Looking awry: an introduction to Jacques Lacan through popular culture

TLDR

Žižek offers a novel, playful reading of Lacan that challenges conventional pedagogical approaches and differs from Derrida's deconstruction. The study aims to clarify Lacan’s intended meanings and omissions so that Žižek can distinguish genuine Lacanian thought from poststructuralist misinterpretations. Žižek analyzes Lacan by mapping his concepts onto motifs from contemporary popular culture, such as Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. Žižek finds that Lacan’s core categories—Imaginary, Symbolic, Real, object a, drive versus desire, and the split subject—manifest across horror, detective thrillers, romances, media depictions of ecological crisis, especially in Hitchcock films.

Abstract

Slavoj ?i?ek, a leading intellectual in new social movements that are sweeping Eastern Europe, provides a virtuoso reading of Jacques Lacan. ?i?ek inverts current pedagogical strategies explain difficult philosophical underpinnings of French theoretician and practician who revolutionized our view of psychoanalysis. He approaches Lacan through motifs and works of contemporary popular culture, Hitchcock's Vertigo to Stephen King's Pet Sematary, from McCullough's An Indecent Obsession to Romero's Return of Living Dead--a strategy of looking awry that recalls exhilarating and vital experience of Lacan. ?i?ek discovers fundamental Lacanian categories--the triad Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, object small a, the opposition of drive and desire, split subject--at work in horror fiction, in detective thrillers, in romances, in mass media's perception of ecological crisis, and, above all, in Alfred Hitchcock's films. The playfulness of ?i?ek's text, however, is entirely different that associated with deconstructive approach made famous by Derrida. By clarifying what Lacan is saying as well as what he is not saying, ?i?ek is uniquely able distinguish Lacan poststructuralists who so often claim him.