The undergrowth of enjoyment: how popular culture can serve as an introduction to Lacan
New Formations - ISSN 0950-2378
Volume 1989 Number 9
The undergrowth of enjoyment: how popular culture can serve as an introduction to Lacan
Slavoj Žižek pages -
Abstract
Zizek uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to read film texts, focussing on the crucial break in Lacan’s thinking which occurred in 1959/60, when an emphasis on desire was transformed into a focus on jouissance or enjoyment. Zizek looks at ideas of communication, and the cinematic gaze and voice, as well as the motif of dreaming and waking (in particular the popular ‘it was all a dream’ ending) in relation to films by Hitchcock, Spielberg, Gilliam and others, as well as in the writing of Robert Heinlein, Franz Kafka, Ruth Rendell and Patricia Highsmith. He pays particular attention to films which feature technical ‘prohibitions’, such as a rule of ‘no cuts’, ‘no speech’ or ‘no objective viewpoint’. These, he argues, induce a kind of claustrophobia and psychosis in the viewer, rendering such formal experiments ultimately unsatisfying.
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To cite this article
Slavoj Žižek (1989) The undergrowth of enjoyment: how popular culture can serve as an introduction to Lacan, New Formations, 1989(9), -