Žižek through Hitchcock - Hardcover

Simmons, Laurence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3030624358 ISBN 13: 9783030624354

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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).

Edition details

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3030624358
• ISBN 13: 9783030624354
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 381