Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
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. < b=""> Fredric R. Jameson <> , Duke University
Review
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. The MIT Press
Review
" 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 The MIT Press
Synopsis
Slavoj iek, a leading intellectual in the new social movements in Eastern Europe, 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.
Synopsis
Slavoj Zizek, a leading intellectual in the new social movements in Eastern Europe, 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.
Slavoj Zizek is a Researcher in the Institute of Sociology at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He ran as a proreform candidate for the presidency of the republic of Slovenia, then part of Yugoslavia, in 1990.
About the Author
Diana Taylor is Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University.She is the author of Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America(University of Kentucky Press, 1991), Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Genderand Nationalism in Argentina's "Dirty War" (Duke University Press, 1997), andThe Archive and the Repertoire (Duke University Press, 2003). A TDR ContributingEditor, she has edited numerous volumes on performance and politics in theAmericas, and is the Founding Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performanceand Politics, funded by the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.