Alenka Zupancic

This was one of the most enjoyable critical theory / philosophy/ psychoanalytic / whatever books I've read in a while. I gave it five stars just for the number of brain explosions I experienced while reading it. A perfect compliment for Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, both in being a further exploration of the concepts and also a further regression toward the birth moment of consciousness and our awareness - across a slivered yet impassable gap - of a restful inanimate non-conscious existence we became only too aware we were no longer part of. What is sex? It's something we create to cover over the fact that we don't know why we ever started existing in the first place.… (más)

This book is a Lacanian psychoanalytic study of certain issues and themes in Nietzsche's work. Author Zupančič is primarily concerned to offer a reading in which Nietzsche's writing upholds and advances a Lacanian idea (I think? I have not read Lacan) of "the Real as the minimal difference of the same," which is her interpretation of the figure of "the shortest shadow" among Nietzsche's important "noon" tropes. According to Zupančič, this notion is the crux of a "philosophy of the two" to escape the sort of complementarity which reduces itself to unity.

I came to this book with a very different reading of "the shortest shadow," and while Zupančič did not persuade me that hers was better, I did enjoy the book. The general gist is antimetaphysical without becoming a rationalist empiricism or materialist positivism -- a feature of Nietzsche's own work, to be sure. It is demanding, though; I found that even the least fatigue on my part could reduce the writing here to gobbledygook. There was more of value for me in the first half of the book than the second, although that was perhaps a function of my limits as a reader.

Zupančič appends an essay "On Love as Comedy," which treats some of the same issues, without any direct references to Nietzsche. It had been written as a separate project. Somewhat disorientingly in the context of a volume on Nietzsche, its definition of the comedic genre does not relate to classical or even Shakespearean sources. Instead, the exemplars are the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin. And yet references to tragedy are still to Aeschylus, following Lacan.

I might read other volumes in this series edited by Slavoj Zizek -- of which The Shortest Shadow is the second. But the experience of this one suggests that I could benefit from a little "remedial" reading in Lacan before I do.… (más)