Zizek through Hitchcock: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Slavoj Zizek But Were Afraid to Ask Alfred Hitchcock

Maverick Slovenian cultural theorist, philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek 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 Žižek's pretensions to cinephilia and film criticism seriously? In this book, adopting Žižek's own tactic of counterintuitive observation, the author reads the corpus of Alfred Hitchcock's films ('one of the great achievements of Western civilization') and Žižek's idiosyncratic citation of them in order to identify the core commitments that inform Žižek's own work. From the practice of Hitchcock the author arrives at a theory of Žižek. 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 Žižek's ideas