The Illusion of Inner Peace: Perfect Days‘ Pathological Abstraction and Stasis
The narrative of Perfect Days is seemingly very simple and straightforward: Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) works as a public toilet cleaner in the upscale Shibuya-ku district of Tokyo. He lives on the other side of the city in his simple house and devotes his free time to his love of music cassettes, which he listens to in his van, and when he gets home from work, he turns to his books, which he reads every night before bed. Hirayama reads stories by William Faulkner and Patricia Highsmith and essays by Aya Koda. His dreams are shown in flickering impressionistic sequences at the end of each day.
In general, critics’ opinions are frequently predicated on the beauty that is concealed beneath the straightforwardness of the film’s narrative and the stunner of discovering tranquility and Zen in the midst of the apparent hardship of daily life. As Wendy Ide summarizes, Perfect Days:
[s]hould be the most soul-crushingly bleak film ever made – a Groundhog Day grind with added despair and urinal cakes. But Wim Wenders’s Zen meditation on beauty, fulfilment and simplicity is quite the opposite: it’s an achingly lovely and unexpectedly life-affirming picture. It all depends – and this is central to the film’s gently profound message – on your way of looking at things. Hirayama looks at the world with his eyes, but sees with his heart (Ide 2024).
But what truly lies beyond its initial charm, beneath the tranquil surface of Perfect Days? It is argued that Hirayama’s Zen presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tensions of technological dynamics, allowing us to separate ourselves from this frenetic and frenzy rhythm and retain our inner peace and enlightenment. This seemingly calm and peaceful world is actually what we might call “Western Buddhism,” i.e., the oriental spirituality that, on the other side of the world, functions as a fetish for enduring the status quo and ignoring the discontents of capitalism.
Traditional Buddhism, particularly specific schools, can foster a critical detachment from worldly attachments and a recognition of suffering that may result in the questioning of societal structures. Nevertheless, the Western inversion frequently privatizes this endeavor. Rather than motivating collective action or systemic change, it is transformed into a tool for the individual to maintain mental equilibrium and reduce stress in the frantic pace of the capitalist game. The overemphasis on “peace of mind” in superficial versions of Western meditation prevents us from seriously engaging with political and social structures and actually benefits the existing system; in such an apparatus, one only indulges in personal gratification and continues the cycle of consumption and productivity, without taking any steps to change the existing parameters.
Western Buddhism has long evolved into an agent of the interests of capital, serving as a perfect ideological supplement to capitalism. It enables people to actively engage in the capitalist dynamic while preserving the impression that they are somehow separate from or cognizant of its insignificance. This process creates a fetishist mode of ideology that bridges the gap between perceived separation and engagement. This abstract gap presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of capitalist dogma, allowing us to uncouple and retain inner peace, thereby enabling us to observe all the mechanisms around us from a safe and enjoyable distance.
The detachment, indifference, and calculated coping mechanism in the face of capitalist demands that is the cornerstone of Western Buddhism embodies a kind of coldness that is calculated and contractual, serving to suspend conventional reality and create a space for a desired transformation or rebirth. Isn’t the ultimate nature of Wenders’ film a celebration of the pathological aspect of our world today? It is argued that Hirayama’s Zen presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tensions of our societies, allowing us to dissociate from this frenetic flow and retain our inner peace. In short, Western Buddhism steps in to save people who have lost control of their lives due to the technical and social developments in modern capitalist societies, often known as “risk-societies”:
Western Buddhism, this pop-cultural phenomenon preaching inner distance and indifference toward the frantic pace of market competition, is arguably the most efficient way for us fully to participate in capitalist dynamics while maintaining the appearance of mental sanity – in short, the paradigmatic ideology of late capitalism (Žižek 2003).
In Western Buddhism, achieving inner peacefulness always has a price beyond the original idea of Zen, and that is complete disregard for the displeasures of civilization. In other words, capitalism always needs a nothingness based on abstract tranquility, because by this means it can emphasize coping with the current state of the world.
In Wenders’ movie, Hirayama observes everything from a safe and calm interspace. Wenders’ apprehension in Perfect Days is a depoliticized one, a crude symphony of tears and smiles, based on some kind of false equality behind the so-called appearances of today’s world. To put it simply, Wenders’ world in this film is the perfect embodiment of liberalism with a smile, i.e., accommodation and normalization of the present state of affairs, which ultimately serves to minimize the negative consequences of global capitalism without challenging its fundamental structures.
