Anyone who has read a book by Slavoj Žižek knows that it is difficult - almost impossible - to give a coherent summary of what he has written. That's because there is a chaotic force to the structure of his books, an apparent anarchism that makes it feel as though Žižek should perhaps be taking some kind of medication to mitigate his scattered attention. There's also that little matter of him constantly repeating (plagiarizing?) his own work, so that reading successive works of his creates a strong sense of déjà vu.

That said, there is no question that Žižek knows what he is talking about. His points and insights have a rare penetration into the complexities of whatever issue he is talking about - the problem is merely that he likes to jump from topic to topic, leaping with apparent abandon from a discussion of the function of the gaze in Hitchcock to the "postmodernity" of Kafka to the hysterical nature of Hegelian philosophy to the formal structure of the democratic subject all without blinking an eyelid.

As such, I'm not going to give an overview of what Žižek presents in Looking Awry, an introduction to Lacan that compares favorably with his 2006 effort [b:How to Read Lacan|18919|How to Read Lacan|Slavoj Žižek|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1349036461s/18919.jpg|847953], which felt more like the fulfillment of a contract obligation than a labor of love. Instead, I simply want to mention two of the things that I got out of reading this book, new perspectives on Lacan to which Žižek opened my eyes.

The first is Žižek's justification of the later Lacan. Everyone who reads Lacan tends to be fascinated with the early to middle stages of Lacan's work, namely, the structuralist-linguistic model that he develops in "An Instance of the Letter..." Žižek, however, emphasizes how the later Lacan provides a more profound set of ideas and techniques for moving beyond the vagaries of language and into an exploration of the real. Žižek is a groundbreaking interpreter of Lacan precisely because he has been able to see the value of this later development in Lacan's thought, which is either ignored by Lacanians or seen (by Roudinesco, for instance) as a distraction from his real work. I also tend to see the later Lacan, with the mathemes and the knots, as an adventure in nonsense, but Žižek is able to draw out some valuable stuff, especially from Seminars 17, 20, and 23.

The second is Žižek's explanation of the sinthome. I have been trying so hard to grasp the significance of this term, which up until this point seemed banal and theoretically useless. However, in Chapter 7 of Looking Awry, Žižek finally explains, in the ethical context of Lacan's work, how there is a movement from a concern with the symptom (dialectical, negotiable, symbolic) to the sinthome (non-dialectical, non-negotiable, real). This was a major theoretical breakthrough for me, a concept the value of which no other writer has allowed me to see.

Looking Awry is not really an "introduction" to Jacques Lacan, as its subtitle claims - it is a critical rereading of Lacan by Žižek, in an attempt not only to explain but to reposition the basic understanding of what Lacan's thought was trying to do, to move beyond the linguistic model that has dominated Lacanian thought and explore the more radical dimensions of his later thought. ( )

Judith Butler said, in a way that always seemed too doting and sat uncomfortably with me, "Discussing Hegel and Lacan is like breathing for Slavoj". i was a cynic; I always thought that in discussing Lacan, Zizek was really discussing Zizek (and sometimes Hitchcock), not that that was a problem, because Zizek is an interesting topic and Zizek discusses him in a fun, clever way. This earlyish vol from the MIT Press, though, makes me think I wasn't giving the guy (Z) credit--in a moderately programmatic way that suits the subject much as though he were writing the mother of all "Lacan for Dummies" books--illustrating each point copiously with examples from film (e.g., constantly, Hitchcock) and "pulp" fiction (e.g. Ruth Rendell, Heinlein, Stephen King, which may legitimately annoy you if you think the line between art and commerce in the book world is too thickly drawn by the conventional wisdom (as who doesn't [which makes hating on the line our new conventional wisdom, I suppose, and Zizek a reverse iconoclast in that wise]?), and without delving too deep into "matheme" bullshit, Zizek does a decent job of demystifying Lacanian silliness and convincing me that maybe, just maybe, the man had something to say about desire and its goals, drives and their aims, that wasn't just basic Freud crossed with basic Foucault crossed with basic common sense with a sprinkling of fuck-off jargon. Nice work! Jouissance!

(That's already the second time I've written the word "jouissance" this morning.) ( )