Zizek through Hitchcock by Laurence Simmons
Maverick Slovenian cultural theorist, philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek 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 Zizeks pretensions to cinephilia and film criticism seriously? In this book, adopting Zizeks own tactic of counterintuitive observation, we shall read the corpus of Alfred Hitchcocks films (one of the great achievements of Western civilization) and Zizeks idiosyncratic citation of them in order to arrive at a position where we can identify the core commitments that inform Zizeks own work. From the practice of Hitchcock we shall (hopefully) arrive at a theory of Zizek (just as Zizek 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 Zizeks ideas.