?i?ek through Hitchcock

Maverick Slovenian cultural theorist, philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj ?i?ek 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 ?i?ek's pretensions to cinephilia and film criticism seriously? In this book, adopting ?i?ek'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 ?i?ek's idiosyncratic citation of them in order to arrive at a position where we can identify the core commitments that inform ?i?ek's own work. From the practice of Hitchcock we shall (hopefully) arrive at a theory of ?i?ek (just as ?i?ek 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 ?i?ek's ideas.