Book cover of Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture

Book description

Slavoj Žižek, a leading intellectual in the new social movements that are sweeping Eastern Europe, provides a virtuoso reading of Jacques Lacan. Žižek 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…


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Why read it?

1 author picked Looking Awry as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This study was published during my student years, and I was instantly attracted to Žižek’s unorthodox approach and his idiosyncratic rhetoric. The idea that (Lacanian) theory and (Hegelian) philosophy only make sense insofar as one can explain it to two ‘idiots’ by using examples from ‘popular’ culture, and film in particular, struck a chord with me.

The way Žižek can discuss within only a few pages a Stephen King adaptation, a spaghetti western, and a Fritz Lang film has confused several of his critics, but it has been mind-blowing to me to the present day. Bold and thought-provoking as his…

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December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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