Free Ebook: How to Read Lacan by Slavoj Zizek

The How to Read series provides a context and an explanation that will facilitate and enrich your understanding of texts vital to the canon. These books use excerpts from the major texts to explain essential topics, such as Jacques Lacan's core ideas about enjoyment, which re-created our concept of psychoanalysis.

Lacan’s motto of the ethics of psychoanalysis involves a profound paradox. Traditionally, psychoanalysis was expected to allow the patient to overcome the obstacles which prevented access to "normal" sexual enjoyment; today, however, we are bombarded by different versions of the injunction "Enjoy!" Psychoanalysis is the only discourse in which you are allowed not to enjoy.

Slavoj Žižek’s passionate defense of Lacan reasserts Lacan’s ethical urgency. For Lacan, psychoanalysis is a procedure of reading and each chapter reads a passage from Lacan as a tool to interpret another text from philosophy, art or popular ideology.

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How to Read Lacan by Slavoj Zizek

1. Introduction

2. Empty Gestures and Performatives: Lacan Confronts the CIA Plot

3. The Interpassive Subject: Lacan Turns a Prayer Wheel

4. From Che vuoi? to Fantasy: Lacan with Eyes Wide Shut

5. Troubles with the Real: Lacan as a Viewer of Alien

6. Ego Ideal and Superego: Lacan as Viewer of Casablanca

7. "God is Dead, but He Doesn't Know It": Lacan Plays with Bobok

8. The Perverse Subject of Politics: Lacan as a Reader of Mohammad Bouyeri

Buy How to Read Lacan here.