Hitchcock

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (63)

1. #01

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.84

   <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor** > **Three significant turns away from Marxism in film theory**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that three major currents—realism, auteurism, and cultural studies—constituted a turn away from Marxist (especially Adornian) film theory by privileging spectatorial agency, medium transparency, and particularism over form, mediation, and critique; and that the institutionalization of film studies itself, as part of the cultural superstructure, materially conditioned this retreat from Marxism.

   D. W. Griffiths or Alfred Hitchcock could be pointed to as parallels for famous composers studied in musicology

2. #02

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.158

   <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Ideology in Fight Club** > **Cinematographic innovations**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Fight Club's cinematographic innovations—particularly the IKEA catalog sequence, reverse-tracking CGI shots, and multi-camera construction—formally enact Marxist analytical procedure by foregrounding labor, mediation, and the gap between commodity and its conditions of production, making the film's style itself a materialization of Marxist critique.

   the camera zooms in to the catalog page, embarking on a 360-degree pan through the space of an apartment but that quickly becomes visual acrobatics of melding the medium of the print catalog with that of film

3. #03

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.165

   <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Ideology in Fight Club** > **Genre bending**

   Theoretical move: Fight Club's successive genre-blending operates as a self-reflexive formal strategy: by destabilising generic expectations, the film transforms itself into an interpretative problem that disrupts the 'efficient communication' of Hollywood convention and courts active, critical engagement from audiences rather than passive consumption.

   the film positions itself in the genre of spectacular twister, in the tradition of The Sixth Sense or The Usual Suspects

4. #04

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.166

   <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Ideology in Fight Club** > <span id="page-164-0"></span>**Intertextuality and the labor of cinema**

   Theoretical move: Fight Club's intertextuality is theorized not merely as aesthetic citation but as a formal technique that mediates the cinematic mode of production — making visible the collective labor behind the unified screen illusion — and thereby functions ideologically to interrogate capitalism and representation from within the film itself.

   Shots of the outside of the Paper St house directly quote Hitchcock's composing of the Bates residence in Psycho.

5. #05

   Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.102

   FA S C I SM OR E M AN C IPATION

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the political valence of capitalism's crises is determined by how one interprets the emergent gaze: fascism misreads it as an external distortion to be purified, while emancipatory politics identifies with it as the system's inherent imbalance — a distinction illustrated through The Usual Suspects as a cinematic analogue for the encounter with the gaze.

   In The Usual Suspects, a moment of crisis occurs that occasions just the effect that a crisis in capitalism does, and it points the spectator toward emancipation rather than fascism.

6. #06

   Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.206

   ROM AN TIC C OME DIE S AND LOV E C OME DIE S

   Theoretical move: Romantic comedies ideologically transform love into romance by eliminating love's traumatic core and rendering it a profitable commodity; authentic love, by contrast, disrupts social recognition and status, working against the capitalist logic of acquisition that romance serves.

   If Hollywood usually takes seriously Alfred Hitchcock's legendary claim that 'movies are real life with the boring parts cut out,' then the elision of the initial stages of relationships seems shocking.

7. #07

   Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.247

   A SATI SFIE D OR IE N TALI SM

   Theoretical move: McGowan argues that orientalism is a structural product of capitalism's commodity-sublime logic — the exoticism of the Other is an extension of commodity fetishism — and that Coppola's *Lost in Translation* performs an antiorientalist move not by revealing an 'authentic' Japan but by relocating sublimity in the act of sublimation itself, thereby invalidating the Other as commodity and opening a Hegelian path beyond capitalist accumulation.

   its sublimity resides in the encounter that the Western visitors have with it, and in the film, Coppola shows that what makes Japan appear sublime is the perspective taken up toward it.

8. #08

   Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.260

   IN TRODU C TION: AF TE R IN J USTIC E AND R E PR E SSION

   Theoretical move: This passage is a footnote/endnote section providing bibliographic citations and brief scholarly asides for the introduction; it contains no sustained theoretical argument of its own.

   In Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), Tom Cassidy tells Marion Crane that he is spending 40,000 for a house... not as a way of 'buying happiness' but instead of 'buying off unhappiness.'

