Uppsatsen tar avstamp i det faktum att ideologi ofta förmedlas via språket och syftet var att skapa förståelse av hur Sverigedemokraterna argumentativt uttrycker ideologi i flygbladet ”NO MONEY, NO JOBS, NO HOME”. Med hjälp av Žižeks ideologikritik och en klassisk topikanalys presenteras följande: Sverigedemokraternas argumentation kretsar till stor del kring en agonistisk uppdelning som visar på ett förakt mot en viss grupp av människor utifrån en uppdelning av ett ”vi” som utgörs av svenskar och ett ”dem” som utgörs av invandrare – där svenskar är det goda och invandrare det dåliga. Vidare utgår argumentationen utifrån att det finns en tydlig syndabock: ideologins symptom som i flygbladet är invandraren. Detta symptom är anledningen till den negativa verklighetsbeskrivning vi får ta del av i flygbladet. Deras argumentation är till viss del implicit vilket kan förstås bero på att partiet inte vill uppfattas som oetiska och därmed förlora förtroende hos sina väljare.

This thesis investigates the ways representations of terrorism in Hollywood, German and British cinema embody what Slavoj Žižek describes as the postpolitical, that is the current state of denial of alternatives within global politics and a directionlessness within cultural theory, which set in after the apparent defeat of the possibility of a radical alternative to capitalism. Moreover, this thesis proposes that films about terrorism are not only cultural expressions of the post-political, but also show the post-political condition to be problematic, displaying as they do symptoms such as the devaluation of human subjectivity and its concomitant failure to achieve progressive political change. Žižek’s philosophical approach as a method of interpreting the postpolitical is applied to the films Munich (2005), Zero Dark Thirty (2012) The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008) Die Kommenden Tage/The Coming Days, (2010) Four Lions (2010) and Hunger (2008). As well as Žižek’s work, the writings of other critics and commentators and such as Frank Furedi, Thomas Elsaesser, Kenan Malik and others are drawn on. The aesthetic and formal properties of these films are read against Žižek’s texts on ideology critique, which are primarily directed at the post-political. The films shown exhibit expressions of the post-political in notions of empathy and sustainability, campness, and postmodern forms of narrative, which Žižek calls filling in gaps, and Žižek’s concept of ‘the act’. By mapping the post-political in Hollywood, British and German cinema this research assays the manner in which screen terrorism is symptomatic of the post-political condition.

Between 1888 and 1896, William Morris wrote several medieval-inspired, proto-fantasy romances which have consistently threatened to fall into the doldrums of literary criticism. I am particularly interested, here, in the most complete of these compositions entitled The Story of the Glittering Plain, The Wood Beyond the World, The Well at the World’s End, The Water of the Wondrous Isles, and The Sundering Flood: texts which I call Morris’s late romances. Critics who have engaged with these texts have often taken on the difficult task of reconciling Morris’s growing political vehemence during the time of their composition and the ostensibly escapist stance these romances seem to purport. As such, critics have largely relied on Morris’s fidelity of the Middle Ages as a time that offered a more authentic, original, innocent, or natural mode of human experience, which Morris preferred over the industrial capitalism of his own Victorian period. Through various versions of this stance, critics have articulated that the late romances can offer socially progressive content through an outdated mode of literary production. While this dissertation maintains the significance of anti-escapist readings of these late romances, it also expresses the value of alternative readings of the critical appeal to authenticity. Using critical theories from Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and most especially Slavoj Žižek, this dissertation suggests that any recognition of authenticity is reliant upon its own corruption and that part of the communist value of William Morris’s late romances exists not in their exemplification of a (medieval) world unblighted by modern corruption but through their demonstration of the conceptual necessity to incorporate modern corruption into any possible vision of past authenticity. That is, the late romances show that past authenticity is a product of an intellectual frame produced by modern corruption; they therefore imply that, in a similar way, communism can only become recognizable as a result of capitalist exploitation. In this way, I hope to aid in resurrecting these beautiful and valuable texts so that they can play a role in the communist struggles of the future.

(in English): The thesis deals with the formulation of a new theoretical perspective on terrorism. Terrorism has become a frequent topic in the academic, political and laical environment, especially in recent years as a result of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. It acquired a new form of a global threat; however, it is still a phenomenon of socially ambiguous approach. This thesis aims to analyze terrorism through its ideological background. Criticism of social inequality, which is masked by ideology, is the basic subject of Marxist thinkers. The thesis focuses on the Slovenian philosopher and sociologist Slavoj Zizek. He enriches the Marxist theory of psychoanalysis, which provides him a tool for the interpretation of social phenomena, and ideology is one of his central themes. The main goal of this thesis is to show the analysis of ideology through Žižek's original approach, which can be used to understand the causes of terrorism.

