Gramsci, Althusser and Lukacs as thinkers who emerged out of these aporias. The gamut of Balibar’s book is fundamentally futural in its implications, showing how Marx was not simply a historical figure useful for understanding the emergence of early capitalism, but one who continues to shed light on our present conjecture. Slavoj Žižek – Looking Awry – 1991 Slavoj Žižek’s early book on the work of Lacan and Hegel is a tour-de-force in reinventing how to navigate the landscape of popular culture. Žižek oscillates wildly from high to low culture, jumping from Stephen King to The Phenomenology of Spirit to detective novels to Hamlet, while still maintaining an astute link to them all. This book is your best bet if you can’t decide where to start, as its sporadic, rapid-fire style makes
it very difficult to lose interest. Joan Copjec – Read My Desire – 1994 Leaving my hyperbole to the last moment, I say with little hesitation that Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire is one of the best books to emerge from cultural studies in the past thirty or so years, boldly drawing a throughline between topics as diverse as historicism, film noir, sexuality, race, and spectator studies. Copjec’s overarching provocation to the field of cultural studies is to take seriously the idea of desire as a confronting and distorting force in society, encouraging the reader to pay more attention to the out-of-place and excluded elements that make up our social reality. Pushing nearly 300 pages, this selection might appear intimidating, however, one can take her chapters as essays on their own terms one-by-one, as well as cohesively together.
Did You Know: Murray Bail was married to Helen Garner?!?
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