This piece looks at the implications of Zizek's work on cyberspace for understanding the ideology of communicative capitalism. Emphasizing the role of the decline of symbolic efficiency in theorizing virtuality, the author extends the analysis into the field of practices known as Web 2.0. She argues that Zizek's work on drive opens up the internet as Real and employs it in a critique of Kittler and Hansen.

This collection of essays provides a reassessment of the question of sexual difference, taking into account important shifts in feminist thought, post-humanist theories, and queer studies. The contributors offer new and refreshing insights into the complex question of sexual difference from a post-feminist perspective, and how it is reformulated in various related areas of study, such as ontology, epistemology, metaphysics, biology, technology, and mass-media.

This article sets out the idea of affective networks as a constitutive feature of communicative capitalism. It explores the circulation of intensities in contemporary information and communication networks, arguing that this circulation should be theorized in terms of the psychoanalytic notion of the drive. The article includes critical engagements with theorists such as Guy Debord, Jacques Lacan, Tiziana Terranova, and Slavoj Zizek.

This paper draws from contemporary psychoanalytic theory as well as nineteenth-century crowd theory to critique Louis Althusser’s account of the ideological interpellation of the subject. I argue that rather than ideology interpellating the individual as a subject, bourgeois ideology interpellates the subject as an individual. By “bourgeois ideology” I mean the loose set of ideas and apparatuses associated with European modernity, an instrumental concept of reason, and the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. The advantage of reversing the Althusserian (...) account is that the subject is not pre-constrained to the individual form, a form that is itself always already as failing and impossible as it is assumed and demanded. In Althusser’s version, the individuality that emerges in history is posited as universal, a given. In mine, the individual form is itself the problem; it’s a coercive and unstable product of the enclosure of the common in never-ceasing efforts to repress, deny, and foreclose collective political subjectivity. The individual is thus a form of capture. Rather than natural or given, the individual form encloses into a singular bounded body collective bodies, ideas, affects, desires, and drives. There is nothing necessary about the link between subjectivity and individuality; it is an effect contingent to the array of processes that converge into bourgeois modernity. (shrink)

This article is based on a keynote address delivered at the annual meetings of the North American Society for Social Philosophy. It chronicles the story of my hire as the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Marquette University, and the subsequent revocation of that deanship in reaction to pressure from conservative Catholic sources. This is a story about religion, leadership, sexuality, and politics. In these comments, I describe the case, offer an analysis of the event based on the logic (...) of a cultural politics of belonging and exclusion within a religious framework, and suggest a critique of forms of institutional power whereby diversity is intentionally cultivated in accordance with the Jesuit educational mission and then betrayed when it becomes controversial. (shrink)