theories that the serious student of Lacan will find the book's most original contribution. For in the fourth chapter a detailed account is provided of how Lacan derived his infamous formulae of sexuation from Aristotelian logic. These formulae are then extensively discussed against the backdrop of interpretive theory and textual analysis, showing how these formulae capture much more than just the difference between the sexes. Strikingly, this difference is also found to run through meaning itself, something the final chapter aims to demonstrate. It does this by amalgamating three key components of late-Lacan: sexuation, discourse theory and his use of topological spaces. This amalgamation is a first in the literature. But this amalgamation is not just useful in demonstrating the book's thesis. It further suggests how seemingly divergent aspects of late-Lacanian theory can be made to work together.

"ABSTRACT:
    This study assumes the subject's pursuit of meaning is generally incapacitating and should be suspended. It aims to demonstrate how such a suspension is theoretically accomplished by utilizing Lacan's formulae of sexuation integrated with his work in discourse theory and topology.
    Part I places this study into context by examining scholarship from the established fields of hermeneutics, phenomenology, (post)structuralism, aesthetic theory and psychoanalysis in order to extract out their respective theory of meaning. These theories reveal that an historical struggle with meaning has been underway since the Reformation and reaches near crisis proportions in the 20th century. On the one hand this crisis is mollified by the rise of Heideggerian-Gadamerian hermeneutical phenomenology which questions traditional epistemological approaches to the text using a new ontological conceptualization of meaning and a conscious rejection of methodology. On the other hand this crisis is exacerbated when the ubiquitous nature of meaning is itself challenged by (post)structuralism's discovery of the signifier which inscribes a limit to meaning, and by the domains of sense and nonsense newly opened up by aesthetic theory. These historical developments culminate in the field of psychoanalysis which most consequentially delimits a cause of meaning said to be closely linked to the core of subjectivity.
    Part II extends these findings by rigorously constructing out of the Lacanian sexuated formulae a decidedly non-hermeneutical phenomenological approach useful in demonstrating the sexual nature of meaning. Explicated in their static state by way of an account of their original derivation from the Aristotelian logical square, it is argued that these four formulae are relevant to basic concerns of textual theory inclusive of the hermeneutical circle of meaning. These formulae are then set into motion by integrating them with Lacan's four discourses to demonstrate the breakdown of meaning. Finally, the cuts and sutures of two-dimensional space that is topology as set down in L'étourdit are performed to confirm how the very field of meaning is ultimately suspended from a nonsensical singular point known in Lacanian psychoanalysis as objet a. The contention is that by occupying this point the subject frees himself from the debilitating grip of meaning."

The philosophical positions of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek emerge in opposition to the deconstruction of the history of philosophy and to the corresponding rejection of the category of the subject. The subject becomes in their thought not a philosophical trap to be evaded but a political possibility to be realized. However, just as their embrace of the category of the subject distinguishes them from the theoretical landscape in which they exist, it is also an important point of divergence between their philosophical systems. Crucial to both such philosophical systems – and the distinct conceptions of the subject that emerges from them – is the significance of ruptures in the continuity of history. Badiou’s ‘event’ and Zizek’s ‘act’ name these ruptures. This article introduces and compares these respective approaches, drawing attention both to the important ways in which their thought diverges and to how Zizek’s system implicitly responds to the contradictions in Badiou’s.

Abstract -- Filipino migration is characterized by taking up positions abroad that conform to gender roles, while nonmigrating household members take over the duties of the absent migrant. When those duties do not conform to one’s gender role, one is less likely to perform the duty. In the case of a mother migrating, the father (who is “traditionally” seen as the main breadwinner, but not as the primary parent) is put into a position wherein he earns less than his wife and is expected to take care of the children. However, men are also commonly considered less capable of raising children, despite communications technology having advanced so that dual parenting can still be accomplished from abroad; fathers do not have to be seen as the only parents in this situation. The stigmatization that men experience as a result of their wives migrating has a serious effect on their feelings of masculinity and is further exacerbated by the “New Heroes” national script put forward by the government, which praises migrants as saving the nation while ignoring the equal (or greater) labor carried out in their absence. This thesis, built upon fieldwork conducted in Cebu City, disputes the widespread reputation of men as incapable fathers who rely entirely upon their wives’ remittances, and advocates calling more attention to the gender- and vocation-biased praise of the New Heroes propaganda.

