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

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Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture

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Slavoj Zizek, a leading intellectual in the new social movements that are sweeping Eastern Europe, provides a virtuoso reading of Jacques Lacan. Zizek inverts current pedagogical strategies to explain the difficult philosophical underpinnings of the French theoretician and practician who revolutionized our view of psychoanalysis. He approaches Lacan through the motifs and works of contemporary popular culture, from Hitchcock's Vertigo to Stephen King's Pet Sematary, from McCullough's An Indecent Obsession to Romero's Return of the Living Dead - a strategy of "looking awry" that recalls the exhilarating and vital experience of Lacan.

Zizek discovers fundamental Lacanian categories the triad Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, the object small a, the opposition of drive and desire, the split subject - at work in horror fiction, in detective thrillers, in romances, in the mass media's perception of ecological crisis, and, above all, in Alfred Hitchcock's films. The playfulness of Zizek's text, however, is entirely different from that associated with the deconstructive approach made famous by Derrida. By clarifying what Lacan is saying as well as what he is not saying, Zizek is uniquely able to distinguish Lacan from the poststructuralists who so often claim him.Slavoj Zizek is a Researcher in the Institute of Sociology at the University of Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. His work has been published in France and in Yugoslavia where, running as a proreform candidate, he narrowly missed being elected to the presidency of the republic of Slovenia.
 

Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out

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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.

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

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Hitchcock gets onto the analyst’s couch in this extraordinary volume of case studies.

The contributors bring to bear an unrivaled enthusiasm and theoretical sweep on the entire Hitchcock oeuvre, analyzing movies such as Rear Window and Psycho. Starting from the premise that ‘everything has meaning,’ the authors examine the films’ ostensible narrative content and formal procedures to discover a rich proliferation of hidden ideological and psychic mechanisms. 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 new edition features a brand-new essay by philosopher Slavoj Žižek, presenter of Sophie Fiennes’s three-part documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema.

With contributions by Pascal Bonitzer, Miran Božovič, Michel Chion, Mladen Dolar, Fredric Jameson, Stojan Pelko, Renata Salecl, and Alenka Zupančič

Mapping Ideology

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For a long time, the term ‘ideology’ was in disrepute, having become associated with such unfashionable notions as fundamental truth and the eternal verities. The tide has turned, and recent years have seen a revival of interest in the questions that ideology poses to social and cultural theory, and to political practice.

Mapping Ideology is a comprehensive reader covering the most important contemporary writing on the subject. Including Slavoj Žižek’s study of the development of the concept from Marx to the present, assessments of the contributions of Lukács and the Frankfurt School by Terry Eagleton, Peter Dews and Seyla Benhabib, and essays by Adorno, Lacan and Althusser, Mapping Ideology is an invaluable guide to the most dynamic field in cultural theory.

With contributions by Nicholas Abercrombie, Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, Michèle Barrett, Seyla Benhabib, Pierre Bourdieu, Peter Dews, Terry Eagleton, Stephen Hill, Fredric Jameson, Jacques Lacan, Michel Pécheux, Richard Rorty, Göran Therborn, and Bryan Turner

Lacan: The Silent Partners

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A dazzling re-evaluation of Jacques Lacan, uncovering his hidden inspirations.

Jacques Lacan is the foremost psychoanalytic theorist after Freud. Revolutionising the study of social relations, his work has been a major influence on political theory, philosophy, literature and the arts, but his thought has so far been studied without a serious investigation of its foundations. Just what are the influences on his thinking, so crucial to its proper understanding?

In Lacan: The Silent Partners Slavoj Žižek, the maverick theorist and pre-eminent Lacan scholar, has marshalled some of the greatest thinkers of our age in support of a dazzling re-evaluation of Lacan's work. Focussing on Lacan's 'silent partners', those who are the hidden inspiration to Lacanian theory, they discuss his work in relation to the Pre-Socratics, Diderot, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schelling, Hölderlin, Wagner, Turgenev, Kafka, Henry James and Artaud.

This major collection, including three essays by Žižek, marks a new era in the study of this unsettling thinker, breathing new life into his classic work.
With contributions by Alain Badiou, Bruno Bosteels, Miran Božovič, Lorenzo Chiesa, Joan Copjec, Mladen Dolar, Timothy C. Huson, Fredric Jameson, Adrian Johnston, Sigi Jöttkandt, Sylvia Ons, Robert Pfaller, and Alenka Zupančič