Looking Awry

Slavoj Žižek, a leading intellectual in the new social movements that are sweeping Eastern Europe, provides a virtuoso reading of Jacques Lacan. Žižek inverts current pedagogical strategies to explain the difficult philosophical underpinnings of the French theoretician and practician who revolutionized our view of psychoanalysis. He approaches Lacan through the motifs and works of contemporary popular culture, from Hitchcock''s Vertigo to Stephen King''s Pet Sematary, from McCullough''s An Indecent Obsession to Romero''s Return of the Living Dead—a strategy of "looking awry" that recalls the exhilarating and vital experience of Lacan.

Žižek discovers fundamental Lacanian categories the triad Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, the object small a, the opposition of drive and desire, the split subject—at work in horror fiction, in detective thrillers, in romances, in the mass media''s perception of ecological crisis, and, above