The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (Wo Es War Series)

A spectre is haunting Western academia, the spectre of the Cartesian subject. Deconstructionists and Habermasians, cognitive scientists and Heideggerians, feminists and New Age obscurantists _ all are united in their hostility to it. The Ticklish Subject seeks to undermine the common presupposition of all these critiques by posing a provocative question: what if there is a subversive core of the Cartesian subject to be unearthed, a core which provides the indispensable philosophical point of reference of any genuinely emancipatory politics? In this new, long-awaited systematic exposition of the foundations of his theory, Slavoj i ek explores this question through a detailed and rigorous confrontation with predominant contemporary notions of the subject: Heidegger’s attempt to overcome subjectivity; the post-Althusserian elaborations of political subjectivity (Ernesto Laclau, Etienne Balibar, Jacques RanciÅre and Alain Badiou); deconstructionist feminism (Judith Butler); and the theories of second modernity and risk society (Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck). While philosophical in tenor and peppered with i ek’s characteristic witticisms, The Ticklish Subject is first and foremost an engaged political intervention, addressing the burning question of how to reformulate a leftist project in an era of global capitalism and its ideological supplement, liberal-democratic multiculturalism.