The Lacanian Thing: Psychoanalysis, Postmodern Culture, and Cinema, Student Edition

Note: this is a shortened version of the original, hardcover work. References have been removed.This book explores the Lacanian concept of the 'Thing' and its critical re-elaboration by Slavoj Žižek, one of the foremost philosophers and cultural critics of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It is important to stress this is not a book about Žižek; neither is it an introduction to his philosophy nor a classification or ordering of his ideas. Instead, this book is inspired by Žižek's take on Lacan in order to rethink and explore some undercurrents of his thought, some embryonic insights, circulating around the Thing. Žižek's books have been published widely over the last fifteen years, his work unsettles and provokes the stalemate of academia, sparks new discussions. This book adds to this ongoing attempt to elaborate a psychoanalytic approach to the popular culture. The book focuses on the unrepresentable in post-modern culture and how this unrepresentable resurfaces in various forms of the uncanny, the sublime, the inhuman, as a return of something repressed which has been plaguing reason since the Enlightenment. It explores a whole range of unconscious postmodernist political enjoyment, from Radical Evil and pleasure in horror, to dreams of the everyday and the impotence of the utopian. Finally it poses the question how does the monstrous, the loathsome occult otherness, gradually become part of everyday life, of ideology and a dsytopian support for globalisation. In order to outline the problems and effects of the unrepresentable Thing, in addition to Žižek's psychoanalysis, the book crosses a wide range of theories: post-feminism, film theory, literary theory of the fantastic and so on. The book is an interdisciplinary quest of the Thing through a wide range of topics. It asks how to represent the representation of the unrepresentable. In declaring from the outset that this book is about "no/thing," author Mario Vrbancic thereby indicates that he is aware of the attendant difficulties. The effect of reading the book is to at least make plausible the notion that there are indeed elective affinities between various manifestations of the Thing. In this respect, the invocation of Hardt and Negri--with capital as the thing--is the strong version of his argument, but not its strongest argument. The eleven chapters explore notions of jouissance, the law, the devil, conspiracy, cinema, gaze, thought, alien, vampire, and zone in relation to the thing. By a strategy of circulating around its theme in this way, one is progressively drawn into a book that does indeed acquire a cumulative plausibility. This is an important book for all academic libraries. It will be an important text for all interested in psychoanalytic approach to popular culture. Read more