In recent decades, Western Buddhism-based inner awareness has become so popular that it seems to act as a password that can solve all problems and difficulties effortlessly. As Ronald Purser argues in his “McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality”, the Western translation of Eastern insight has been repackaged as a tool to absolve the ruling order of all cynicism: “Mindfulness, like positive psychology and the broader happiness industry, has depoliticized and privatized stress. If we are unhappy about being unemployed, losing our health insurance, and seeing our children incur massive debt through college loans, it is our responsibility to learn to be more mindful.” (Purser 2019) According to similar logic, in Perfect Days, instead of objectively engaging in everyday disputes, economic inequities, and so on, the protagonist abandons all hatred and seeks refuge in his Zen rather than risk sinking into the heart of darkness.
Emphasizing the simplicity hidden in the heart of misery, the idea that the poor can better understand life’s beauties, as demonstrated in Perfect Days, is a vision that ultimately belongs to bourgeois ideology. Hirayama’s young assistant, Takashi, repeatedly asserts in the film that “one cannot fall in love without money.” While he might be wrong – since wealth does not eventually equate to happiness – his perspective holds truth for wrong reasons. The lower class comprehends the significance of money and the hardships associated with its lack far more acutely than the bourgeoisie. It is solely the bourgeoisie who possess the privilege to reject all that is essential (Hirayama’s backstory suggests he was previously a wealthy businessman who voluntarily surrendered to poverty and simplicity), unlike those who succumb to adversity out of compulsion. Wenders is captivated here by the same opiate that our world has been infected with for decades: acceptance of every foe and emphasis on collective castration. It is true that the world is covered in destruction and everything has become our ultimate apocalyptic image, but we may appreciate the “path,” preserve our “inside,” and accept that “it is what it is.”
The concept of Stasis in the philosophy of Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi can help us better understand the pathological basis of Wenders’ worldview in Perfect Days. Mohan and Dwivedi characterize stasis as a condition of obstructed movement, political paralysis, or an existential impasse resulting from conflicting forces that inhibit the formation or operation of a unified entity. They view stasis as a sickness of the whole, a fundamental problem in the current worldwide political and social arrangement:
Stasis happens when the movement of something is blocked by something else: say, water’s flow through a canal blocked by a brick. The Greeks used the word stasis to talk about a problem in politics. When several groups compete with one another in a city to have the sole power to legislate for everyone, there is stasis (Mohan 2020).
“Stasis,” then, “is a form of evil which happens when something necessary is being blocked” (Dwivedi and Mohan 2024). Accordingly, while various powerful entities (e.g., technocrats, financiers, nations) struggle for comprehensive control, they collectively produce a state of paralysis where no single, unifying law or direction can truly emerge for the world. In this sense, stasis describes a condition where global cooperation and collective problem-solving are hindered by fragmented, competitive forces. Wenders’ depiction of Hirayama’s seemingly idyllic existence -frequently lauded as an exemplar of mindful living- is a clear example of this pervasive disease, namely stasis, in which all existing forces in a tangible social context are neutralized, and ultimately a kind of pervasive stagnation prevails.
Let’s expand on this issue a bit with an example from so-called classical cinema. As an adaptation of Ladislav Fuks’s brilliant novel, The Cremator (Juraj Herz, 1969) presents a grotesque, dystopian world in which a dutiful father, following the strict logic of his time, draws a strange line between Western Buddhism and unbridled violence, liberating the souls of his loved ones by destroying their bodies. This work of the Czechoslovak New Wave takes place against the backdrop of the political radicalization of Europe during the 1930s. Karel Kopfrkingl (Rudolf Hrušínský) works at a crematorium in Prague which he passionately calls “Temple of Death.” He believes he is not just cremating the dead, but liberating the souls of the departed. He also devotes a good amount of time to reading excerpts from a book about Tibetan mysticism by Alexandra David-Neel (the Belgian-French explorer, spiritualist, Buddhist, and anarchist) from which he frequently quotes throughout the film (usually before committing murder). The movie shows well through various episodes and numerous mental leaps that Kopfrkingl’s calm and civilized personality is actually violent and neurotic. However, the interesting thing about this masterpiece is that the director skillfully depicts that this self-announced “abstinent” is a ceaseless moralizer and homilist, and this is done by emphasizing the similarities between Western Zen and sickening violence. In fact, the director goes beyond the usual pessimistic logic of violence (“we are all bloodthirsty animals behind our civilized appearance”) and demonstrates that the shell of Western mysticism acts as a necessary complement to this violent structure. By the final scenes, we witness a more detailed narrative of this closeness as Kopfrkingl, believing himself as a universal savior and the next Dalai Lama, declares: “No one will suffer! I shall save them all!” The Symbolic displacement is very important here: What leads to violence is the very idea that places so much emphasis on harmony and inner peace, whatever price this sublime liberation might have.
