The Impossible David Lynch (Film and Culture Series)

Todd McGowan launches a provocative exploration of weirdness and fantasy in David Lynch's groundbreaking oeuvre. He studies Lynch's talent for blending the bizarre and the normal to emphasize the odd nature of normality itself. Hollywood is often criticized for distorting reality and providing escapist fantasies, but in Lynch's movies, fantasy becomes a means through which the viewer is encouraged to build a revolutionary relationship with the world. Considering the filmmaker's entire career, McGowan examines Lynch's play with fantasy and traces the political, cultural, and existential impact of his unique style. Each chapter discusses the idea of impossibility in one of Lynch's films, including the critically acclaimed Blue Velvet and The Elephant Man; the densely plotted Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive; the cult favorite Eraserhead; and the commercially unsuccessful Dune. McGowan engages with theorists from the "golden age" of film studies (Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, and Jean-Louis Baudry) and with the thought of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Hegel. By using Lynch's weirdness as a point of departure, McGowan adds a new dimension to the field of auteur studies and reveals Lynch to be the source of a new and radical conception of fantasy.

Biographies & Memoirs

McGowan, Todd

Arts & Literature

Columbia University Press

Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

Despite creating vast inequalities and propping up reactionary world regimes, capitalism has many passionate defenders―but not because of what it withholds from some and gives to others. Capitalism dominates, Todd McGowan argues, because it mimics the structure of our desire while hiding the trauma that the system inflicts upon it. People from all backgrounds enjoy what capitalism provides, but at the same time are told more and better is yet to come. Capitalism traps us through an incomplete satisfaction that compels us after the new, the better, and the more. Capitalism's parasitic relationship to our desires gives it the illusion of corresponding to our natural impulses, which is how capitalism's defenders characterize it. By understanding this psychic strategy, McGowan hopes to divest us of our addiction to capitalist enrichment and help us rediscover enjoyment as we actually experienced it. By locating it in the present, McGowan frees us from our attachment to a better future and the belief that capitalism is an essential outgrowth of human nature. From this perspective, our economic, social, and political worlds open up to real political change. Eloquent and enlivened by examples from film, television, consumer culture, and everyday life, Capitalism and Desire brings a new, psychoanalytically grounded approach to political and social theory.

Business & Money

Economics

Despite creating vast inequalities and propping up reactionary world regimes, capitalism has many passionate defenders―but not because of what it withholds from some and gives to others. Capitalism dominates, Todd McGowan argues, because it mimics the structure of our desire while hiding the trauma that the system inflicts upon it. People from all backgrounds enjoy what capitalism provides, but at the same time are told more and better is yet to come. Capitalism traps us through an incomplete satisfaction that compels us after the new, the better, and the more.\nCapitalism's parasitic relationship to our desires gives it the illusion of corresponding to our natural impulses, which is how capitalism's defenders characterize it. By understanding this psychic strategy, McGowan hopes to divest us of our addiction to capitalist enrichment and help us rediscover enjoyment as we actually experienced it. By locating it in the present, McGowan frees us from our attachment to a better future and the belief that capitalism is an essential outgrowth of human nature. From this perspective, our economic, social, and political worlds open up to real political change. Eloquent and enlivened by examples from film, television, consumer culture, and everyday life, Capitalism and Desire brings a new, psychoanalytically grounded approach to political and social theory.

Hegel is making a comeback. After the decline of the Marxist Hegelianism that dominated the twentieth century, leading thinkers are rediscovering Hegel’s thought as a resource for contemporary politics. What does a notoriously difficult nineteenth-century German philosopher have to offer the present? How should we understand Hegel, and what does understanding Hegel teach us about confronting our most urgent challenges? In this book, Todd McGowan offers us a Hegel for the twenty-first century. Simultaneously an introduction to Hegel and a fundamental reimagining of Hegel’s project, Emancipation After Hegel presents a radical Hegel who speaks to a world overwhelmed by right-wing populism, authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and economic inequalities. McGowan argues that the revolutionary core of Hegel’s thought is contradiction. He reveals that contradiction is inexorable and that we must attempt to sustain it rather than overcoming it or dismissing it as a logical failure. McGowan contends that Hegel’s notion of contradiction, when applied to contemporary problems, challenges any assertion of unitary identity as every identity is in tension with itself and dependent on others. An accessible and compelling reinterpretation of an often-misunderstood thinker, this book shows us a way forward to a new politics of emancipation as we reconcile ourselves to the inevitability of contradiction and find solidarity in not belonging.

Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Product Description 
Hegel is making a comeback. After the decline of the Marxist Hegelianism that dominated the twentieth century, leading thinkers are rediscovering Hegel’s thought as a resource for contemporary politics. What does a notoriously difficult nineteenth-century German philosopher have to offer the present? How should we understand Hegel, and what does understanding Hegel teach us about confronting our most urgent challenges?\nIn this book, Todd McGowan offers us a Hegel for the twenty-first century. Simultaneously an introduction to Hegel and a fundamental reimagining of Hegel’s project, 
Emancipation After Hegel presents a radical Hegel who speaks to a world overwhelmed by right-wing populism, authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and economic inequalities. McGowan argues that the revolutionary core of Hegel’s thought is contradiction. He reveals that contradiction is inexorable and that we must attempt to sustain it rather than overcoming it or dismissing it as a logical failure. McGowan contends that Hegel’s notion of contradiction, when applied to contemporary problems, challenges any assertion of unitary identity as every identity is in tension with itself and dependent on others. An accessible and compelling reinterpretation of an often-misunderstood thinker, this book shows us a way forward to a new politics of emancipation as we reconcile ourselves to the inevitability of contradiction and find solidarity in not belonging. 
 Review 
This is the book we were waiting for after long years of being bombarded by Hegel as a closet liberal whose last word is recognition. With Todd McGowan, the revolutionary Hegel is back―however, it is not the old Marxist Hegel but the Hegel AFTER Marx, the Hegel who makes us aware that revolution is an open and risked process which necessarily entails catastrophic failures. Hegel’s problem―how to save the legacy of the French revolution after its breakdown―is our problem today: how to save the project of radical emancipation after the catastrophe of Stalinism. In a truly democratic country, 
Emancipation After Hegel would be reprinted in hundreds of thousands of copies and distributed for free to all students. Read this book… or ignore it at your own risk! -- Slavoj Žižek, author of 
Less Than Nothing and 
Absolute Recoil\nTodd McGowan's 
Emancipation After Hegel could not come at a more appropriate time: the time when we truly need to carefully (re)think and reestablish the idea of emancipation. The book does this in a brilliant and compelling way, taking contradiction―as understood by Hegel―as the key to the understanding of emancipation and its relationship to freedom. -- Alenka Zupančič, author of 
What Is Sex?\nIn 
Emancipation After Hegel, Todd McGowan forges an unprecedented type of left Hegelianism. From Marx and Engels onward, leftist defenders of Hegel either downplay or repudiate Hegel's accounts of Christianity and the state. McGowan's distinctive achievement is to prove that Hegelian freedom would not exist without both the Christian legacy and the modern state. McGowan opens up new horizons precisely by venturing where traditional left Hegelianisms have feared to go. -- Adrian Johnston, author of 
A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek, and Dialectical Materialism\nThe ten chapters canvass a wide range of topics―logic, reason, history, love, freedom, politics, experience, universality. In each case, McGowan shows with devastating clarity how the received view of Hegel has been founded on serious misreadings, then unfolds a fresh interpretation as deeply insightful as it is far-reaching. The result is an absolute 
tour de force. In McGowan's book, Hegel rises from the dead and assumes the status of an indispensable resource for the next chapter of Western intellectual history. -- Richard Boothby, author of 
Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan\nSparklingly articulate. ― 
Marx and Philosophy Review of Books\nIf Todd McGowan’s book on Hegel didn’t exist, we w

The great political ideas and movements of the modern world were founded on a promise of universal emancipation. But in recent decades, much of the Left has grown suspicious of such aspirations. Critics see the invocation of universality as a form of domination or a way of speaking for others, and have come to favor a politics of particularism--often derided as "identity politics." Others, both centrists and conservatives, associate universalism with twentieth-century totalitarianism and hold that it is bound to lead to catastrophe. This book develops a new conception of universality that helps us rethink political thought and action. Todd McGowan argues that universals such as equality and freedom are not imposed on us. They emerge from our shared experience of their absence and our struggle to attain them. McGowan reconsiders the history of Nazism and Stalinism and reclaims the universalism of movements fighting racism, sexism, and homophobia. He demonstrates that the divide between Right and Left comes down to particularity versus universality. Despite the accusation of identity politics directed against leftists, every emancipatory political project is fundamentally a universal one--and the real proponents of identity politics are the right wing. Through a wide range of examples in contemporary politics, film, and history, Universality and Identity Politics offers an antidote to the impasses of identity and an inspiring vision of twenty-first-century collective struggle.

Universality and Identity Politics

Pure Excess: Capitalism and the Commodity

Understanding capitalism as a psychic strategy.

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by McGowan, Todd. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by McGowan, Todd

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by McGowan, Todd. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Impossible David Lynch (Film and Culture Series)

The Impossible David Lynch (Film and Culture Series)

Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution

Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution

Universality and Identity Politics

Pure Excess: Capitalism and the Commodity

Pure Excess: Capitalism and the Commodity

Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets