The Ridiculous Sublime:Aesthetics And Ethics In (?)i(?)ek's Theory

Ever since his entrance into the academia of humanities in the English speaking world,the Slovene philosopher Slavoj (?)i(?)ek has been globally acclaimed for his incisive critique of ideology,original theoretical reformulation,and witty bricolage of seemingly incompatible discourses.Since (?)i(?)ek never systematically "showcases" his theoretical "complex" built with German idealism,Lacanian psychoanalysis and dialectical materialism,the first step to engage his theory for researchers from different fields has been "to formalize" it.This kind of project has yielded scholarship in such fields as political science,philosophy and film studies.However,for literary studies,it is just setting out.This thesis takes into its scope the aspects of aesthetics and ethics in (?)i(?)ek's theory,which are both significant to literary studies and inherent to (?)i(?)ek's Lacanian slogan "traversing the ideological fantasy." The aim of this thesis is thus two-fold:both to explore the interlocked relationship between the aesthetics and ethics in (?)i(?)ek's theory,and to argue that both of them share the epistemological-ontological roadmap of "Kant-Lacan-Hegel," which is also present in (?)i(?)ek's ideology critique.This thesis consists of five parts.Chapter One is the introduction,which introduces (?)i(?)ek the person and the relevancy of his theory to literary studies,reviews the literature,and describes the outline of the thesis.Chapter Two looks at the background and main ideas of Zi2ek's theory of "enjoyment as a political factor,"introduces relevant psychoanalytic concepts,and emphasizes the ethico-political nature of the aesthetic experience.The third chapter focuses on the aesthetic category of the sublime,analyzing ?i2ek's psychoanalytically-informed Hegelian criticism of Kant's idea of the noumenon,which leads to the argument that the epistemological failure does not result from the existence of the transcendental noumenon,but from the ontological lack or radical negativity of the object itself.The insight produced by this criticism is the Hegelian "downward-synthesis," or "determining reflection,"which leads to the possibility of aestheticizing the antagonistic "parallax." Chapter Four discusses "there is no big Other" and "subjective destitution," the two crucial processes in (?)i(?)ek's politicized ethics,in terms of the theoretical matrix of"Kant-Lacan-Hegel";it then proceeds to a discussion of the radically negative death drive and the "act" that run through these two processes.And the final chapter is the conclusion,which concludes with the argument that the relationship between the parallax and the death drive,as well as the relationship between the (?)i(?)ekian aesthetics and ethics,is interlocked in their fidelity to radical negativity.Also,the conclusion restates the underlying isomorphism among the different aspects of (?)i(?)ek's theory:the theoretical matrix of Kant-Lacan-Hegel organizes his aesthetics,ethics and politics into a whole by revealing the lack of the subject,the lack of the object,and the lack of the big Other.