Looking Awry ─ An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture

Slavoj Zizek, a leading intellectual in the new social movements that are sweepingEastern Europe, provides a virtuoso reading of Jacques Lacan. Zizek inverts current pedagogicalstrategies to explain the difficult philosophical underpinnings of the French theoretician andpractician who revolutionized our view of psychoanalysis. He approaches Lacan through the motifs andworks of contemporary popular culture, from Hitchcock's Vertigo to Stephen King's Pet Sematary, fromMcCullough's An Indecent Obsession to Romero's Return of the Living Dead - a strategy of "lookingawry" that recalls the exhilarating and vital experience of Lacan.Zizek discovers fundamentalLacanian categories the triad Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, the object small a, the opposition of driveand desire, the split subject - at work in horror fiction, in detective thrillers, in romances, inthe mass media's perception of ecological crisis, and, above all, in Alfred Hitchcock's films. Theplayfulness of Zizek's text, however, is entirely different from that associated with thedeconstructive approach made famous by Derrida. By clarifying what Lacan is saying as well as whathe is not saying, Zizek is uniquely able to distinguish Lacan from the poststructuralists who sooften claim him.Slavoj Zizek is a Researcher in the Institute of Sociology at the University ofLjubljana, Yugoslavia. His work has been published in France and in Yugoslavia where, running as aproreform candidate, he narrowly missed being elected to the presidency of the republic ofSlovenia.

Diana Taylor is Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University.She is the author of Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America(University of Kentucky Press, 1991), Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Genderand Nationalism in Argentina's "Dirty War" (Duke University Press, 1997), andThe Archive and the Repertoire (Duke University Press, 2003). A TDR ContributingEditor, she has edited numerous volumes on performance and politics in theAmericas, and is the Founding Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performanceand Politics, funded by the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.