The woman-One as a Late Capitalism Newfound Product: Žižek and Badiou’s Insights into State of Women in the Contemporary Age

Document Type : Original Article

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1 Department of English, Faculty of Language and Literature, University of Kurdistan, Sanandaj, Iran

2 Department of English Language, Aba.C., Islamic Azad University, Abadeh, Iran

10.22034/lda.2025.143629.1046

Abstract

The contemporary subject, frustrated by the anal and post-industrial fathers, cannot enact the ideological mechanism desired by late capitalism. Such functional failures reduce the subject to a monster craving for indefinite jouissance, or a pathetic creature lost in the world. Late capitalism thus resorts to the woman-One as an alternative that can retrieve its ideological hegemony. As a library-based qualitative research, this paper reflects Žižek and Badiou’s criticism of late capitalism’s provision of unlimited jouissance and all-encompassing freedom for the woman-One that has marked a dramatic plunge in men’s symbolic significance. Badiou, however, infers that capitalism’s plan will fall through, for the ‘new-girl’, as the ultimate savior, comes to emancipate the whole human race from capitalism. Like the Hegelian Dialectics, the new-Girl implies a capitalistic positive negativity that can confronts capitalism with many challenges. Nevertheless, capitalism’s triumph over woman-One’s body and elimination of the paternal function cannot last long, for the world will be conquered by the ‘new-girl’ heralding capitalism’s overthrow. Disappointed with this incapacitated body, late capitalism invents the woman-One to restore its desired social, political and economic equilibrium. However, the woman-One herself is challenged by the contemporary new-girl that rescinds capitalism’s enslaving scheme, liberate women and the whole race.

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