Justin's Reviews > Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture

This is one of the most fascinating books I've read in a while. Zizek does for "serious" contemporary philosophy what no one has before: he makes it reasonably accessible and super interesting. But Zizek is not someone whose express goal it is to make the works of a giant like Lacan accessible to the public at large, but more to further explicate Zizek's own philosophy (two parts Lacan, two parts Hegel, one part Marx), which is not on the surface in this book, but is always just under the surface. Much of the work in this book finds itself reworked in Zizek's self-professed tour de force, The Parallax View. That being said, it is Zizek's goal to make Zizek's philosophy, while perhaps not "immediately accessible" to the public at large, at least clear enough that someone with an acquaintance with 20th C. Continental Philsophy would have a good chance at wrapping his/her mind around it. At least more accessible than anyone like Derrida, Deleuze or even Lacan himself ever tried to make their work.

Anyone with a passing interest and some knowledge of contemporary philosophy/psychoanalysis vis a vis Lacan should read this. Zizek's primary goal here is not to make Lacan accessible in some kind of systematic way but to elucidate the work of mainly Hitchcock (as well as some others including the entire mystery genre of fiction as well as a little Stephen King) via Lacan. One gets the impression that wherever Zizek casts his net, he would reel in Lacan. The effect does not seem contrived but rather that Lacan does indeed pervade cinema and fiction if not our lives more generally.