Žižek through Hitchcock

Žižek through Hitchcock PDF Author: Laurence Simmons
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030624366
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
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.

Žižek through Hitchcock

Žižek through Hitchcock PDF Author: Laurence Simmons
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030624366
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan PDF Author: Slavoj Žižek
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9780860915928
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
'A modernist work of art is by definition 'incomprehensible'; it functions as a shock, as the irruption of a trauma which undermines the complacency of our daily routine and resists being integrated. What postmodernism does, however, is the very opposite: it objects par excellence are products with mass appeal; the aim of the postmodernist treatment is to estrange their initial homeliness: 'you think what you see is a simple melodrama your granny would have no difficulty in following? Yet without taking into account the difference between symptom and sinthom/the structure of the Borromean knot/the fact that Woman is one of the Names-of-the-Father ... you've totally missed the point!' if there is an author whose name epitomises this interpretive pleasure of 'estranging' the most banal content, it is Alfred Hitchcock (and—useless to deny it—this book partakes unrestrainedly in this madness).' Hitchcock is placed on the analyst's couch in this extraordinary volume of case studies, as its contributors bring to bear an unrivalled enthusiasm and theoretical sweep on the entire Hitchcock oeuvre, from Rear Window to Psycho, as an exemplar of 'postmodern' defamiliarization. Starting from the premise that 'everything has meaning', the films' ostensible narrative content and formal procedures are analysed to reveal a rich proliferation of ideological and psychical mechanisms at work. But Hitchcock is here to lure the reader into 'serious' Marxist and Lacanian considerations on the construction of meaning. Timely, provocative and original, this is sure to become a landmark of Hitchcock studies. Contributors: Frederic Jameson, Pascal Bonitzer, Miran Bozovic, Michel Chion, Mlladen Dolar, Stojan Pellko, Renata Salecl, Alenka Zupancic and Slavoj Zizek.

Looking Awry

Looking Awry PDF Author: Slavoj Zizek
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262740159
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
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.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan PDF Author: Slavoj Žižek
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781844676224
Category : Psychoanalysis and motion pictures
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Hitchcock gets onto the analyst's couch in this extraordinary volume of case studies. The contributors bring to bear an unrivaled enthusiasm and theoretical sweep on the entire Hitchcock oeuvre, analyzing movies such as Rear Window and Psycho. Starting from the premise that 'everything has meaning,' the authors examine the films' ostensible narrative content and formal procedures to discover a rich proliferation of hidden ideological and psychic mechanisms. But Hitchcock is also a bait to lure the reader into a serious Marxist and Lacanian exploration of the construction of meaning. An extraordinary landmark in Hitchcock studies, this new edition features a brand-new essay by philosopher Slavoj Zizek, presenter of Sophie Fiennes's three-part documentary The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. Contributors: Pascal Bonitzer, Miran Bozovi?, Michel Chion, Mladen Dolar, Fredric Jameson, Stojan Pelko, Renata Salecl, Alenka Zupan'i? and Slavoj Zizek.

Hitchcock

Hitchcock PDF Author: Richard Allen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134477228
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
This new collection of writings on Alfred Hitchcock considers Hitchcock both in his time and as a continuing influence on filmmakers, films and film theory. The contributions, who include leading scholars such as Slavoj Zizek, Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen, and James Naremore, discuss canonical films such as Notorious and The Birds alongside lesser-known works including Juno and the Paycock and Frenzy. Articles are grouped into four thematic sections: 'Authorship and Aesthetics' examines Hitchcock as auteur and investigates central topics in Hitchcockian aesthetics. 'French Hitchcock' looks at Hitchcock's influence on filmmakers such as Chabrol, Truffaut and Rohmer, and how film critics such as Bazin and Deleuze have engaged with Hitchcock's work. 'Poetics and Politics of Identity' explores the representation of personal and political in Hitchcock's work. The final section, 'Death and Transfiguration' addresses the manner in which the spectacle and figuration of death haunts the narrative universe of Hitchcock's films, in particular his subversive masterpiece Psycho.

For They Know Not what They Do

For They Know Not what They Do PDF Author: Slavoj Žižek
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781859844601
Category : Civilization, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
With the disintegration of state socialism, we are witnessing this eruption of enjoymnet in the re-emergence of aggressive nationalism and racism. With the lid of repression lifted, the desires that have emerged are from from democratic. To explain this apparent paradox, says Slavoj Zizek, socialist critical thought must turn to psychoanalysis. For They Know Not What They Do seeks to understand the status of enjoyment within ideological discourse, from Hegel through Lacan to these political and ideological deadlocks. The author's own enjoyment of "popular culture" makes this an engaging and lucid exposition, in which Hegel joins hands with Rossellini, Marx with Hitchcock, Lacan with Frankenstein, high theory with Hollywood melodrama.

Absolute Recoil

Absolute Recoil PDF Author: Slavoj Zizek
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1781686823
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
A contemporary philosophical masterwork from “one of the world’s best-known public intellectuals ” (New York Review of Books) Philosophical materialism in all its forms – from scientific naturalism to Deleuzian New Materialism – has failed to meet the key theoretical and political challenges of the modern world. This is the burden of philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s argument in this pathbreaking and eclectic new work. Recent history has seen developments such as quantum physics and Freudian psychoanalysis, not to speak of the failure of twentieth-century communism, shake our understanding of existence. In the process, the dominant tradition in Western philosophy lost its moorings. To bring materialism up to date, Žižek – himself a committed materialist and communist – proposes a radical revision of our intellectual heritage. He argues that dialectical materialism is the only true philosophical inheritor of what Hegel designated the “speculative” approach in thought. Absolute Recoil is a startling reformulation of the basis and possibilities of contemporary philosophy. While focusing on how to overcome the transcendental approach without regressing to naïve, pre-Kantian realism, Žižek offers a series of excursions into today’s political, artistic, and ideological landscape, from Arnold Schoenberg’s music to the films of Ernst Lubitsch.

Violence

Violence PDF Author: Slavoj Zizek
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0312427182
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Philosopher, cultural critic, and agent provocateur Zizek constructs a fascinating new framework to look at the forces of violence in the world.

Hitchcock's Bi-Textuality

Hitchcock's Bi-Textuality PDF Author: Robert Samuels
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791436103
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Uses close readings of Hitchcock's films to combine an articulation of Lacan's theory of ethics with a discussion of recent theories of feminine subjectivity and queer textuality.

The Sublime Object of Ideology

The Sublime Object of Ideology PDF Author: Slavoj Žižek
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9780860919711
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
In this provocative and original work, Slavoj _i_ek takes a look at the question of human agency in a postmodern world. From the sinking of the Titanic to Hitchcock’s Rear Window, from the operas of Wagner to science fiction, from Alien to the Jewish Joke, the author’s acute analyses explore the ideological fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society. _i_ek takes issue with analysts of the postmodern condition from Habermas to Sloterdijk, showing that the idea of a ‘post-ideological’ world ignores the fact that ‘even if we do not take things seriously, we are still doing them’. Rejecting postmodernism’s unified world of surfaces, he traces a line of thought from Hegel to Althusser and Lacan, in which the human subject is split, divided by a deep antagonism which determines social reality and through which ideology operates. Linking key psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts to social phenomena such as totalitarianism and racism, the book explores the political significance of these fantasies of control. In so doing, The Sublime Object of Ideology represents a powerful contribution to a psychoanalytical theory of ideology, as well as offering persuasive interpretations of a number of contemporary cultural formations.