This paper aims to elaborate on some of the possible connections between Hegel and Lacan. Subjectivity, negativity and desire will be the guiding notions of this endeavor, as they are fundamentally intertwined in both thinkers. A comparative analysis of their respective articulations will enrich our understanding thereof, while warding off misunderstandings of their respective positions.
The paper will start with an interpretation of the mirror stage, the master-slave dialectic and the distinctiveness of human desire, which will prepare the subsequent Lacanian reading of three basic Hegelian concepts: determinate negation, mediation and experience. Here the main point of reference will be Slavoj Žižek’s defence of “Hegel’s madness” against Robert Brandom’s “renormalizing” interpretation. The paper ends with an outline of what Hegel could mean by “grasping substance equally as subject”.

Thought does not only make use of images to give it concrete
illustrations or applications, but is also organised in terms of certain overarching images that give form and plausibility to its exercise in a particular epoch. There are two influential images of thought that have given rise to diverse contemporary metaphysical research programmes in Continental Philosophy: the quantum image and the performance image. These are articulated in opposition to the dominance of the structuralist image.

The most radical version of a philosophical project that elaborates a quantum image of thought is to be found in Slavoj Zizek’s recent work, while the most radical version of the performance image is given by
Bruno Latour’s AIME project.

François Laruelle attempts to give a version of the quantum image, and some of his followers have tried to develop a performance image in his name. In both cases their thought is not radical enough, because they
are caught in un-criticized structuralist presuppositions.

This essay 'Instead, They Danced With Joy' deals with concepts from productive misreading to writing as a mode of becoming-spider, through what dance means and where lies joy in dance. It is an attempt to trace the contours of an encounter-love is nothing but the encounter, Lacan says-between Deleuze, Lacan and Žižek. The essay applies the Lacanian trajectory of thought as its modus operandi to deal with problems at hand.

This is a longer version of what will appear as a chapter in a forthcoming volume on Žižek and his critics.  In it, I raise some problems for Žižek's dialectical materialist rendition of quantum mechanics by elaborating a series of Hegelian criticisms of the Schellingian philosophical framework favored by Žižek in his appropriations of the physics of the extremely small.  Apropos Naturphilosophie and its relations to the natural sciences, both Schelling and Hegel propose what fairly can be characterized as emergentisms avant la lettre.  However, whereas Hegel advances an emergentist layer cake model, in which the upper layers of Spirit arise from the lower layers of Nature, Schelling advances an emergentist layer doughnut model in which the top layer of the autonomous transcendental subject is nothing other or more than the resurgence of the bottom layer of something on the order of Spinoza's Deus sive natura.  Schelling's pseudo-emergentism, by contrast with Hegel's genuine emergentism, explains away free sapient subjectivity through what Lacan would characterize as a conjuring trick in which the rabbit of Spirit Schelling pulls out of the hat of Nature is the one he put there in the first place.  Schelling's hylozoism, panpsychism, pantheism, and vitalism, his spiritualization of nature, is neither dialectical nor materialist.  As such, Žižek would do better to stick to his typical Hegelian guns when engaging with such sciences as quantum physics.

The international discussion of the communist hypothesis has quickly developed into a debate regarding the adequate party-form for radical politics today. This article argues that the stakes of this development become clearer when it is related to the central debates of the earlier alternative globalization movement. The article then explores some significant models of organization that emerged in previous periods in which the renewal of communist politics was closely linked to attempts to rethink the party-form: the notion of the ‘compositional party’ of Italian operaismo, Lukács’s concepts of a ‘political subject’, and Gramsci’s ‘modern Prince.’ The modern Prince is argued to represent the type of ‘expansive’ party-form that might be able to respond productively to the challenges of contemporary political movements.

The present text constitutes a preliminary exercise in investigating the productive consequences for psychoanalysis of a Zizekian reading of Lacan. By providing a new periodization of Lacan’s teaching - one which renders legible an insisting and unresolved impasse in psychoanalytic thinking, tying together its clinical, conceptual and institutional dimensions - we intend to demonstrate how the Zizekian theoretical space is capable of thinking continuous and immanent transformations between philosophy, psychoanalysis and politics. In our periodization of Lacan’s teaching, this perspective renders legible a philosophically instigating emergence of certain intrinsically political concerns at the heart of psychoanalytic thinking itself.

In this review essay I am reading Zizek’s DISPARITIES as he asks it to be read, against the grain, following the guiding thread of the disparate in his text and drawing a simple line of demarcation between the disparate and the monist elements. This is the same method that Zizek is both advocating and illustrating in this book. DISPARITIES is an act of “philosophical warfare”. It is written as a political intervention in the domain of theory, in favour of a new or non-standard practice of philosophy.

Zizek agrees with Althusser’s thesis that philosophy is class struggle in the field of theory, and specifies that here it is a question of a “struggle against the different forms of obfuscating disparity”. He favours division and struggle rather than dialogue and consensus. He wishes to draw a line of demarcation between the deployment of disparity ("ontological difference"") and its obfuscation.

