Gaze and Voice As Love Objects

The gaze entices, inspects, fascinates. The voice hypnotizes, seduces, disarms. Are gaze and voice part of the relationship we call love . . . or hate? If so, what part? How do they function? This provocative book examines love as the mediating entity in the essential antagonism between the sexes, and gaze and voice as love's medium. The contributors proceed from the Lacanian premise that "there is no sexual relationship," that the sexes are in no way complementary and that love--figured in the gaze and the voice --embodies the promise and impossibility of any relation between them.

The first detailed Lacanian elaboration of this topic, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects examines the status of gaze, voice, and love in philosophy from Plato to Kant, in ideology from early Christianity to contemporary cynicism, in music from Hildegard of Bingen to Richard Wagner, in literature from Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence to Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, and in cinema from Michael Powell's Peeping Tom to Kieslowski's A Short Film on Love. Throughout, the contributors seek to show that the conflict between the sexes is the site of a larger battle over the destiny of modernity. With insights into the underlying target of racist and sexist violence, this book offers surprising revelations into the nature of an ancient enigma--love.

Contributors. Elisabeth Bronfen, Mladen Dolar, Fredric Jameson, Renata Salecl, Slavoj Zizek, Alenka Zupancic

Renata Salecl is Researcher at the Institute for Criminology at the Faculty of Law, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia) and Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics. She is the author of The Spoils of Freedom and Sexuation (published by Duke University Press).

Slavoj Zizek is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His latest books include Tarrying with the Negative (Duke University Press) and The Indivisible Remainder.