Contingent Encounters and Retroactive Signification: Zooming in on the Dialectical Core of Žižek’s Film Criticism

Abstract

Film for Žižek works as a kind of magnifying lens, revealing to us the formal structure of consciousness and the mode of appearance of reality. Although Žižek has engaged in depth with the art of cinema, venturing into film theory and focusing on specific film authors,¹ his many filmic references, as a rule brief and sharp, serve the purpose of clarifying psychoanalytic and philosophical issues. This, however, should not deceive us on his “use” of cinema: it is not merely that Žižek’s writing on film is ancillary to philosophy, but it points to a philosophy of film that is deeply embedded in Žižek’s forma mentis. Žižek’s critics contend that his treatment of film shows little to no respect for the specificity of single films or for the filmic medium as a whole.² As I have argued elsewhere,³ what this criticism misses is not only the inherent originality of Žižek’s contribution to film studies,⁴ but also the argument that a Žižekian “film theory” is worth pursuing if we aim directly at the core of Žižek’s thinking, since the latter is implicitly cinematic, in other words, its dialectical coordinates center on the problem of mediation.