Welcome to my site. I hope you find the contents useful and interesting.
At this time I’ve uploaded six essays, along with some related documents that I will gradually integrate. I’d like to preface the paper summaries by making it clear that, despite my strong criticisms, I’ve found Zizek’s work tremendously stimulating, and am grateful for his efforts. I hope he keeps at it, and the critical tone that inevitably comes across here should not be interpreted as a dismissal of his efforts.
In general, my aim is to present a loosely organized argument for the validity and relevance of the concept of ideology to critical social theory. In making that case reference psychoanalytic theory is both relevant and necessary, and most recently Zizek's writings, strongly shaped by his reading of Lacan, provide some of the most salient examples of psychoanalytic social criticism.
The “Madness” paper is the longest and most detailed. It criticizes Zizek’s unacknowledged emphasis on narcissistic psychic structures in his assessment of the possibility of radical politics. Lacanian theory deserves much of the blame for this, not the least in Lacan’s inept and unfair reading of the positions of other psychoanalytic schools, and I've included an example showing how Lacan misread and trivialized Ernst Kris' understanding of a case. The bulk of the paper draws on other psychoanalytic writers whose work with analysands takes them into the same areas of psychic reality that Zizek refers to in a cursory fashion, and their work suggests very different conclusions from his.
The Piano Teacher paper takes off from a reference to that film in Welcome to the Desert of the Real. I develop some of the ideas of the Madness paper and use film clips (you will need the latest Flash player to watch them) to support my points. In essence, I argue that Zizek’s Lacanian take on the film obscures key object relational components of the protagonists’ psychodynamics, and therefore its contribution to a politically relevant analysis is at best doubtful. I suggest that this failure may lie in Lacan's avoidance of acknowledging the role of the mother in engendering the narcissistic problematic, and point to his paper on The Mirror Phase as illustrative of this error.
The Hanging Rock paper bridges between comments by Stefan Gullatz on Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (updated Flash needed here as well) to a Zizek article of 1991 on nationalism in Eastern Europe. It focuses on their use of the Thing concept and argues that the concept's deployment brings a withering of the critical motor of psychoanalysis, the recovery of the subject's dialectical capacity vis-a-vis psychic reality. This results in a contemplative recasting of psychoanalytic theory, and in some ways a reversal of its critical function into a theoretical agent of reenchantment. Adorno's assessment of Heidegger as a purveyor of mystifying jargon serves as a critical reference point.
In the Wizard of Oz paper I argue that the film depicts a broad passage from a narcissistic conviction of lack to a mundane but more flexible way of relating to others that is relatively free of narcisisstic mediation and distortion. It is somewhat whimsical, not only because of its grounding but also because I’m uneasy with the affirmative tone I strike. Nevertheless, the film does trace the shifts in self-understanding that might accompany a resolution of narcissistic fixation, and thus helps to convey a potential for transcending narcissism that is lacking in Zizek's work.
The Scrooge paper takes issue with some aspects of an article on money by Joachim Kalka that appeared in New Left Review. I draw out how the cartoonist's presentation of Scrooge's obsession with money is eventually illuminated through Magica de Spel's appearance. Magica's nominally phallocentric preoccupation with Scrooge's fetish provides a standpoint for unpacking Scrooge's own flight from object relations, and this interpretation is then brought to bear on Kalka's understanding of Benjamin's concept of aura.
The Gaga paper follows up on an argument within US feminism between Susan Faludi and Jane Halberstam concerning the latter's applause for a Gaga-Beyoncé video, Telephone. I argue that the video is remarkably clear about a potential connection between an apparent commitment to postmodernist notions of unbound signification and violence against those unwilling to cooperate in derivative fantasies. Fundamentally liberatory concepts can undo themselves when they become caught up in rectifying the universal narcissistic calamities of childhood. Being on guard against this possibility is increasingly necessary, because it is these calamities that the culture industry, with its growing capacity for fantasy representation, seeks to remind us of and regressively reorient us to.
A comment on my style of presentation is in order. To me a great appeal of Internet-based writing is that it's possible to escape some of the usual limits on quotation imposed by print publishing. This allows not only more extensive quoting of text but, as you'll see, the quoting of film. Further -- operating on the margins of copyright law -- it also allows the site to help popularize work that would otherwise, as far as I can tell, only moulder on shelves. Thus at times I may simply provide a brief commentary to bring an important work to your attention.
I’ll be adding more in the near future. If you’d like to correspond, please contact me at (I’m not sure what spammers are capable of these days, so here goes) the name of the website, ideologystop,
at gmail etc.