I argue that we can share Zizek’s concerns without necessarily adopting all of his conclusions. Another way of formulating this struggle would be as the attempt to formulate a view of the universe as open (and recall that Zizek has said that for the true materialist the universe is open all the way down) without falling into postmodern relativism. We need both disparity and realism.

From the perspective of meta-ontology Zizek's concept of disparity is a contribution to the task of thinking the real with the right combination of plasticity and resistance, of subjectivity and testability, of pluralism and realism.

On where the Cutting Edge of the Western Tradition might be found with respect to the development of Fundamental Ontology within Continental Philosophy

-- Key Words:  Continental Philosophy, Ways of Being, Fragmentation of Being, Time, Cutting Edge

-- Abstract:  Did Schelling Discover the Higher Logical Types of Being? Also Syntheses of the Unconscious as Anti-Aufhebung and as the Renaissance Episteme.

-- Key Words:  Potencies, Meta-levels of Being, Fundamental Ontology, Continental Philosophy, Schelling, Foucault, Deleuze, Foucault, Proto-Existentialism

-- Note: Schelling_01_20210302kdp04a New version

In a recent article, Martin McQuillan has inaugurated a vigorous Derridean critique of a “violent tone” that has recently arisen in continental philosophy, exemplified by Slavoj Žižek’s attempt to retrieve Robespierre’s notion of “Terror." This article sets out to complicate such critique, opening a new perspective on the Derrida-Žižek debate on the question of politics. In particular, it examines their respective approaches to difference and violence as differing responses to a shared problematic of constructing a consistent (immanent) politics within the horizon of a finite world. It proceeds by elaborating Žižek’s critique of Derridean deconstruction, highlighting how Derrida’s attempt to minimise violence via maximal openness to difference, within the horizon of the future-to-come, inadvertently reinscribes a minimal but problematic ontotheological trace which ironically circumscribes deconstructive openness to difference. The article goes on to examine how Žižek’s alternative construal of a purified violence and (Hegelian) self-difference ends up repeating in somewhat different terms these same problematic features of Derrida’s writings. The article concludes by arguing that each approach requires a theoretically-integrated ethos of ‘becoming other’ in which the unavoidable theoretical anticipation of difference (and the risk of invocation of the ontotheological) is ruptured by the actual encounter with difference.

Many idealists treated Kant’s system as a wound that needed to be healed: the rigorous dichotomy Kant presented between the phenomenal world and its noumenal counterpart. By the time Schelling came to see a special problem with evil, in his 1809 Freedom essay, he and his contemporaries had explored essentially two possible post-Kantian positions. In very broad outlines, Fichte attempted to reduce receptivity and the phenomenal world to the spontaneity of the self-positing I. Schelling by contrast had developed what he termed a nature philosophy or Naturphilosophie that attempted to derive the spontaneity of the I from nature.  The Freedom essay rejects this enumeration of healing responses to Kant, returns to Kant’s work, and then exacerbates its splits and divisions. What makes Schelling do this? One answer is in the title: freedom. Schelling comes to think that human freedom has somehow not been adequately addressed in the post-Kantian aftermath. And it is evil that makes freedom something the earlier systems cannot address.

I was disappointed with Zizek's review, as it was less ontologically oriented and more reductively Oedipal and political than his comments on the original BLADE RUNNER in his THE TICKLISH SUBJECT. K passes the Turing test, the empathy test, and even Zizek's counterfactuality test.

In "Building Envelope as Surface," Sang Lee and Stefanie Holzheu first trace the role that building envelopes play in terms of their functional and presentational qualities, while drawing from a deep historical perspective of what enclosure has meant from the earliest times. They cite three models of building envelopes, namely, the modernist, the Venturian and the mimetic as examples of how the notion of building envelopes has evolved over time, with changes in the architectural discourse. Next, they propose a conceptual construct of building envelopes as surface. This discussion is based on the Leonardo Surface, a concept proposed by the analytical philosopher Avrum Stroll along with the theory of direct perception by the ecological psychologist James Jerome Gibson.

Subsequently, Lee and Holzheu discuss the philosophical and theoretical dimensions of surface as a concept in relation to Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida. Here, they introduce the notions of mimesis presented by the two philosophers as exemplary in considering the sustainability of architecture, while at the same time, analyzing and critiquing the current mechanistic practice of mimetics in architecture. They propose that being sustainable is, in essence, being mimetic of nature's mediations and relations, while the concept of surface provides a way to establish intimate relations between nature and built environment."