Looking awry: an introduction to Jacques Lacan through popular culture

Slavoj ?i?ek, a leading intellectual in new social movements that are sweeping Eastern Europe, provides a virtuoso reading of Jacques Lacan. ?i?ek inverts current pedagogical strategies explain difficult philosophical underpinnings of French theoretician and practician who revolutionized our view of psychoanalysis. He approaches Lacan through motifs and works of contemporary popular culture, Hitchcock's Vertigo to Stephen King's Pet Sematary, from McCullough's An Indecent Obsession to Romero's Return of Living Dead--a strategy of looking awry that recalls exhilarating and vital experience of Lacan.?i?ek discovers fundamental Lacanian categories--the triad Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, object small a, the opposition of drive and desire, split subject--at work in horror fiction, in detective thrillers, in romances, in mass media's perception of ecological crisis, and, above all, in Alfred Hitchcock's films. The playfulness of ?i?ek's text, however, is entirely different that associated with deconstructive approach made famous by Derrida. By clarifying what Lacan is saying as well as what he is not saying, ?i?ek is uniquely able distinguish Lacan poststructuralists who so often claim him.