Overview
- Adopts Žižek’s own tactic of counterintuitive observation to read the corpus of Alfred Hitchcock’s films?
- Argues that Žižek reads the dialectical process of Hegel in a more radical way
- Explores a specific key concept crucial to the elaboration and core of Žižek’s ideas in each chapter
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (9 chapters)
-
Front Matter
-
Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Maverick Slovenian cultural theorist, philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek has made his name elaborating the complexities of psychoanalytic and Marxist theory through the exotic use of examples from film and popular culture. But what if we were to take Žižek’s pretensions to cinephilia and film criticism seriously? In this book, adopting Žižek’s own tactic of counterintuitive observation, we shall read the corpus of Alfred Hitchcock’s films (‘one of the great achievements of Western civilization’) and Žižek’s idiosyncratic citation of them in order to arrive at a position where we can identify the core commitments that inform Žižek’s own work. From the practice of Hitchcock we shall (hopefully) arrive at a theory of Žižek (just as Žižek in his collection Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (Verso, 1992) arrives at a theory of Lacan from the practice of Hitchcock). To achieve this goal each chapter looks at a specific film by Hitchcock and explores a specific key concept crucial to the elaboration and core of Žižek’s ideas.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Laurence Simmons is Professor of Film Studies in Media and Communication at The University of Auckland, New Zealand. He has written extensively on New Zealand and Italian cinema, as well as works of critical theory including the co-edited volume From Z to A: Žižek at the Antipodes (2005).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Žižek through Hitchcock
Authors: Laurence Simmons
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62436-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-62435-4Published: 13 May 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-62438-5Published: 13 May 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-62436-1Published: 12 May 2021
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIV, 367
Number of Illustrations: 13 b/w illustrations, 17 illustrations in colour
Topics: Directing, Philosophy, general, Film Theory