This chilling parallel with Kopfrkingl’s “liberation of souls” underscores how Hirayama’s cultivated “inner peace” in Perfect Days might similarly serve as an ideological mechanism, enabling a passive acceptance of, or even complicity with, a destructive system, albeit in a more subtle and less overtly violent manner.
Here it seems useful to refer to Hegel, who, despite the common perception of his own abstractness, sharply criticized a specific form of abstract thinking. According to Hegel, the worst vice is to avoid being contaminated by the flow of reality/consciousness, or the separation of “matter” from “form” in classical logic, including Kant’s theoretical philosophy. According to Hegel, this is what uneducated minds do to avoid the “vice” of facing reality:
Who thinks abstractly? The uneducated, not the educated. Good society does not think abstractly because it is too easy, because it is too lowly (not referring to the external status) – not from an empty affectation of nobility that would place itself above that of which it is not capable, but on account of the inward inferiority of the matter (Hegel 1965).
In other words, according to Hegel, refraining from taking risks is exactly what the mind does during abstract thinking; in order to learn to swim, one must be courageous, and in order to know the reality (truth) – the goal that thinking pursues – one must bravely immerse oneself in the river of consciousness. This is why Wenders’ film basically has nothing else to offer except intellectual disillusionment and a kind of sentimental abstractionism. Critics who praise Perfect Days for its “refreshing ambiguity”1 are basically not paying attention to its general nature; Wenders’ latest film exemplifies pathological abstraction, lacking substantive value if its underlying secret were to be disclosed.
The Reversal of History: Apocalyptic Blindness and End Times
At the same time, one can read Perfect Days as a movie about the concept of the end and apocalypse. While the movie doesn’t portray a literal catastrophic event, it profoundly explores themes of societal stagnation, the limits of human connection, and a subtle, pervasive sense of a world that has reached a certain terminal point or a quiet dissolution. Does not the stagnation prevalent in Hirayama’s settings symbolize a realm of ends? Does the cessation of human interactions, inherent in the daily life of this humble and commendable worker of Tokyo public toilets, not represent a condition where all aspects of human routine have been halted, confining the individual to the limits of a minimal existence?
Jean Baudrillard’s reading of the concepts of the End and the apocalypse offers a compelling framework in this regard. For Baudrillard, the apocalypse is not a cataclysmic event, but rather a gradual disappearance of the Real, which is supplanted by hyper-reality and simulations (Baudrillard 1994). In this regard, Perfect Days represents a world in which the Real has largely dissipated, and life is experienced within a meticulously crafted, almost ritualistic simulation. Hirayama’s methodically ordered days -sanitizing restrooms, watering plants, listening to vintage cassette recordings, consuming modest meals, and capturing images of trees- may be construed as a coping strategy in a reality where authentic, meaningful connection has become scarce. It is a perfect day specifically due to its nature as a closed system, a self-sufficient simulation of satisfaction.
In other words, although Hirayama isn’t actively seeking the end, his existence seems to quietly acknowledge a finality, a state of being after something significant has ceased. As Baudrillard formulates it superbly: “It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.” (Baudrillard 1994) Put differently, Hirayama’s pastoral world could be seen as a form of apocalyptic blindness, where the very real has dissipated, and the catastrophe is no longer an event to be confronted.