9. #09

   Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.263

   . THE SUBJEC T OF DE SIR E AND THE SUBJEC T OF C APITALISM

   Theoretical move: This endnotes passage performs several interlocking theoretical moves: it grounds capitalism's logic in the structure of desire and the signifier (gap, mediation, lack), distinguishes psychoanalytic castration from mere frustration, aligns Hegel's ontology of nothing with the foundational role of absence in signification, and positions psychoanalysis against object-relations, deconstruction, and Heideggerian authenticity in their respective treatments of loss and the Other.

   Several voices championing Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) as cinema's greatest achievement... Like Kane, Vertigo also explores the contrast between the lost object and its replacement.

10. #10

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.271

    . SHIE LDIN G OUR E YE S FROM THE GAZ E

    Theoretical move: This endnotes passage develops several theoretical moves: it distinguishes the Lacanian gaze as traumatic object (founding absence structuring desire) from the gaze as mastering look; argues Marx's error was not underestimating selfishness but overestimating self-interest; and uses Hitchcock's Rear Window to anchor the gaze/objet petit a distinction, while also touching on fetishistic disavowal, ideology, and emancipatory politics.

    the difference between the gaze understood as a mastering look and the gaze understood as a traumatic object is perhaps most clearly manifested in the opposing interpretations of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954).

11. #11

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.209

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Conclusions > The Heart of the Matter

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that a Lacanian account of religion grounds the sacred not in wish-fulfilling illusion but in the subject's primordial, ambivalent orientation toward das Ding as the void at the heart of the Other—and further proposes that both religion and science are ultimately forms of devotion to (and defense against) this unknown Thing, thereby dissolving Freud's simple religion/science opposition while aligning Lacan with an "art of unknowing."

    The cinematic evocation of this unnerving but irresistible extra, this uncanny something more, was the key to Alfred Hitchcock's genius

12. #12

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.27

    **Jacques Lacan** > <span id="page-15-0"></span>**IN THE BEG IN N IN G WAS LOVE**

    Theoretical move: Lacan draws a structural parallel between Socrates and Freud as figures who "served Eros in order to make use of him," arguing that this shared practice — and the radical atopia it produces with respect to the social order — is the true precondition of transference and the analytic encounter, which necessarily suspends intersubjectivity rather than deepening it.

    To refer only to Hitchcock's most recent film [Psycho], consider in what form the unscrambler of enigmas appears, the one who is presented there as deciding irrevocably at the end when there is no longer any other recourse.

13. #13

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.70

    chapter 2 > The acousmatics of the voice

    Theoretical move: The acousmatic voice—a voice whose source cannot be seen or located—is shown to structurally produce effects of divinity, authority, and uncanny presence (Unheimlichkeit) by separating the voice from its body, and this mechanism operates through a fantasy-encirclement of the enigmatic object behind the screen, linking the acousmatic to the Voice as Lacanian object.

    think of Hitchcock's Psycho, which revolves entirely around the question 'Where does the mother's voice come from? To which body can it be assigned?'

14. #14

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.180

    The Unvennogender Other: Hysteria and DeDlocracy in ADlerica > The Locked-Room Paradox and the Group

    Theoretical move: The locked-room paradox of detective fiction is the literary figure for the logical operation of suture: a non-empirical surplus element (Objet petit a) must be added to any differential series of signifiers to mark the impossibility of its closure, and this interior limit is what makes counting—and hence the modern statistical-political formation of groups—possible at all.

    I wanted to have a long dialogue scene between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers … They open the door to the car and out drops a corpse.

15. #15

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.253

    LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > Sexual Diference and the Superego

    Theoretical move: This footnote-dense passage develops a critique of film theory's assumptions about the gaze, arguing that aggressivity is not grounded in the reversibility of the imaginary look but in the unreturned, unsymbolizable gaze that resists making the subject fully visible — a specifically Lacanian (not imaginary-identificatory) account of the gaze and aggressivity.

    Jacqueline Rose's 'Paranoia and the Film System'... directed specifically at Raymond Bellour's analyses of Hitchcock

16. #16

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.140

    Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety > The Drying Up of the Breast

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that vampirism figures the collapse of fantasy's support of desire—the "drying up of the breast" as objet petit a—when the extimate object loses its proper distance and returns as an uncanny double endowed with surplus jouissance, threatening the subject's constitutive lack; this structure is traced across breast-feeding advocacy, vampire fiction, Hitchcock's Rebecca, and La Jetée.

    it is Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca-a twentieth century version of an eighteenth century form, the 'female Gothic'-that best illustrates the fact that the object which 'completes' the subject, filling in its lack, is also always a disfiguring surplus.

