[....] Among the antagonisms which characterize our epoch (world-market globalization versus the assertion of ethnic particularisms, etc.), perhaps the key place belongs to the antagonism between the abstraction which increasingly determines our lives (in the guise of digitalization, speculative market relations, etc.) and the deluge of pseudo-concrete images. [....]
This book approaches systematically, from a Lacanian viewpoint, the presupposition of this 'plague of fantasies'. The first chapter ('The Seven Veils of Fantasy') elaborates the contours of the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy, with a special consideration of the way ideology has to rely on some phantasmatic background. The second chapter ('Love Thy Neighbor? No, Thanks!') deals with the ambiguous relationship between fantasy and jouissance: the way in which fantasy animates and structures enjoyment, while simultaneously serving as a protective shield against its excess. The third chapter ('Fetishism and Its Vicissitudes') focuses on the impasses of the notion of fetishism as the paradigmatic case of phantasmic seduction, from its religious origins to its postmodern upheavals. The last chapter ('Cyberspace, Or, The Unbearable Closure of Being') directly tackles the topic of cyberspace as the latest version of the 'plague of fantasies', endeavoring to sketch the answer to the question of how ongoing digitalization will affect the status of subjectivity. The three appendixes to these four main chapters analyze three examples of the irrepresentability of the Real as the inherent obverse of the 'plague of fantasies': the failure in representing the sexual act in cinema ('From the Sublime to the Ridiculous: The Sexual Act in Cinema'); the inscription of subjectivity in the breakdown of the melodic line in music ('Robert Schumann: The Romantic Anti-Humanist'); and the foreclosure of the content of the moral Law in modern (Kantian) ethics ('The Unconscious Law: Towards an Ethics Beyond the Good').
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