Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)

by Zizek, Slavoj; Bonitzer, Pascal; Bozovic, Miran; Chion, Michel; Dolar, Mladen

• ISBN13: 9781844676217
• ISBN10: 1844676218
• Edition: 00
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-08-03
• Publisher: VERSO

Summary

The contributors bring to bear an unrivalled enthusiasm and theoretical sweep on the entire Hitchcock oeuvre, from Rear Window to Psycho , which is shown to be an exemplary source of postmodern defamiliarization. Starting from the premise that 'œeverything has meaning,' the authors analyze the films' ostensible narrative content and formal procedures to discover a rich proliferation of ideological and psychic mechanisms at work. But Hitchcock is also a bait to lure the reader into a serious Marxist and Lacanian exploration of the construction of meaning. An extraordinary landmark in Hitchcock studies, this edition features a brand new essay by Slavoj Zizek.

Author Biography

Slavoj Zizek is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Table of Contents

Foreword to the Second Edition	p. vii
Introduction Alfred Hitchcock, or, The Form and its Historical Mediation	p. 1
The Universal: Themes
Hitchcockian Suspense	p. 15
Hitchcock's Objects	p. 31
Spatial Systems in North by Northwest	p. 47
A Perfect Place to Die: Theatre in Hitchcock's Films	p. 73
Punctum Caecum, or, Of Insight and Blindness	p. 106
The Particular: Films
Hitchcockian	p. 125
The Spectator Who Knew Too Much	p. 129
The Cipher of Destiny	p. 137
A Father Who Is Not Quite Dead	p. 143
Notorious	p. 151
The Fourth Side	p. 155
The Man Behind His Own Retina	p. 161
The Skin and the Straw	p. 178
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