The Art of Shrinking Heads
Jodi Dean over at I cite has put together a brief review of Dany-Robert Dufour’s The Art of Shrinking Heads, a Lacanian critique of late capitalism and the rise of the “postmodern subject.” I haven’t read Dufour’s book yet, but going off of Dean’s review, it seems to significantly overlap with Zizek’s similarly-themed politico-philosophical project, which would be one reason among others to take some interest in reading it (or her post(s) on it, at the very least).
Who, We?
Jodi Dean:
Ultimately, what bugs me the most about critiques of ‘we’ is the way that they mobilize a suspicion toward collectivity and privilege individualism. To this extent, they are little machines or engines of neoliberalism, neoliberal-bots that drive writers and thinkers to dismantle any collective sense or feeling of solidarity in advance, to suspect such sentiments rather than be responsible to them. Most of us who write in contemporary left political and media theory have been reading and writing about difference for a long time now. It’s time that we redirect the suspicions leveled toward collectivity toward suppositions of individuality and autonomy.
Can the People Speak?
Jodi Dean:
Perhaps paradoxically division best appears under compulsion to choose when there are no grounds for choice. Clinton and Obama have similar plans, programs, voting records. What appears in the contest between them is the fact of division, just like in the past two elections, elections that nearly perfectly captured divide because there were no differences that mattered.