For biblical authors and readers, law and restoration are central concepts in the Bible, but they were not always so. To trace out the formation of those biblical concepts as elements in defensive ...strategies, Cataldo uses as conversational starting points theories from Zizek, Foucault and Deleuze, all of whom emphasize relation and difference. This work argues that the more modern assumption that biblical authors wrote their texts presupposing a central importance for those concepts is backwards. On the contrary, law and restoration were made central only through and after the writing of the biblical texts - in particular, those that were concerned with protecting the community from threats to its identity as the "remnant". Modern Bible readers, Cataldo argues, must renegotiate how they understand law and restoration and come to terms with them as concepts that emerged out of more selfish concerns of a community on the margins of imperial political power.
On Žižek's Dialectics explores the theoretical and practical potential of the psychoanalytic method deployed by Slavoj Žižek by investigating its epistemological implications within our contemporary ...capitalist universe. The book begins by evaluating Zizek's account of the capitalist ideology of enjoyment through the analysis of Lacan's critique of Marx's surplus-value. If the originality of Žižek's wager lies in the claim that enjoyment secretly sustains our ideological space, can we think of surplus-jouissance in a way that not only unmasks the ruse of capitalism but also adumbrates the construction of an alternative social space? The answer to this question is developed in the second part of the book. Arguing that the transformative potential of Zizek's epistemology needs to be fully unravelled if it is to avoid the risk of congealing into mere academic exercise, Fabio Vighi attempts to politicise Žižek's groundbreaking critical method by calling upon the necessity to translate its emphasis on the "indigestible" surplus of knowledge into the drive to think the new. Under the current conditions, this creative moment can no longer be delayed.
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InZizek and Politics, Geoff Boucher and Matthew Sharpe go beyond standard introductions to spell out a new approach to reading Zizek, one that can ...be highly critical as well as deeply appreciative. They show that Zizek has a raft of fundamental positions that enable his theoretical positions to be put to work on practical problems. Explaining these positions with clear examples, they outline why Zizek's confrontation with thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze has so radically changed how we think about society. They then go on to track Zizek's own intellectual development during the last twenty years, as he has grappled with theoretical problems and the political climate of the War on Terror. This book is a major addition to the literature on Zizek and a crucial critical introduction to his thought.
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