17. #17

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.122

    5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *From "Divine" Violence . . .*

    Theoretical move: The passage critiques Žižek's valorization of "divine violence" by arguing that it collapses the necessary tension between transgressing and affirming normative limits, and risks "forcing the encounter with the Real" — a move that forecloses the context-specific political work of symbolization in favor of an absolute ethical act.

    the discourse suddenly shifts to a celebration of Norman's murder of Marion in Hitchcock's Psycho

18. #18

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.176

    **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **The Locked-Room Paradox and the Group**

    Theoretical move: Copjec argues that the "locked-room paradox" in detective fiction is the structural equivalent of language's internal limit: the excess element is not a hidden surplus beneath the structure but the limit immanent to it, which is why the detective's interpretive act is constitutively desire—the quasi-transcendental principle that posits a gap irreducible to evidence—and why the sexual relation is structurally foreclosed from the genre by the absence of the final, woman-signifier.

    We may now return to the assembly-line scene that Hitchcock planned for North by Northwest to observe this paradox at work.

19. #19

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.170

    **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **The Locked-Room Paradox and the Group**

    Theoretical move: Copjec uses Miller's reading of Frege via Lacan to argue that the locked-room paradox in detective fiction is the literary form of the suture operation: the corpse functions as objet petit a—the non-empirical, interior limit of the series—without which neither counting nor the modern social group is possible, thereby countering Foucauldian/historicist accounts that reduce concealment to a fiction of panoptic power.

    In his famous interview with François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock describes a scene he planned to include in North by Northwest … out drops a corpse.

20. #20

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

    <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_page237"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_pg237" class="pagebreak" title="237"></span></span>**Notes** > **Chapter 7**

    Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 7, listing scholarly sources cited in the chapter's argument about statistics, noir film, suture, voice, and drive. The only substantive theoretical content appears in note 16, which argues that Jakobson's differential phonology exhibits the same logic of suture as Frege's, and in note 28, which deploys the drive/defense-against-drive distinction to clarify the theory of film noir.

    François Truffault, Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), p. 257.

21. #21

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.129

    **Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety** > <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_c05_r1.htm_page127"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_c05_r1.htm_pg127" class="pagebreak" title="127"></span></span>**The Drying Up of the Breast**

    Theoretical move: Copjec argues that vampirism and the uncanny are structurally indexed to the collapse of the fantasy relation to the partial object (objet petit a): when the extimate object loses its status as object-cause of desire and is encountered at zero distance, anxiety replaces desire, the fantasy structure collapses, and jouissance floods in—a logic illustrated through breast-feeding discourse, vampire fiction, Hitchcock's Rebecca, and Marker's La Jetée.

    it is Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca—a twentieth-century version of an eighteenth-century form, the 'female Gothic'—that best illustrates the fact that the object which 'completes' the subject, filling in its lack, is also always a disfiguring surplus.

22. #22

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.189

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sinuosities of Sexualized Time > [Cracks in Circular Time](#contents.xhtml_ahd12)

    Theoretical move: Žižek deploys a science-fiction time-travel paradox to argue that reality is constituted by the structural exemption of a Real element: when the "ontologically cheating" object is finally returned to its proper place, reality itself collapses—a logic he extends to ideology, where a political commitment sustained by a borrowed future reveals the same catastrophic structure.

    inspects the room with a Hitchcockian gaze, like Lila and Sam do with Marion's motel room in Psycho

23. #23

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.6

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-2453"></span>Unorientable Space of <span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-498"></span><span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-1339"></span>Dialectical Materialism

    Theoretical move: The passage advances a programmatic argument that dialectical materialism must be reconceived as a formal materialism of unorientable surfaces—without substantial matter or teleological development—and that sexuality (understood as radical negativity following Lacan) is the privileged site where the parallax gap between ontology and the transcendental is redoubled and thus our sole contact with the Absolute, with topology (Möbius strip, cross-cap, Klein bottle) providing the structural vocabulary for this redoubling.

    Everyone who has seen Hitchcock's Vertigo remembers the mysterious scene in the sequoia park where Madeleine walks over to a redwood cross-section of an over-a-thousand-year-old trunk

24. #24

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.367

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > [The Inhuman View](#contents.xhtml_ahd24)

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that abstract universality (the subject, labour, cogito) achieves its "practical truth" only in capitalist modernity, and that this historically conditioned abstraction is nonetheless irreversible—after capitalism there is no return to pre-modern substance. Lacan's achievement is to de-substantialize the subject (and the Unconscious), making $ a purely relational, non-substantial entity whose "bar" is a transcendental-formal condition rather than a historically variable exclusion, which separates him from Butler's account of interpellation.

