Abstract
Film and mass culture are of interest because they represent aspects of everyday life and the part of the culture from below that makes it possible to understand how people cope with the deadlocks of power and repression and of exploitation. Film theory adds significantly to the theory of ideology, but a Žižekian analysis of cinema, rather than simply adding to film theory, is better suited to the critique of ideology One area where film analysis and the critique of ideology overlap is on the category of enjoyment. For Žižek, enjoyment, or jouissance, is a political problematic that is connected to ideology. By analyzing and interpreting enjoyment in cinema, Žižek adds to our understanding of enjoyment in ideology. A Žižekian analysis of cinema, while paying little attention to the specificity of the filmic medium, does develop a much stronger analysis of the mediation of ideology. This chapter introduces a Žižekian analysis of cinema that focuses on the production of enjoyment in spectatorship and in ideology.
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Notes
Colin MacCabe, “Realism and Cinema,” in Tracking the Signifier—Theoretical Essays: Film, Linguistics, Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 52.
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 164.
G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 89.
Žižek, Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Rout-ledge, 2004), 150.
Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xii.
See David Bordwell, “A Case for Cognitivism,” Iris 9 (1989): 11–40, 13.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1963–64), trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 34.
See Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 146–149;
and Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 59.
Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 89.
A Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 57.
Žižek, Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 30.
On this point, see Renata Salecl, On Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 2004), and The Tyranny of Choice (London: Profile, 2011).
Slavoj Žižek, “The Spectre of Ideology,” in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 1994), 4.
See Žižek, Parallax View, 246–50; see also, Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (London: Vintage, 2001).
Jacques Lacan, Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (1954– 1955), trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 164.
Žižek. The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 6.
Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), 101.
A Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski between Theory and Post-Theory (London: BFI, 2001), 76.
See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film and Theory: An Anthology, eds. Toby Miller and Robert Stam (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000);
and Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Ben Brewster et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
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© 2012 Matthew Flisfeder
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Flisfeder, M. (2012). Enjoyment in the Cinema. In: The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137110749_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137110749_7
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