Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (October Books)

Slavoj Zizek, a leading intellectual in the new social movements that are sweeping Eastern Europe, provides a virtuoso reading of Jacques Lacan. Zizek inverts current pedagogical strategies to explain the difficult philosophical underpinnings of the French theoretician and practician who revolutionized our view of psychoanalysis. He approaches Lacan through the motifs and works of contemporary popular culture, from Hitchcock's Vertigo to Stephen King's Pet Sematary, from McCullough's An Indecent Obsession to Romero's Return of the Living Dead - a strategy of "looking awry" that recalls the exhilarating and vital experience of Lacan.Zizek discovers fundamental Lacanian categories the triad Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, the object small a, the opposition of drive and desire, the split subject - at work in horror fiction, in detective thrillers, in romances, in the mass media's perception of ecological crisis, and, above all, in Alfred Hitchcock's films. The playfulness of Zizek's text, however, is entirely different from that associated with the deconstructive approach made famous by Derrida. By clarifying what Lacan is saying as well as what he is not saying, Zizek is uniquely able to distinguish Lacan from the poststructuralists who so often claim him.Slavoj Zizek is a Researcher in the Institute of Sociology at the University of Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. His work has been published in France and in Yugoslavia where, running as a proreform candidate, he narrowly missed being elected to the presidency of the republic of Slovenia. Slavoj Žižek, a leading intellectual in the new social movements that are sweeping Eastern Europe, provides a virtuoso reading of Jacques Lacan. Žižek inverts current pedagogical strategies to explain the difficult philosophical underpinnings of the French theoretician and practician who revolutionized our view of psychoanalysis. He approaches Lacan through the motifs and works of contemporary popular culture, from Hitchcock's Vertigo to Stephen King's Pet Sematary, from McCullough's An Indecent Obsession to Romero's Return of the Living Dead—a strategy of'looking awry'that recalls the exhilarating and vital experience of Lacan.Žižek discovers fundamental Lacanian categories the triad Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, the object small a, the opposition of drive and desire, the split subject—at work in horror fiction, in detective thrillers, in romances, in the mass media's perception of ecological crisis, and, above all, in Alfred Hitchcock's films. The playfulness of Žižek's text, however, is entirely different from that associated with the deconstructive approach made famous by Derrida. By clarifying what Lacan is saying as well as what he is not saying, Žižek is uniquely able to distinguish Lacan from the poststructuralists who so often claim him. Preface -- Acknowledgments -- How Real Is Reality? -- From Reality To The Real -- The Paradoxes Of Objet Petit A -- A Black Hole In Reality -- The Real And Its Vicissitudes -- How The Real Returns And Answers -- How The Real Is Rendered And Knows -- Two Ways To Avoid The Real Of Desire -- The Sherlock Holmes Way -- The Philip Marlowe Way -- One Can Never Know Too Much About Hitchcock -- How The Non-duped Err -- The Unconscious Is Outside -- Ladies Who Vanish -- The Hitchcockian Blot -- The Phallic Anamorphosis -- The Maternal Superego -- Pornography, Nostalgia, Montage: A Traid Of The Gaze -- The Perverse Short Circuit -- The Hitchcockian Cut -- Fantasy, Bureaucracy, Democracy -- The Ideological Sinthome -- Gaze And Voice As Objects -- Love Thy Sinthome As Thyself -- The Obscene Object Of Postmodernity -- The Postmodernist Break -- Bureaucracy And Enjoyment -- Formal Democracy And Its Discontents -- Toward And Ethic Of Fantasy -- The Nation-thing -- Notes -- Index Of Works Cited. Slavoj Žižek. An October Book. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [171]-183) And Index.

Slavoj Žižek provides a virtuoso reading of the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan through the works of contemporary popular culture, from horror fiction and detective thrillers to popular romances and Hitchcock films.

Booknews

A brilliant piece of work, as Yugoslavian social theorist (and reform activist) Zizek explicates famed French psychoanalyst Lacan through the motifs and works of contemporary popular culture, including Hitchcock, Chaplin, Stephen King, and George Romero. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Slavoj Zizek, a leading intellectual in the new social movements of Eastern Europe, provides a virtuoso reading of the psycholanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan through the works of contemporary popular culture, from horror fiction and detective thrillers to popular romances and Hitchcock films.