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If [[Zupancic]]'s book does not become a classic [[work ]] of reference, the only conclusion will be that our academia is caught in an obscure [[desire ]] to [[self]]-destruct.

[[Kant]], sober [[Enlightenment ]] thinker and [[philosopher]]'s philosopher, seems the very antithesis of [[Lacan]], the "wild theorist" of [[psychoanalysis]]. But, drawing on a wide range of writers from [[Sophocles ]] to de [[Sade]], [[Alenka Zupancic ]] here demonstrates that the two thinkers stake everything on a similar [[ethical ]] enterprise. For both, [[ethics ]] is a necessary [[impossibility]]-[[impossible ]] because of the infinite and inhuman [[demands ]] it makes on us. Moreover, both are thinkers of [[desire, ]] of the ethics of desire and the desire for ethics.

What is it that makes [[Nietzsche ]] Nietzsche? In The Shortest Shadow, Alenka Zupancic counters the currently fashionable appropriation of Nietzsche as a philosopher who was "ahead of his [[time]]" but whose time has finally come -- the rather patronizing reduction of his often extraordinary statements to mere opinions that we can "share." Zupancic argues that the definitive Nietzschean quality is his very unfashionableness, his [[being ]] out of the mainstream of his or any time.

To restore Nietzsche to a context in which the [[thought ]] "lives on its own credit," Zupancic examines two aspects of his [[philosophy]]. First, in "Nietzsche as Metapsychologist," she revisits the principal Nietzschean themes -- his declaration of the [[death ]] of God (which had a twofold [[meaning]], "God is [[dead]]" and "[[Christianity ]] survived the death of God"), the ascetic [[ideal]], and [[nihilism ]] -- as [[ideas ]] that are very much [[present ]] in our hedonist [[postmodern ]] condition. Then, in the second part of the book, she considers Nietzsche's [[figure ]] of the Noon and its consequences for his [[notion ]] of the [[truth]]. Nietzsche describes the Noon not as the [[moment ]] when all shadows [[disappear ]] but as the moment of "the shortest shadow" -- not the [[unity ]] of all things embraced by the sun, but the moment of [[splitting]], when "one turns into two." Zupancic argues that this notion of the Two as the minimal and irreducible [[difference ]] within the same animates all of Nietzsche's work, generating its permanent and inherent tension.

Alenka Zupancic is a Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovene Academy of [[Sciences]], [[Ljubljana]].Alenka Zupancic is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Slovene Academy of Sciences, Ljubljana. She is the [[author ]] of Ethics of the [[Real]]: Kant and Lacan and editor-in-chief of the journal Problemi.