    Recall the magic moment at the beginning of Vertigo when, in Ernie's restaurant, Scottie sees Madeleine for the first time

25. #25

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1608"></span>Parallax <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1657"></span>of Ontology

    Theoretical move: The passage introduces the concept of the "parallax gap" as ontologically real—not merely epistemological—by illustrating through Prus's story how two incommensurable dimensions (realist and transcendental) coexist without synthesis, and then uses the couple's silent mutual deception as a figure for Hegelian Absolute Knowing.

    in short, it's 'Rear Window' with a twist.

26. #26

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.130

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Sexual Parallax and Knowledge](#contents.xhtml_ahd8)

    Theoretical move: Sexuality is constitutively grounded in a structural impossibility ('il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel') rather than in repressed instinct: fantasy fills the gap opened by this impossibility, infantile sexuality is not a pre-normative productive base but the very site where the impossibility first registers, and copulation itself has two sides—the Master-Signifier of orgasmic culmination and S(Ⱥ), the signifier of the barred Other as irreducible antagonism.

    to put it in Hitchcockian terms, she changes into a woman who knew too much

27. #27

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > [Index](#contents.xhtml_end2)

    Theoretical move: This is a non-substantive passage consisting of index entries (P–S) from Žižek's *Sex and the Failed Absolute*, listing topics and their page locations with no argumentative content.

    *Psycho* (Hitchcock) [here], [here]

28. #28

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.266

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > [<span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_p259" class="pagebreak" title="259"></span>A Snout in Plato’s Cave](#contents.xhtml_ahd18)

    Theoretical move: The Klein bottle's topology—specifically its "snout" as the subject's inscription in reality—is used to argue that the subject is not merely a fiction generated by objective neuronal processes (contra Metzinger) but the very convolution through which the Real observes itself; the Splitting of the Subject ($) and Objet petit a are shown to be two aspects of the same topological feature seen from inside and outside respectively.

    In the second staircase murder (of the detective Arbogast) from Hitchcock's Psycho, we first get the Hitchcockian god's-point-of-view shot from above … as if, in this twist from objective to subjective shot, god himself lost his neutrality and 'fell into' the world

29. #29

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.384

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > Notes

    Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for the chapter "The Persistence of Abstraction," providing scholarly citations and brief ancillary remarks (e.g., on totalitarianism vs. authoritarian antagonism); it contains no primary theoretical argumentation of its own.

    I rely here on Jean-Pierre Esquenazi, Hitchcock et l'aventure de Vertigo, Paris: CNRS Editions 2001, pp. 123–26.

30. #30

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > [Index](#contents.xhtml_end2)

    Theoretical move: This is a non-substantive index passage from Žižek's *Sex and the Failed Absolute*, listing alphabetical entries from H–I with page-reference hyperlinks to various chapters; it performs no theoretical argument of its own.

    Hitchcock, Alfred *The Birds* [here](#theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-912) *Psycho* [here](#corollary_2_sinuosities_of_sexualized_time.xhtml_IDX-914) *Vertigo* [here](#introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-916)

31. #31

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.378

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > [The All-Too-Close In-Itself](#contents.xhtml_ahd25)

    Theoretical move: Žižek defends the transcendental subject against object-oriented ontology by arguing that the subject is not an object but an irreducible standpoint, and redeploys the Lacanian Real as virtual-impossible rather than materially present, showing how direct neuronal manipulation produces a "more real than real" experience that dissolves the reality/simulacrum divide — while paralleling this logic to the Unconscious (which must not be substantialized) and to neurotheology's hard-rock encounter with the Real.

    Recall Hitchcock's dream of the direct manipulation of emotions: in the future, a director will no longer have to invent intricate narratives... he will dispose of a keyboard connected directly with the viewer's brain

32. #32

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.145

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [The Sexed Subject](#contents.xhtml_ahd9)

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the 'feminine' formula of sexuation (non-All, multiplicity filling in the void of the missing binary signifier) has logical priority over the 'masculine' formula (All-with-exception), and that this asymmetry reveals feminine subjectivity as a more radical negativity — not determinate negation but pure 'without,' i.e., the barred subject ($) as such — making the feminine the constitutive operator of reality's inconsistency rather than its exception.

