Zizek's most recent film, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, was presented at the Independent Film Festival of Boston in 2007. (I mentioned it in the 15 April NYT Sampler.) Publishers Weekly Starred Review. A Lacanian-Hegelian philosopher and pop culture critic who divides his time between America and Slovenia, Zizek is one of the few living writers to combine theoretical rigor with compulsive readability, and his new volume provides perhaps the clearest elaboration of his theoretical framework thus far. Expatiating on such subjects as ,Heidegger, neuroscience, the war on terror and The Matrix, he seeks to rehabilitate dialectical materialism by replacing the popular "yin-yang" interpretation (the struggle between opposites that ultimately form a whole) with a theory of the "gap which separates the One from itself." One example is a tribe whose two subgroups draw mutually exclusive plans of their village: their deadlock "implies a hidden reference to a constant... an imbalance in social relations that prevented the community from stabilizing itself into a harmonious whole." Discussing Abu Ghraib and pedophilia in the Catholic Church, Zizek explores how an ideological edifice is sustained by underground transgressions: "Law can be sustained only by a sovereign power which reserves for itself the right... to suspend the rule of law(s) on behalf of the Law itself." Based on his interpretation of Lacanian psychoanalysis, he envisions a society in which public law would no longer sustain itself through its own obscene breach. This challenging book takes us on a roller-coaster ride whose every loop is a Mobius strip.
About the film, IFF Boston said: World-renowned philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek examines the work of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky, Charlie Chaplin and others, concluding that "Cinema is the ultimate pervert art...It doesn't give you what you desire, it tells you how to desire."
You can read the book's introduction: A Spanish art historian uncovered the first use of modern art as a deliberate form of torture: Kandinsky and Klee, as well Bunuel and Dali, were the inspiration behind a series of secret cells and torture centers built in Barcelona in 1938, the work of a French anarchist,Alphonse Laurencic (a Slovene family name!), who invented a form of "psychotechnic" torture: he created his so-called "colored cells" as a contribution to the fight against Francofs forces. The cells were as inspired by ideas of geometric abstraction and surrealism as they were by avant-garde art theories on the psychological properties of colors. Beds were placed at a 20-degree angle, making them near-impossible to sleep on, and the floors of the 6-foot-by-3-foot cells were strewn with bricks and other geometric blocks to prevent the prisoners from walking backward and forward.The only option left to them was staring at the walls, which were curved and covered with mind-altering patterns of cubes, squares, straight lines, and spirals which utilized tricks of color, perspective, and scale to cause mental confusion and distress. Lighting effects gave the impression that the dizzying patterns on the wall were moving. Laurencic preferred to use the color green because, according to his theory of the psychological effects of various colors, it produced melancholy and sadness.
The Parallax View, by Slavoj Zizek |