The scrupulously cultivated “perfect day” serves as a protective shell, preventing Hirayama from confronting the underlying anxieties and unresolved questions of his past or the broader societal malaise. This internal conflict and the potential for a concealed sadness beneath the surface of his “perfect” existence are hinted at in the film’s final scene, where Hirayama’s face alternates between joy and sorrow while listening to Nina Simone. This interchange fundamentally helps us so that we can just relax and perversely enjoy the spectacle of destruction. Alenka Zupančič formulates this seemingly calm but terrifying framework immaculately:
We start with the survival strategies, we take the losses one at a time, and only at “the end” will we find out what exactly it was that we lost, in total. Today we get used to this, tomorrow to something else; we’ll manage somehow, as long as we don’t see the whole picture, which is actually being created in this way […]. Our apocalypse is a loss without the lost, a mourning that precedes the loss and actually creates it with its work (that of mourning). It is a mourning without object (Zupančič 2018).
This is how Kafkaesque’s world of The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty (Wim Wenders 1972) and Benjaminian’s universe of Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire 1987) transition towards a state of divine illumination, where one must make concessions to the realities of the universe and embrace whatever may come. If in Der Himmel über Berlin, Damiel, living in 1980s Berlin, aims to validate Arthur Rimbaud’s renowned statement (“One must be absolutely modern”), Hirayama in Perfect Days succumbs to the hedonistic tendencies of postmodern castration, contemplating the pleasant memories of the past and the intoxicating allure of nostalgia. Paying homage to the tradition of “city symphony” silent films, including Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov 1929) or even Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (Walter Ruttmann, 1927), Wings of Desire serves as a remarkable depiction of winter Berlin and the period preceding integration. This poetic and melancholic movie follows two angels, Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Solveig Dommartin), who are invisible and inaudible to humans, as they roam through the divided city of Berlin. Their purpose is to establish a comforting presence for those in despair by observing and preserving human thoughts, emotions, and experiences, while uttering their interior monologues. Damiel, on the other hand, begins to long for tangible human experiences such as the taste of coffee, the warmth of the sun, the human touch, and the sensation of being loved. Marion (Solveig Dommartin), a gorgeous and secluded circus trapeze artist, captivates him, fueling his desire. He is completely enamored with her, and his desire for human interaction becomes unbearable. Finally, Damiel decides to abandon his immortality and become human, a metamorphosis that can only take place if he truly embraces the human condition.
The movie also examines the city’s tumultuous history by utilizing archival footage to depict the capital in a condition of devastation after the war. For the angels, this may seem like a brief moment, but for spectators in the late 20th century, regardless of their nationality, Wenders’ visuals imply that the horrifying presence of human history cannot be casually ignored or rejected. On the contrary, the narrative in Perfect Days is completely receptive to everything. Now, the Angelus Novus, whose all-encompassing voice could be heard throughout Wings of Desire, has ceased all efforts to reawaken the dead and instead is eagerly awaiting the opportunity to join their ranks and finalize the historical continuum.2 Walter Benjamin once posited that salvation is dependent upon the small gaps that manifest in a persistent catastrophe. However, Perfect Days demonstrated that the most Benjaminian director in cinematic history is now obstinately adamant about denying not only these gaps but the disaster’s very objectivity.
The Paradoxes of the Excess
Another crucial point about Perfect Days is its relationship to the concept of the abject. What most catches the viewer’s eye when watching this film is not only the pervasive cleanliness of Tokyo’s public toilets, but also the director’s insistence on not showing the “filthy” details that are obviously inseparable from Hirayama’s job; here, the cleaning of the public toilet, the place where the last remnants of the body’s biological process are disposed of, is done without any disturbing features. Without trying to be ironic, it must be mentioned that the problem with such a scenario is that even if an entire nation is devoted to public hygiene, there will always be “dirty” moments that one cannot escape – moments that Wenders does everything in his power to ignore.
