Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture / Edition 1

by Slavoj Zizek

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262740159
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	09/08/1992
Series:	October Books
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.54(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Slavoj Žižek, a philosopher and cultural critic, is Senior Researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London. He is the author of more than thirty books, including Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, The Parallax View, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic (with John Milbank), and Žižek's Jokes (Did you hear the one about Hegel and negation?), these five published by the MIT Press.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
I How Real Is Reality?
1 From Reality to the Real
The Paradoxes of Objet Petit a
A Black Hole in Reality
2 The Real and Its Vicissitudes
How the Real Returns and Answers
How the Real Is Rendered and Knows
3 Two Ways to Avoid the Real of Desire
The Sherlock Holmes Way
The Philip Marlowe Way
II One Can Never Know Too Much about
Hitchcock4 How the Non-duped Err
"The Unconscious Is Outside"
Ladies Who Vanish
5 The Hitchcockian Blot
The Phallic Anamorphosis
The Maternal Superego
6 Pornography, Nostalgia, Montage: A Traid of the Gaze
The Perverse Short Circuit
The Hitchcockian Cut
III Fantasy, Bureaucracy, Democracy
7 The Ideological Sinthome
Gaze and Voice as Objects
"Love Thy Sinthome as Thyself"
8 The Obscene Object of Postmodernity
The Postmodernist Break
Bureaucracy and Enjoyment
9 Formal Democracy and Its Discontents
Toward and Ethic of Fantasy
The Nation-Thing
Notes
Index of Works Cited

What People are Saying About This

Fredric R. Jameson

Looking Awry is a wonderful introduction to dialectical psychoanalysis; to a fresh approach to the subjectivities of mass culture, and to an extraordinary new voice we will hear often in the coming years.

Endorsement

Looking Awry is a wonderful introduction to dialectical psychoanalysis; to a fresh approach to the subjectivities of mass culture, and to an extraordinary new voice we will hear often in the coming years.

—Fredric R. Jameson, Duke University

From the Publisher

" Looking Awry is a wonderful introduction to dialectical psychoanalysis; to a fresh approach to the subjectivities of mass culture, and to an extraordinary new voice we will hear often in the coming years." Fredric R. Jameson , Duke University

"A Hegelian and a Lacanian Hitchcock has my vote! Looking Awry is a wonderful introduction to dialectical psychoanalysis; to a fresh approach to the subjectivities of mass culture; and to an extraordinary new voice we will hear often in the coming years." Fredric R. Jameson

"Žižek is a one-person culture mulcher. Flinging out readings of film noir or Hitchcock"s The Birds, drawing maps of the unconscious, analyzing the commodity form, Stephen King, or Hegel"s Phenomenology of Spirit, be plays the philosopher as standup comic.... The elusive Lacan, who cultivated an aura of indecipherability with the care of a diva becomes a field guide to life in an age of media." Edward Ball , Voice Literary Supplement

Andrew Ross

Zizek is one of the very few thinkers who has been able to reinvent Lacan's fundamental concepts with a freshness and elasticity that makes one remember what was genuinely exciting and revolutionary about the Parisian school. His work is saturated with the lessons of philosophy and psychoanalysis and he has a feel for film and literary culture that is quite breathtaking.

Editorial Reviews

Žižek is a one-person culture mulcher. Flinging out readings of film noir or Hitchcock's The Birds, drawing maps of the unconscious, analyzing the commodity form, Stephen King, or Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, be plays the philosopher as standup comic...The elusive Lacan, who cultivated an aura of indecipherability with the care of a diva becomes a field guide to life in an age of media.—Edward Ball, Voice Literary Supplement—

From the Publisher

Žižek is a one-person culture mulcher. Flinging out readings of film noir or Hitchcock's The Birds, drawing maps of the unconscious, analyzing the commodity form, Stephen King, or Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, be plays the philosopher as standup comic...The elusive Lacan, who cultivated an aura of indecipherability with the care of a diva becomes a field guide to life in an age of media.

—Edward Ball, Voice Literary Supplement

Reviews

Žižek is a one-person culture mulcher. Flinging out readings of film noir or Hitchcock's The Birds, drawing maps of the unconscious, analyzing the commodity form, Stephen King, or Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, be plays the philosopher as standup comic...The elusive Lacan, who cultivated an aura of indecipherability with the care of a diva becomes a field guide to life in an age of media.

Voice Literary Supplement - Edward Ball

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)

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