Zizek through Hitchcock

by Laurence Simmons

Overview

Maverick Slovenian cultural theorist, philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek has made his name elaborating the complexities of psychoanalytic and Marxist theory through the exotic use of examples from film and popular culture. But what if we were to take Žižek’s pretensions to cinephilia and film criticism seriously? In this book, adopting Žižek’s own tactic of counterintuitive observation, we shall read the corpus of Alfred Hitchcock’s films (‘one of the great achievements of Western civilization’) and Žižek’s idiosyncratic citation of them in order to arrive at a position where we can identify the core commitments that inform Žižek’s own work. From the practice of Hitchcock we shall (hopefully) arrive at a theory of Žižek (just as Žižek in his collection Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (Verso, 1992) arrives at a theory of Lacan from the practice of Hitchcock). To achieve this goal each chapter looks at a specific film by Hitchcock and explores a specific key concept crucial to the elaboration and core of Žižek’s ideas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030624385
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	05/12/2021
Edition description:	1st ed. 2021
Pages:	367
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Laurence Simmons is Professor of Film Studies in Media and Communication at The University of Auckland, New Zealand. He has written extensively on New Zealand and Italian cinema, as well as works of critical theory including the co-edited volume From Z to A: Žižek at the Antipodes (2005).

Table of Contents

From H to Z: Introduction.- Chapter 1. The objet petit a.- Chapter 2. The Real.- Chapter 3. The sinthome.- Chapter 4. Metastases.- Chapter 5. Jouissance.- Chapter 6. Fantasy: Che vuoi?.- Chapter 7. Pauline Christianity.- Coda: Does Hitchcock Remake Žižek?