George Bataille explores themes of putrefaction, mortality, and the obscene in works such as Visions of Excess, which can be interpreted as manifestations of that which is expelled, rejected, and deemed useless by a restricted, utilitarian mindset (Bataille 1985). Bataille establishes a profound connection between the sacred and the sovereign and the realm of the abject and repugnant, which represents a breach of conventional boundaries and an encounter with a fundamental truth of existence that transcends utility. Refuse, in all its historical and contemporary manifestations, can ultimately be categorized as surplus, signifying the remnants of production and consumption. From this perspective, without a material world composed of dirt, sacred space would not exist. This relationship is crucial for comprehending Bataille’s overarching project; in a limited economic context, dirt and trash are simply waste products – items devoid of utility that must be discarded. However, for Bataille, they epitomize the ultimate manifestation of surplus, the irretrievable aspect of consumption and production. They constitute the “abject” that society endeavors to conceal or eradicate, yet their mere presence underscores the intrinsic excess and loss that are essential to existence itself.
The contradictory nature of Wenders’ work takes on another dimension here. Perfect Days attempts to erase all manifestations of “excess” from the spectator’s view. Wenders obsessively conceals any element that could play a destructive role in the existing framework (abjection, antagonism, etc.), and therefore ignores the fundamentals of existence. His aesthetic portrayal of Hirayama’s labor further reinforces this ideological concealment through a highly controlled and nearly antiseptic visual approach. When Hirayama cleans the Tokyo toilets, the camera deliberately frames these public latrines not as spaces of visceral abjection or somatic excess, as described in Bataillean terms, but rather as immaculate architectural monuments illuminated by soft, contemplative light. By eliminating any authentic signs of filth, odor, or the unsettling materiality of human waste, Wenders creates a sanitized, hyperreal ritual of labor. This clinical visual strategy serves as an aesthetic barrier to the abject, transforming what could be a subversive engagement with society’s marginalized excess into a reassuring, marketable version of Western Buddhist mindfulness.
Contrary to his antiseptic gaze, soil and refuse are not merely remnants; they may also possess sacred qualities as they represent unreciprocated expenditure. The proliferation of waste in modern society can thus be regarded as a concrete representation of an unregulated, repressed, or sublimated accursed share. It represents the tangible manifestation of that which transcends the limitations of a restricted economy, serving as a testament to the incessant flow of energy that fundamentally characterizes human existence. To better understand the nature of this approach, perhaps it would be better to refer to what Jean-Luc Nancy in his Being Singular Plural, called “being-with”, meaning that that “I” is not prior to “we,” and existence is essentially co-existence. Things can only be-with, because every-single-thing exists and they all exist together. According to Nancy, the “with” is an inherent part of being because the world is the togetherness of all things; therefore, there is no neutral place where being happens. Abjection and being, or to put more precisely, our being and the refuse, take place together. The finitude of being is experienced by being in community, that is, through exposure to the death of others, whether it be the reeking remnant of our mortal body or the expiry of objects.
Hirayama struggles not just with “being-with,” but even a simple touch, such as Aya’s kiss on his cheek, disrupts his typical equilibrium. In one of the final scenes, we observe him engaging in shadow play with a man who, it appears, has a limited amount of time left to live and will soon succumb to cancer. Two individuals endeavor to determine whether the obscurity of the shadow will increase when their shadows overlap. They then attempt to seize each other’s shadow by stepping on it. This seemingly simple and euphoric sequence is another indication of the ideology hidden in Wenders’ movie. Jean-Luc Nancy explains that being-with is the invariable condition of existing because being is being-sense. “Sensing” (as acting in direction) is at the same time “sensing” (touching) other “senses” (beings), so presence is never individual but only “singular-plural”. Contrary to what Wenders tries to show through the lens of Hirayama’s life, existence does not exist purely, in a neutral and unaffected “place”; rather, beings exist as the world and all things, every single one of them, co-appear! Or as Nancy puts it brilliantly:
What is shared is nothing like a unique substance in which each being would participate; what is shared is also what shares, what is structurally constituted by sharing, and what we call “matter”. The ontology of being-with can only be “materialist”, in the sense that “matter” does not designate a substance or a subject (or an anti-subject), but literally designates what is divided of itself, what is only as distinct from itself, partes extra partes […]. The ontology of being-with is an ontology of bodies, of everybody, whether they be inanimate, animate, sentient, speaking, thinking, having weight, and so on (Nancy 2000).
In contrast to Damiel’s entire descending odyssey in Wings of Desire, which revolves around sense, the protagonist of Perfect Days has very little to do with space and touch. This is precisely what is lacking in Wenders’s world. In his castrated universe, being is reduced to a never-ending parade of shifting pretenses and images.