    Something like this happen in Hitchcock's Vertigo: after losing Madeleine, Scottie discovers that what he lost—Madeleine—never existed, that it was a fake staged for him from the very beginning

33. #33

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    INTRODUCTION

    Theoretical move: Fantasy is not the scene of desire's satisfaction but its constitutive frame and simultaneously a defence against the raw desire of the Other; the completed Graph of Desire maps the structural impossibility between the Symbolic order and jouissance, where the lack in the Other enables Separation (de-alienation) and drives are tied to remnant erogenous zones that survive the signifier's evacuation of enjoyment.

    Let us take Hitchcock's Rear Window: the window through which James Stewart, disabled and confined to a wheelchair, gazes continually is clearly a fantasy-window - his desire is fascinated by what he can see through the window.

34. #34

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    INTRODUCTION

    Theoretical move: Symbolic identification (ego-ideal, I(O)) dominates imaginary identification (ideal ego, i(o)) as the mechanism of socio-symbolic interpellation, but this quilting always leaves a remainder — the gap of 'Che vuoi?' — which marks the irreducible split between demand and desire and prevents full closure of the subject's integration into the symbolic order.

    This 'Che vuoi?' is perhaps best illustrated by the starting point of Hitchcock's film North by Northwest.

35. #35

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    INTRODUCTION

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the symbolic order is constituted around an impossible Real kernel, requiring a contingent element to embody its structural necessity; this logic generates a quartet of "subject presumed to…" figures (know, believe, enjoy, desire) that articulate the unconscious as the gap between form and content—illustrated through Hitchcock and Mozart.

    Finally, we have a third kind of object: the birds in The Birds, for example... This object has a massive, oppressive material presence... it is just a mute embodiment of an impossible jouissance.

36. #36

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    INTRODUCTION

    Theoretical move: The subject is not a questioning force but an "answer of the Real" — the void produced when the Other's question exposes the ex-timate traumatic kernel (objet petit a / das Ding); this hystericization is constitutive of the subject, while interpellation/subjectivation functions as an attempt to evade this kernel through identification. Žižek further deploys Hitchcock's object-typology to distinguish the MacGuffin, the circulating real-object (objet petit a), and the phallic object, showing how the Real must irrupt to establish the symbolic structure.

    we must not forget that in Hitchcock's films, too, the MacGuffin is just one of three types of object

37. #37

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    INTRODUCTION

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian Real is a paradoxical entity that does not exist yet produces structural effects (trauma, jouissance, the MacGuffin, class struggle, antagonism), and extends this logic to the 'forced choice of freedom'—the subject is always-already positioned in the symbolic order such that 'free choice' is itself real-impossible, structured retroactively, which Žižek traces from Kant through Schelling to Freud/Lacan.

    To mention the final example: the famous MacGuffin, the Hitchcockian object, the pure pretext whose sole role is to set the story in motion but which is in itself 'nothing at all'

38. #38

    The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.112

    ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Diane's Wish Fulfillment

    Theoretical move: Fantasy's structural function is to cover over the constitutive dissatisfaction of desire by reorganizing obstacles, repositioning objects, and delivering the objet petit a in a "pure form" free of pathological taint — a theoretical move McGowan demonstrates through a systematic reading of the two parts of *Mulholland Drive* as desire-world versus fantasy-world.

    Lynch uses the same actor to play Camilla Rhodes in the second part of the film and Rita in the first part, but changes the name in order to illustrate fantasy's attempt to deliver the impossible object in a pure form, free of any pathological taint.

39. #39

    The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.47

    ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Voices Unhinged

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Lynch's *Dune* deploys the voice as an "impossible object" — an object-cause of desire that destabilizes rather than secures symbolic authority — in order to construct a fully fantasmatic world where the originary loss of the privileged object has not occurred, enabling direct access to jouissance and collapsing the boundary between internal and external reality.

    Rather than working to reinforce a regime of power, the voice challenges and undermines every such regime.

40. #40

    The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.61

    ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Fantasy and the Traumatic Encounter

    Theoretical move: Fantasy's ideological function depends on withholding the traumatic encounter with the impossible object, but Lynch's *Blue Velvet* extends fantasy to its logical conclusion, staging a direct encounter with the real dimension of the impossible object (embodied as the Gaze) and thereby producing genuine jouissance rather than mere pleasure.

