Subjects and Simulations presents essays focused on suffering and sublimity, representation and subjectivity, and the relation of truth and appearance in the twenty-first century. Inspired by the work of Jean Baudrillard, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and JeanLuc Nancy, sixteen authors study how the real reasserts itself in an age of every more fragmented media, and how art and literature give us access to forms of truth that elude philosophy. How does representation grant us access to the place once occupied by the subject? Is political life possible? Can plural thinking be retrieved? Will metaphor and simulation give us ways of being in an evanescent world? The volume engages discussions of French and Continental philosophy, post-structuralism, deconstruction, simulacra, aesthetics, existentialism, and media theory.
Between Subjects and Simulations-at the Limits of Representation, Hugh J. Silverman and Anne O'Byrne Part One: Re-presenting Subjectivity Introduction Chapter 1. Simulate This!:The Seductive Return of the Real in Baudrillard, Drew Hyland Chapter 2. The Fiction of the Unconscious: The Use and Abuse of Representation in Freud, Alina Clej Chapter 3. The Postmodern Subject: Truth and Fiction in Lacoue-Labarthe's Nietzsche, Hugh J. Silverman Chapter 4. The Subject of the Good: Exhaltation without Representation in Lacoue-Labarthe and Wittig, Stephen David Ross Part Two: The Art of Representation Introduction Chapter 5. Fiction, Allegory, Irony: The Unveiling of Lacoue-Labarthe, Massimo Verdicchio Chapter 6. The Power of the Text: Lacoue-Labarthe, Rorty, and the Literariness of Philosophy, Gary E. Aylesworth Chapter 7. Edging the Sublime: Baudrillard and the Inaccessible Real, Basil O'Neill 119 Chapter 8. In the Wake of Critique: Notes from the Inside Cover of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, Thomas P. Brockelman Part Three: Unrepresentable Communities Introduction149 Chapter 9. Utopia is Here: Revolutionary Communities in Baudrillard and Nancy, Anne O'Byrne Chapter 10. Eden Foreclosed: The Subjectivity of Social Identification, Bettina Bergo Chapter 11. The (Ir)resistible Suffering of Others: Tragedy, Death and the Spectator, Robin May Schott Chapter 12. The Subjects of Philosophy: "The We" and Us, James R. Watson Part Four: Political Mediations Introduction Chapter 13. 9/11 and the Representation of the Unrepresentable: Chora, Aleph and Mediation, Damian Ward Hey Chapter 14. Amerika (Kafka)/ America (Baudrillard): Modern Media and Tele-tactility, Katherine Rudolph Chapter 15. Dressing like Hitler: Reality, Simulation and Hyperreality, Martin Weiss Chapter 16. Moved by Appearances: Metaphor, Metamorphosis and Irony in the Later Works of Jean Baudrillard, Henk Oosterling
