Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out [Paperback]

Slavoj iek (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0415928125 | ISBN-13: 978-0415928120 | Publication Date: March 28, 2001 | Edition: 2

Slavoj Zizek, dubbed by the Village Voice "the giant of Ljubljana," is back with a new edition of his seriously entertaining book on film, psychoanalysis (and life). His inimitable blend of philosophical and social theory, Lacanian analysis, and outrageous humor are made to show how Hollywood movies can explain psychoanalysis-and vice versa using films such as Marnie and The Man Who Knew Too Much.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Sociology, contemporary cultural theory, linguistics and film meet once again in a text where fluid erudition and the anecdotal remain a characteristic of this compelling writer.
–Film Waves

Kant called example the 'go-cart of judgment.' His description can now be viewed as pre-Zizekian. This freshly expanded version of Enjoy Your Symptom! updates Kant, turning example into a whirling, dizzying, linear-logic defying turbo-jet of judgment. Pay attention to the title's imperative; it is a serious, all-out assault on theory's current obsession with an 'ethics of otherness'.
–Joan Copjec, author of Read My Desire

About the Author

Slavoj Zizek is Research Fellow at the University of Ljubljana. He teaches and lectures frequently in the United States. Among his many books are Looking Awry and The Ticklish Subject.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 2 edition (March 28, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415928125
• ISBN-13: 978-0415928120
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,369,113 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

"The most dangerous philosopher in the West," (says Adam Kirsch of The New Republic) Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include "First as Tragedy, Then as Farce;" "Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle;" "In Defense of Lost Causes;" "Living in the End Times;" and many more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars very clear stuff, April 1, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (Paperback)

If you know anything about Hegel and Lacan, Zizek is actually a quite clear expositor of Lacan. Looking awry is particularly clear, lucid to the point of simplification in his account of Lacan, but what can you expect when your proof-test is Hitchcock and HOllywood movies. Most academic books consist of (dead author) and (contemporary theorist), and if the text at hand simply serves to validate the theory, why drag out heavy reading when Hitchcock will do? If the theory is correct, it encompasses both Shakespeare and anything oj simpson ever appeared in, so not to use both would only be a sign of stuffiness. Zizek has the virtue of being easy to read and not taking himself too seriously, and begins every chapter with a quote from Lenin or Stalin, as if Stalin was the last philosopher. It's not a parody, but if Kojeve (Lacan) is right, that every philosophy is just a repetition of one moment of the Hegelian spirit, then Zizek's jeu d'esprit is an honest accomodation to what's happening now.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars elevator music piped upwind, March 27, 2003

By 

Alvaro Lewis "jwatson5" (Redwood City, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (Paperback)

Clarity of language and argument one finds, some feel, rarely in current theoretical writing or in psychoanalytic writing. Here Zizek has structured his book so that nearly every idea gets two chances to impress the reader. I would agree with one of the reviews on this site of another of Zizek's books, that the author writes more clearly and persuasively about politics than about culture. However, this book presents a pleasing mixture (as most of Zizek's books do) of the cultural, political, philosophical, and Lacanian munch.

Each chapter sets out to answer a question posed by the chapter heading (e.g., Why is Reality Always Multiple?). First Zizek approaches a solution or description of the problem as it appears in Hollywood films. These Zizek treats as texts or case studies. Whatever your opinion of the merits of psychoanalytic description for general use, the discussion of the films makes marvellously amusing reading. As demanding for this reader as the steep range of theoretical vocabulary employed is the ample library of films from which Zizek draws his examples. Many of which films I'd never seen. The second section of each chapter recasts the first approach through film in the language, theory and realm of analysis, theory and philosophy.

I cannot weigh in an estimation of the value of this book. Surely, it is not as profoundly useful or clear as Zizek's political and philosophical thriller, Ticklish Subject. Yet, the application of Zizek's critical arsenal to Hollywood without the baggage of Politics and History, makes room for exposition through, sad to say, a universal and more immediate medium.

2 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the point?, July 16, 2004

By 

"kortnay" (calgary) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (Paperback)

"I cannot weigh in an estimation of the value of this book. Surely, it is not as profoundly useful or clear as Zizek's political and philosophical thriller, Ticklish Subject. Yet, the application of Zizek's critical arsenal to Hollywood without the baggage of Politics and History, makes room for exposition through, sad to say, a universal and more immediate medium." Here's a statement that completely misses not only the point but the importance of Zizek. Ofcourse, in an era of achedemics and 'intellectual'-types complacently spiteful to popular culture as the anti-shakespeare (christ?), this isn't surprising.