Short Circuits

A short circuit occurs when there is a wrong connection in the network—wrong, of course, from the standpoint of the smooth functioning of the network. Is therefore the shock of short circuiting not one of the best metaphors for a critical reading? Is not one of the most efficient critical procedures to cross wires that don’t usually touch—to take a major classic (text, author, notion) and read it in a short circuiting way, through the lenses of a “minor” author, text, or conceptual apparatus (“minor” in the sense of marginalized, disavowed by the hegemonic ideology, dealing with a “lower,” less dignified topic)? The starting premise of this series is that Lacanian psychoanalysis is a privileged instrument of such an approach. This, then, is not a new series of books on psychoanalysis, but a series of “connections of the Freudian field”—of short Lacanian interventions into art, philosophy, theology, and ideology.

Series editor: Mladen Dolar, Alenka Zupančič, & Slavoj Žižek