    For Lacan, 'The objet a in the field of the visible is the gaze.'

41. #41

    The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.55

    ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > A Different Kind of Separation?

    Theoretical move: Blue Velvet's fundamental opposition is not between public reality and its underside but between two equally fantasmatic worlds (stabilizing and destabilizing fantasy) and a separate space of desire; by separating the two modes of fantasy, Lynch renders visible their underlying structural similarity and opposes masculine fantasy to feminine desire.

    As opposed to Hitchcock's melodramas, which often center on a woman, Blue Velvet is a man's world

42. #42

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.318

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Do We Still Live in a World?

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that global capitalism is uniquely "worldless" — it dissolves every stable representational frame rather than founding one — and this creates a fundamental aporia for Badiouian emancipatory politics (which traditionally intervenes from within a world's symptomal excess), forcing a parallax reading of the economy/politics non-relation as the key structural problem for any leftist project today.

    There is a nice Hitchcockian detail in Finding Nemo: when the dentist's monstrous daughter comes into her father's office, where there is an aquarium, the music is that of the murder scene from Psycho.

43. #43

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.136

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > interlude 1

    Theoretical move: Žižek reads the final scene of Henry James's *The Wings of the Dove* as a demonstration of how the intersubjective status of knowledge (knowing that the Other knows) restructures libidinal economy, and how Densher's "test" enacts a deceptive formal/informal dialectic aimed at deceiving the big Other—presenting a forced choice as freedom while the object-letter functions as a proto-Hitchcockian materialization of intersubjective tension.

    Such an object is never possessed: we do not manipulate it, it is the object itself which determines what we are, its possession affects us in an uncontrollable way.

44. #44

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.349

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > The Ignorance of the Chicken

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the opposition between liberal cynicism and fundamentalism is a false one masking a deeper shared pathology—both substitute direct knowledge for authentic belief—while the structural logic of the symbolic order (fetishistic disavowal, the big Other, les non-dupes errent) requires a "third term" to reveal the true antagonism beneath ideological surface oppositions, and that "the truth has the structure of a fiction" applies to political, aesthetic, and theological domains alike.

    Recall the United Nations murder scene from Hitchcock's North by Northwest: at the very moment when Cary Grant is engaged in a conversation with the senior UN diplomat...

45. #45

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.407

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 1: Kate's Choice, or, The Materialism ofHenry James > 3The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Divine Shit

    Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section providing citations and brief elaborations on various topics (Hegelian dialectics, Christian theology, psychoanalysis, biogenetics, digital technology), containing no sustained theoretical argument of its own but several embedded conceptual gestures including a Lacanian reference to truth vs. knowledge and a Hegelian point about historical dimension of notions.

    God is like a Hitchcockian film-maker or a painter who withdraws from his finished product, signaling his authorship merely by a barely discernible signature at the edge of the picture.

46. #46

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.73

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > A Boy Meets the Lady

    Theoretical move: The passage uses the Bobby Peru scene from Lynch's *Wild at Heart* as a pivot to theorize the structure of the empty gesture, desire vs. want, and the "wild analyst" figure, then extends the analysis through Heidegger's reading of Trakl to argue that sexual difference is not between two sexes but between the asexual and the sexual — with the discordant *Geschlecht* being irreducibly feminine, not neutral — making the presexual "undead boy" a figure of Evil and the Real of antagonism.

    I am tempted to insert in the same series the famous shot in the scene at the florist's early in Hitchcock's Vertigo.

47. #47

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.47

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Master-Signifier and Its Vicissitudes

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "truth" of ideology lies in its universal form rather than its fantasmatic support, and that genuine subjectivity is constituted by a structural gap or noncoincidence-with-itself — a void that is not filled by particular content but is itself a stand-in for a missing particular — thereby linking the Hegelian dialectic of Subject/Substance to Lacanian aphanisis and the three-level triad of Universal-Particular-Individual.

    Take the systematic use of this device in Hitchcock: Ingrid Bergman skiing down a mountain slope in front of a ridiculously discrepant snowy background in Spellbound...

48. #48

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.143

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > interlude 1

    Theoretical move: The passage reads two Henry James novels—*The Wings of the Dove* and *The Golden Bowl*—as ethical and libidinal allegories: in *Wings*, Densher's "moral masochism" (fake love for Milly's memory) constitutes the real betrayal, while in *Golden Bowl*, the cracked bowl functions as the signifier of the barred Other that structures intersubjective relations, and the incest motif encodes the link between capitalist brutality and familial protection/violation.

    it is, rather, again a Hitchcockian object, a little piece of reality which circulates around, the focus of intense libidinal investments.

