What is the relation between family misfortune and desire? Why must we bury the dead? What is to come for those unburied? How to distinguish the endless stream of graphic violence from violence that goes straight to the bone? How does language make up not only the law, but also unwritten laws?
In Let Them Rot Alenka Zupančič takes up the ancient figure of Antigone and finds a blueprint for the politics of desire. Not desire as consumption, enjoying what is offered, but desire’s oblivion to what came before. Such politics says: “No, this world must end and I will be the embodiment of that end.” This is not self-satisfied destruction for destruction’s sake; it is existence with consequences beyond the predictable. Zupančič asks: “Why desire?” And this question of desire, which may be the only question, takes the form of a no that is also an “I.”
This edition contains a new afterword by the author.
978-1-7395161-0-9
13.9 × 21.6 cm
112 pp paperback
1 December 2023
Non-fiction
Philosophy
Psychoanalysis
£ 11.99
Zupančič’s ideas are fresh, as if they hailed from some open air beyond the clutter of current theoretical quarrels. This brilliant account of Sophocles’s Antigone breaks new ground for philosophy, psychoanalysis, and political and feminist theory.
Writing my book on Antigone, I thought: ‘There we go, the subject is closed—let’s go to sleep.’ And then along came Zupančič with her take and compelled me to rethink everything I did. In other words—and this is difficult for me to say—she is better than me here.
About the author
Alenka Zupančič is a Slovenian philosopher and social theorist. She is a professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School and a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts. She is the author of many books, including What Is Sex? (MIT Press, 2017), The Odd One In: On Comedy (MIT Press, 2008), and Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (Verso, 2000).
Endorsements
Zupančič’s ideas are fresh, as if they hailed from some open air beyond the clutter of current theoretical quarrels. This brilliant account of Sophocles’s Antigone breaks new ground for philosophy, psychoanalysis, and political and feminist theory.
Writing my book on Antigone, I thought: ‘There we go, the subject is closed—let’s go to sleep.’ And then along came Zupančič with her take and compelled me to rethink everything I did. In other words—and this is difficult for me to say—she is better than me here.
Press
- The Prisma Antigone’s monstrous protest
- e-flux Notes “A Hot Mind Over Chilly Things”: On Antigone
What the Fire Sees—A Divided Reader
Flood Tide
Twenty Shadows
Tosquelles: Healing Institutions
A Toast to St Martirià
Bourgeois Coldness
Darryl
I have brought you a severed hand
Holy Smoke
In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities
Wave of Blood
In Thrall
Night Philosophy
London-rose | Beauty Will Save the World
Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent
World of Interiors
This Poor Book
Disorganisation & Sex
Again! Plenitude and Repetition
How to Leave the World
Another Sun
Artificial Gut Feeling
Journey to the East of France
Self-portrait
Stage of Recovery
Bosses