DIVA study of melancholia, sexuality, and representation in literary and visual texts that can be read at the crossroads of psychoanalysis and the arts in modernism./div

Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture is a rich testament to our ubiquitous preoccupation with the tangled web of death and desire. In these pages we find nuanced analysis that blends Plato with Shelley, Hölderlin with Foucault. Dollimore, a gifted thinker, is not content to summarize these texts from afar; instead, he weaves a thread through each to tell the magnificent story of the making of the modern individual.

The tale of twins being reunited after a long separation is a trope that has been endlessly repeated and reworked across different cultures and throughout history, with each moment adapting the twin plot to address its current cultural tensions. In this study, Edward King demonstrates how twins are a means of exploring the social implications of hyper-connectivity and the compromising relationship between humans and digital information, their environment and their genetics. As King demonstrates, twins tell us about the changing forms of connectivity and power in contemporary culture and what new conceptions of the human they present us with. Taking account of a broad range of literary, cultural and scientific practices, Entwined Being probes discussions surrounding twins such as: - The way in which they appear in behavioral genetics as a way of identifying inherited predispositions to social media - How their faces interrupt biometric interfaces such as facial recognition software and undermine advances in neo-liberal surveillance systems - How they represent the uncanny and the weird in the horror genre and how this questions ideologies of communications media and the connectivity it enables - Their association with telepathy and cybernetics in science fiction - Their construction as models for entangled being in ecological thought Drawing upon the literary and filmic works of Ken Follet, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Bruce Chatwin, Shelley Jackson, Brian de Palma, Peter Greenway and David Cronenberg, as well as science fiction literature and the television series Orphan Black, King illuminates how twins are employed across a range of disciplines to envision a critical re-conception of the human in times of digital integration and ecological crisis.

This comprehensive yet accessible book analyses the clinical and historical experiences that led to the radical, complex and fundamental psychoanalytic concept of the death drive. In The Death Drive: A Contemporary Introduction, Rossella Valdrè traces the path that led Sigmund Freud to theorise this key concept in his essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. She considers its roots in Freud’s experiences of war trauma and his assessment of the human compulsion to repeat, as well as its consequences on his later theoretical and clinical work. Short vignettes from the clinician’s room and examples from books and films introduce the reader to the birth and development of the concept, its biological and philosophical roots and its many clinical implications. Valdrè also reviews its varied reception among post-Freudians, and examines the controversies and questions that the death drive commonly engenders within the psychoanalytic community. She concludes by considering the death drive through the medium of art, its relationship with sublimation and the confirmation neuroscience is beginning to provide. Written in a style that is at once accessible and precise, this book is an invaluable tool to students and psychoanalysts in training approaching the theory for the first time, as well as practising analysts, postgraduate students and scholars familiar with the concept and looking to explore it further.

Music in Youth Culture examines the fantasies of post-Oedipal youth cultures as displayed on the landscape of popular music from a post-Lacanian perspective. Jan Jagodzinski, an expert on Lacan, psychoanalysis, and education's relationship to media, maintains that a new set of signifiers is required to grasp the sliding signification of contemporary 'youth'. He discusses topics such as the figurality of noise, the perversions of the music scene by boyz/bois/boys and the hysterization of it by gurlz/girls/grrrls. Music in Youth Culture also examines the postmodern 'fan (addict)', techno music, and pop music icons. Jagodzinski raises the Lacanian question of 'an ethics of the Real' and asks educators to re-examine 'youth' culture.

Psychoanalytic Reflections on The Freudian Death Drive is a highly accessible book that investigates the relevance, complexity and originality of a hugely controversial Freudian concept which, the author argues, continues to exert enormous influence on modernity and plays an often-imperceptible role in the violence and so-called "sad passions" of contemporary society. With examples from cinema, literature and the consulting room, the book’s four chapters – theory, the clinic, art and contemporaneity – investigate every angle, usually little explored, of the death drive: its "positive" functions, such as its contribution to subjectification; its ambiguous relationship with sublimation; the clues it provides about transgenerational matters; and its effects on the feminine. This is not a book about aggression, a type of extroflection of the death drive made visible, studied and striking; rather, it is about the derivatives of the pulsion that changes in the clinic, in life, in society, in artistic forms. With bold and innovative concepts and by making connections to film and books, Rossella Valdrè unequivocally argues that the contemporary clinic is a clinic of the death drive. Psychoanalytic Reflections on The Freudian Death Drive seeks to relaunch the debate on a controversial and neglected concept and will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists. Today’s renewed interest in the Freudian death drive attests to its extraordinary ability to explain both "new" pathologies and socio-economic phenomena.

From the Windrush immigration of the 1950s to contemporary multicultural Britain, Black British Culture and Society examines the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in post-war Britain.

In The Borderline Culture: Intensity, Jouissance, and Death, Željka Matijašević argues that the psychological descriptor, “borderline,” should be extended to encompass the main facets of contemporary Western culture: splitting, affective dysregulation, intensity, and the polarization of good and bad objects.

Nation and Aesthetics is a unique attempt to examine the ambiguous nature of nationalism and nation by examining them through aesthetics. In this translation by Jonathan E. Abel, Darwin H. Tsen, and Hiroki Yoshikuni, Karatani grasps the modern social formation as a nexus of three different "modes of exchange", namely capital-nation-state. Nation here plays the role of complementing capitalism and the state. Benedict Anderson defined nation as an "imagined community". Through rethinking Kant, Karatani suggests that "imagination" here is not a mere fancy, but very real, in the sense that it mediates state and capital. Usually imagination is regarded as fancying what is not present here. Kant grasped imagination as a faculty to imagine what we can understand but cannot sense; that is, to say, a faculty to mediate reason and sensibility. This observation provided the foundation to Modern aesthetics, which in the course of time became an important source of nationalism. In Italy, Germany, and Japan, nationalism appeared as fascism. They found in aesthetics a moment to go beyond capitalism and the state. The key to go beyond nation, Karatani argues, lies also in the thoughts of Kant, a cosmopolitan and an advocate of a world republic. It is well-known that the League of Nations was formed after First World War under the influence of his "Perpetual Peace". Karatani draws attention to the overlooked fact that around the same time Freud made a radical revision of his notion of the "superego". Karatani introduces article nine of Japan's postwar constitution, which renounces the right to wage war, as a crystallization of Kant's ideal of peace and Freud's superego. By providing a unique explanation of, and ways to counter, current nationalistic and imperialistic tendencies, Nation and Aesthetics argues that theories of Kant and Freud, which are usually understood to contrast, are deeply linked and suggest ways to go beyond capital-nation-state.

In this comprehensive, stylish and accessible introduction to contemporary social theory, Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert examine the major theoretical traditions from the Frankfurt School to globalization and beyond. When first published, the book’s wide range set new standards for introductory textbooks – social theorists discussed include Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, Julia Kristeva, Jurgen Habermas, Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, Manuel Castells, Ulrich Beck, Zygmunt Bauman, Giorgio Agamben and Manuel De Landa. Extensively developed to take into account significant recent developments in American social theory, the book offers chapters on American pragmatism, structural functionalism, ethnomethodology, black feminist thought and world-systems theory. American traditions of social theory are brought powerfully to life in treatments of intellectuals ranging from William James to Robert K. Merton, David Riesman to Randall Collins, and Patricia Hill Collins to Saskia Sassen. Introduction to Contemporary Social Theory combines lively exposition and clarity with reflective social critique and original insights, and is a superb textbook with which to navigate the twists and turns of contemporary social theory as taught in the disciplines of sociology, politics, history, cultural studies and many more.