According to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, our postmodern era and its correlate political problematic requires a shift in positing socialist strategy. Their wager is that by shifting away from essentialist Marxism, and towards a post-Marxist theory of hegemony which they adapt from Gramsci, the analytic for overturning contemporary hegemony will take the form of a radical democratic politics. My contention is that in shifting away from essentialist Marxism through their post-structuralist deconstructive stance, Laclau and Mouffe overstep and make their analytic for socialist strategy impotent. In order to show where Laclau and Mouffe have gone wrong I use primarily the work of Michel Foucault and Slavoj Žižek in order to demonstrate how a post-structuralist theory of ideology need not be a post-Marxist theory of ideology. / Master of Arts

Sweden is often considered to be one of the world's most tolerant countries. This is often illustrated by questions surrounding religious expression, such as if it should be tolerated to have a veil on when working in healthcare or schools? At the same time, we can see current examples of decreasing tolerance in some parts of Europe and the world. The Hungarian Government has annulled gender studies on the basis that we are born either as women or men. Meanwhile we ask ourselves in Sweden whether parties that advocate a racial war will have right to demonstrate on our streets. In this way, tolerance seems to be linked to the contradiction that exists within democracy between the will of the people and the individual. Between those which may be included, and those which cannot be included at all - the excluded. Because democracy always needs to draw a line and this line is today redrawn in the name of tolerance. This essay aims to investigate and problematize rhetoric’s relation to politics and democracy based on tolerance as a concept. This purpose leads to three key questions: 1. What role do the Scandinavian rhetoric researchers give the rhetoric in relation to politics and democracy? 2. How can we understand tolerance and its function for and within the democracy? 3. What could be an alternative role for rhetoric beyond tolerance? The essay therefore contains a survey of the Scandinavian researchers in rhetoric and their views on the role of rhetoric in politics. It also contains a problematization of tolerance extracted from the work of Wendy Brown and Slavoj Žižek. The essay concludes that rhetoric research in Scandinavia is based on the intention to create more tolerance. It also comes to the conclusion that tolerance as a political discourse works depoliticizing. The essay’s contribution to rhetorical science therefore comes in the form of another perspective providing an alternative role for rhetoric in democracy. Here it is not based on morality but on what we should call the political. That is, rhetoric may act in the intersections between the dichotomies – politics / the political, democracy / dictatorship, descriptive / normative – in order to see the various symptoms and the lack that exist in society and in the system.

This dissertation is based on the observation that Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" has become a popular reference in contemporary culture. Not only in the field of literary scholarship but also in the realm of art, political theory and philosophy, it is employed as an example of authentic resistance to power, a counter-intuitive politics that finds its strength in withdrawal, inaction, and inscrutability. The thesis examines the reasons and motives that drive literary scholars, artists and philosophers to read, interpret and use the story in such a way. It does so by analyzing the nature of and reoccurring patterns in Bartleby Industry, the enormous bulk of academic scholarship devoted to the story. It observes how the story is made use of outside of literary scholarship by disciplines, such as art and philosophy, that are not primarily concerned with the literary complexity of the story but use it to work on their own problems of politics and ethics. It pays special attention to its popularity among influential Postmarxist philosophers, namely Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze. As the presence of "Bartleby" in the realm of philosophy has to do with a particular function literature performs in that field, in these chapters "Bartleby" becomes more of a guiding thread in order to...

In our thesis we will discuss political philosophy of Slavoj Žižek. Our aim is to explore his thoughts in the context of searching for an emancipatory strategy for 21st century. In first par of our thesis we will concentrate on the analysis of functioning of capitalism from the perspective of Lacan's discourse of university. Then we will move to the criticism of static subject in Marxism and dispersed subject in thoughts of post-Marxist radical democrats. We will continue to so called communist hypothesis. In second part of our thesis we will discuss how Žižek's theoretical approach affects his position to the three selected social conflicts and movements. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Raymond Williams argues that a community’s cultural texts naturally draw upon its lived experience, and are thus a trustworthy expression of life within that community. This thesis explores the subject positions expressed in two contemporary texts—Wang Yuan’s Lipstick (又 红), and Ning Ying’s I Love Beijing (夏日暖洋洋)—to understand how urban Chinese individuals experience and comprehend the transformations convulsing their cities. To facilitate this, my primary goal in this thesis is to build a theoretical framework that uses the psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek to create the concept of the fantasy construction of the desiring subject. Using this concept, and drawing on two aspects of the cultural theories of Walter Benjamin—his heavily citational methodology and his theory of the flâneur—I examine the role of fantasy in the construction of contemporary urban Chinese individuals as desiring subjects. / Graduate / 0305 0295 / stetard@me.com

The aim of this paper it to observe different approaches to human beings. Two major points of view will be that of Karl Marx and of Sigmund Freud. In which apects are their deffinitions of human being, behavior and thinking processes different and in which are they similar? How are their ideas transferred in the work of oher authors and where does it lead? Is it possible to find similar streams in the work of their followers? These are the two major questions that this paper will try to answer. Another meaning this paper should have is to create a meanigful and coherent source of various authors who were involved in examination of human being.