49. #49

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.402

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 1: Kate's Choice, or, The Materialism ofHenry James

    Theoretical move: This passage is a footnote apparatus for a chapter on Henry James, but it does substantive theoretical work by: (1) deploying the Lacanian triad of objects (objet petit a, S of barred A, big Phi) to map three types of Hitchcockian narrative objects found in James; and (2) critically noting James's failure to fully confront the ethical claim of revolutionary radicalism, contrasting this with Hegel's acknowledgment that the 'rabble' (Pöbel) is justified in its unconditional demands on society.

    the third Hitchcockian object, the traumatic impossible Thing which threatens to swallow the subject

50. #50

    The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.251

    29 > **20. Steven Spielberg's Search for the Father** > **21. D. W. Griffith's Suspense**

    Theoretical move: Hitchcockian suspense is structurally distinguished from Griffithian suspense by refusing to resolve desire through fantasy: rather than stabilizing desire via a fantasmatic resolution, Hitchcock divides desire between two antagonistic, logically opposed possibilities, thereby forcing a traumatic encounter with the impossible object and the antagonistic nature of desire itself.

    Hitchcockian suspense does not structure desire around a single focus, but rather divides our desire between two different antagonistic possibilities.

51. #51

    The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.214

    **Wim Wenders and the Ethics of Fantasizing**

    Theoretical move: Fantasy, unlike pure desire (which remains confined to the level of the signifier and thereby insulates the subject from the real other), exposes the subject to the real other by making it vulnerable—and this vulnerability constitutes the ethical dimension of fantasy that the cinema of intersection (Wenders) uniquely reveals.

    Only the division of the filmic experience into separate realms makes this radical experience possible because this division facilitates the direct encounter with the gaze.

52. #52

    The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.161

    21

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Griffith's parallel editing structure embeds a fantasmatic logic that domesticates the gaze by converting it from an impossible, traumatic absence into a knowable, manageable presence—thereby demonstrating that the formal racism of the "cinema of integration" is inseparable from its editorial technique of suspense-through-fantasy.

    As Alfred Hitchcock notes in an interview with François Truffaut, we have a choice between 'fifteen seconds of surprise' and 'fifteen minutes of suspense.'

53. #53

    Theory Keywords · Various · p.32

    **Fantasy** > **Form**

    Theoretical move: The passage pivots between Hegel's account of how consciousness's experience generates new objects "behind its back" and Žižek's transposition of this logic into cinematic form: just as the in-itself emerges for us but not for consciousness, cinematic form operates beneath narrative meaning as a proto-real level that communicates with itself, constituting the proper density of the cinematic experience.

    In Hitchcock we have the motif of a person hanging above an abyss by the hand of another person...so we see here the same visual motif repeating itself.

54. #54

    Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.17

    Žižek Responds! > [Introduction](#contents.xhtml_ch01) > Universally Antagonistic

    Theoretical move: Žižek's political project is grounded in a reconceptualization of universality as constitutive antagonism rather than totalizing wholeness: particulars, identities, and social structures emerge from and are sustained by a universal antagonism that can never be resolved, making emancipation consist not in overcoming antagonism but in insisting on it—a position figured topologically through the Möbius strip and the objet a as the excremental singular point that embodies the universal.

    one of the great achievements of Alfred Hitchcock, for instance, is to show the subjective moment of the objective world, as in the God's eye shot from The Birds (1963)

55. #55

    Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.7

    Žižek Responds! > [Introduction](#contents.xhtml_ch01) > The Unemployed Theorist

    Theoretical move: This passage is a biographical and intellectual-historical introduction to Žižek's career, outlining his trajectory from Yugoslav academia through his embrace of Lacan and Hegel to global theoretical prominence; it is non-substantive in terms of direct theoretical argument.

    His second book in English, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (1991), turned to film and especially Alfred Hitchcock in order to explain Lacan's most difficult ideas.