Perfect Days suffers from what Shaj Mohan calls an idyllic a priori (Mohan 2020). That is, it thinks from the idylls of someone or some select people and then sets up this idyll as the impossible teleology. M. K. Gandhi too conceived an Indian village idyll and contrasted it with “western civilization”. Gandhi’s idyll is the village of the privileged upper caste Indian under whom the racial hierarchies and exploitations of the majority lower caste people carry on, but without an ounce of resentment on the part of the exploited. The problem is that these images of idyll are always of someone or of some people under whom many had to suffer to sustain them. For example, the contemplative life of an upper-caste man surrounded by nature in the subcontinent was made possible through the racist caste order.3
Contrary to Wenders’ opinion, a vacuum does not generate existence. Touch, materiality, and expenditure are not only interconnected facets of existence; rather, they are essential in the creation of distinct and “perfect” days. As Jean-Luc Nancy once said: “There’s no intact matter-or else there’d be nothing. On the contrary, there’s tact, the pose and deposing, the rhythm of coming-and-going of the bodies in the world. Tact united, divided unto itself” (Nancy 2009).
Endnotes
- See for example, Rosenfeldt, Adrian, “Can the Dark Spirituality of Wim Wenders’s ‘Perfect Days’ Provide an Antidote to What Ails Western Culture?”, ABC Religion & Ethics, 30 December 2024, available at https://www.abc.net.au/religion/adrian-rosenfeldt-dark-spirituality-wim-wenders-perfect-days/104712718. ↩︎
- A further illustration of this distinction can be observed in Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1967) and Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966), two masterpieces by the renowned French director Robert Bresson. Au hasard Balthazar depicts a donkey as it is transferred to a variety of owners, the majority of whom treat him with contempt. Mouchette is a depiction of the agonizing loneliness of a girl who is destined for a life of poverty, daily humiliation, and death. In contrast to Balthazar, who passively accepts his fate, Mouchette conducts herself as a figure who comprehends the meaninglessness of her unequal circumstances. She is acutely aware that there is no grace behind this structure of suffering. ↩︎
- Doesn’t the subtle allure of Abbas Kiarostami’s films, the acclaimed Iranian director, also stem from this idyll? Isn’t the fundamental worldview of Kiarostami’s masterpieces an attempt to return to the “perfect” old days, with a primitive attitude that considers simplicity and purity as the antidote to the mysterious modern world? ↩︎
Bibliography
Bataille, Georges, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Dwivedi, Divya, and Shaj Mohan. Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics, London: Hurst, 2024.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich and Kaufmann, Walter (eds.), Hegel: Texts and Commentary, Garden City: Anchor, 1965.
Ide, Wendy, “Perfect Days Review – Wim Wenders’s Zen Japanese Drama is his Best Feature Film in Years”, The Guardian, 25 February 2024, available at https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/feb/25/perfect-days-review-wim-wenders-koji-yakusho-tokyo-toilet-cleaner.
Mohan, Shaj, “The Crown of the Stasis,” The Philosophical Salon, 18 June 2020, available at https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-crown-of-the-stasis.
Nancy, J.-L, Being Singular Plural, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Nancy, J.-L, Corpus, Fordham: Fordham University Press, 2009.
Owen, Jack, “The Cremator: No One Will Suffer”, The Criterion Collection, 22 April 2020, available at https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6916-the-cremator-no-one-will-suffer.
Purser, Ronald, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality, London: Repeater, 2019.
Žižek, Slavoj, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.
Zupančič, Alenka, ”The Apocalypse is (Still) Disappointing“, Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique, 11, 2018.
Kamran Baradaran is an Iranian critic, translator and journalist. He has translated various philosophical and literary works into Farsi, including works by Jean Baudrillard, Antonio Gramsci, Paul Virilio, Slavoj Žižek, Hector Munro, Georges Perec, and Luigi Pirandello. Baradaran has also published a book on feminine writing titled Écriture Féminine: Improvisation in the Mist.
Marziyeh Farnam is an Iranian critic and translator. She is a screenwriting graduate from Soore University and has translated works by Slavoj Žižek, Bistra Velichkova, Robert Walser and Willis Hall into Farsi.
