Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out
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Book Overview
The title is just the first of many startling asides, observations and insights that fill this guide to Hollywood on the Lacanian psychoanalyst's couch.
Zizek introduces the ideas of Jacques Lacan through the medium of American film, taking his examples from over 100 years of cinema, from Charlie Chaplin to The Matrix and referencing along the way such figures as Lenin and Hegel, Michel Foucault and Jesus Christ.
Enjoy Your Symptom is a thrilling guide to cinema and psychoanalysis from a thinker who is perhaps the last standing giant of cultural theory in the twenty-first century.
Customer Reviews
Rated 5 starsthe point?
"I cannot weigh in an estimation of the value of this book. Surely, it is not as profoundly useful or clear as Zizek's political and philosophical thriller, Ticklish Subject. Yet, the application of Zizek's critical arsenal to Hollywood without the baggage of Politics and History, makes room for exposition through, sad to say, a universal and more immediate medium." Here's a statement that completely misses not only the point...
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Rated 4 starselevator music piped upwind
Clarity of language and argument one finds, some feel, rarely in current theoretical writing or in psychoanalytic writing. Here Zizek has structured his book so that nearly every idea gets two chances to impress the reader. I would agree with one of the reviews on this site of another of Zizek's books, that the author writes more clearly and persuasively about politics than about culture. However, this book presents a pleasing...
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Rated 5 starsvery clear stuff
If you know anything about Hegel and Lacan, Zizek is actually a quite clear expositor of Lacan. Looking awry is particularly clear, lucid to the point of simplification in his account of Lacan, but what can you expect when your proof-test is Hitchcock and HOllywood movies. Most academic books consist of (dead author) and (contemporary theorist), and if the text at hand simply serves to validate the theory, why drag out...
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