56. #56

    Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.308

    Žižek Responds! > [Response to Rousselle](#contents.xhtml_ch13a)

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Rousselle's (and Miller's) thesis of "generalized foreclosure" characterizing the current political era, contending that the symbolic order remains operative—as evidenced by political censorship that still works through metaphoric substitution (absence standing in for prohibited content)—and that the Iraq WMD and Ukraine "bio-labs" narratives function as Hitchcockian MacGuffins rather than psychotic foreclosures.

    the non-existing 'Iraqi weapons of mass destruction' fitted perfectly the status of the Hitchcockian MacGuffin.

57. #57

    Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.238

    Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10)

    Theoretical move: Nobus argues that Lacan's "Kant with Sade" constitutes the impossible-yet-central nucleus of Žižek's entire intellectual project, and that a rigorous critique of Žižek must reconstruct the coherence of his scattered readings of that essay through a centripetal force mirroring the centrifugal force required to read Lacan's text itself.

    Hegel is read with Lacan, Lacan is read with Hitchcock, ideology is read with dirty jokes, and so on.

58. #58

    Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.103

    Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek’s Hegel](#contents.xhtml_ch4)^{<a href="#4_slavoj_ieks_hegel.xhtml_en4-1" id="4_slavoj_ieks_hegel.xhtml_nr4-1">1</a>} > IV

    Theoretical move: The passage critiques Žižek's use of "negation of negation" and "pure drive beyond fantasy" as un-Hegelian residues of positivist metaphysics, arguing through readings of Coetzee's *Disgrace* and Hitchcock's *Vertigo* that genuine Hegelian mediation dissolves the fantasy frame without positing an excess or remainder beyond dialectics, and that ideological distortion (not ontological remainder) explains why subjects cannot traverse their fantasies.

    The second example is equally interesting. It is Hitchcock's Vertigo.

59. #59

    Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.209

    Žižek Responds! > [Response to Zalloua](#contents.xhtml_ch8a)

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that "dislocation" — the radical re-contextualization of an element into a new symbolic space that confers an entirely new meaning — is the key dialectical concept that corrects misreadings of Hegelian Sublation: in genuine dialectical passage, Universality itself is dislocated and a predicate becomes a new Subject, so that no single overarching Substance persists through history.

    Bernard Herrmann's clarinet quintet 'Souvenirs de voyage' (1967) opens up with the same melodic line that he used a decade earlier in the beginning of the most famous piece (scene d'amour) from his score of Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958).

60. #60

    Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

    Žižek Responds! > [<span class="grey">INDEX</span>](#contents.xhtml_end1)

    Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section from the edited volume "Žižek Responds!" listing proper names and concepts (H–K) with hyperlinked page references; it performs no theoretical argument.

    Hitchcock, Alfred [here], [here] *Birds*, *The* [here] MacGuffin [here] *Vertigo* [here], [here]

61. #61

    Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.259

    Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10) > Notes

    Theoretical move: This footnote apparatus is non-substantive, comprising bibliographic endnotes that track a textual crux (deletion of 'a' in the English Écrits), cite Žižek's 1992 engagement with Lacan's second schema in "Kant with Sade," and point to Foucault's 1970 Sade lectures as an unexpected champion of Lacan's idea linking Sade's writing to object a.

    Slavoj Žižek, 'In His Bold Gaze My Ruin Is Writ Large.' In Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (London-New York NY: Verso, 1992), 222.

62. #62

    Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.105

    [UNIVERSAL VILLAINS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_3) > **NAZISM’S POSTHUMOUS TRIUMPH**

    Theoretical move: Nazism's postwar ideological victory lies precisely in its depoliticization: by being rendered as 'pure evil' (a lust for power or a natural danger) rather than as an anti-universalist identity politics, Hollywood and popular ideology unwittingly ratify Nazism's own particularist logic, confirming that the real danger of Nazism is its refusal to think universally, not an excess of universalism.

    We can see this depoliticization in almost any Hollywood thriller utilizing Nazis as villains, such as Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and its sequels.

63. #63

    What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.61

    Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's formulas of sexuation are not about anatomical or cultural difference but about two distinct logical configurations of the same constitutive minus (castration/phallic function) intrinsic to the signifying order, such that sexual difference is ontological rather than secondary—and that feminine jouissance marks precisely the place where the Other's lack is inscribed in the Other itself, functioning as the signifier of missing knowledge rather than as an obstacle to the sexual relation.

    we have a nice illustration of this, to borrow one of Žižek's examples, in Hitchcock's movie Rear Window. James Stewart… watches her searching the apartment… now he very much desires her. She has quite literally entered the 'window of his fantasy.'