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

About this book

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 Hitchcocks Vertigo to Stephen Kings Pet Sematary from McCulloughs An Indecent Obsession to Romeros Return of the Living Deada strategy of "looking awry" that recalls the exhilarating and vital experience of Lacan. Zizek discovers fundamental Lacanian categoriesthe triad Imaginary/Symbolic/Real the object small a the opposition of drive and desire the split subjectat work in horror fiction in detective thrillers in romances in the mass medias perception of ecological crisis and above all in Alfred Hitchcocks films. The playfulness of Zizeks 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.