Secondary literature 2004

Lacan and Contemporary Film

Todd McGowan & Sheila Kunkle (eds.)

by Todd McGowan, Sheila Kunkle (2004)

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Synopsis

Lacan and Contemporary Film (2004), edited by Todd McGowan and Sheila Kunkle, assembles nine psychoanalytic essays that collectively mount a corrective intervention in the history of Lacanian film theory. The editors argue that the canonical apparatus theory of the 1970s and 1980s (Metz, Baudry, and their Althusserian framework) impoverished Lacan by reducing him to the Imaginary and Symbolic registers and by conceptualizing film exclusively as an ideological machine of interpellation. Against this, the collection relocates the gaze in the Real, reconceives fantasy as politically ambivalent rather than simply ideologically reproductive, and insists that traversal of fantasy constitutes a genuine political act. Each essay reads a contemporary film—ranging from Aronofsky's π and Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut to Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter and Jane Campion's Holy Smoke—as a site where the Real erupts within or against the symbolic order, where jouissance (phallic and Other) destabilizes ideology, and where subjects can encounter the traumatic kernel that the fantasy otherwise screens. The book is thus simultaneously a theoretical manifesto, a methodological reorientation of film studies toward interpretation rather than social science, and a series of close readings that demonstrate the political stakes of later Lacanian concepts—particularly the formulas of sexuation, the Not-All, the sinthome, and objet petit a as gaze. Together the essays argue that psychoanalytic film theory achieves its fullest critical purchase not when it diagnoses the subject's subjection to the signifier but when it tracks the points at which that subjection fails, cracks open, and becomes transformable.

Distinctive contribution

The collection's most distinctive contribution is its systematic theoretical shift from the Lacanian Imaginary/Symbolic axis—which dominated 1970s–80s apparatus theory—to the Real and to later Lacanian concepts (Seminar XX's formulas of sexuation, objet petit a as gaze rather than mirror-effect, jouissance as disruption rather than merely as regulatory excess). No single monograph in the Lacanian film-theory corpus before 2004 had gathered sustained close readings of contemporary films under the banner of this specifically post-apparatus-theory Lacanian framework. Where Žižek's contemporaneous film essays treat cinema as an illustrative device for theoretical propositions, and where Copjec's Read My Desire critiques apparatus theory at the level of epistemology, Lacan and Contemporary Film operationalizes the corrective by doing the actual interpretive work on specific films, demonstrating what a Real-oriented, jouissance-centered, fantasy-traversal reading looks like in practice.

A second distinctive contribution lies in the collection's sustained engagement with the political stakes of Lacanian film theory. Several essays take seriously Fredric Jameson's challenge—posed directly at the 1999 American Lacanian Link meeting—that Žižek and allied theorists never adequately bridge psychoanalytic critique and political action. The McGowan essay on Dark City and the Žižek essay on Fight Club/The Sweet Hereafter offer what amounts to a Lacanian theory of the political act: traversal of the fundamental fantasy is not merely a clinical end-point but the precondition for any authentic political rupture of the symbolic order. This move—fusing analytic praxis with political theory through close film reading—is not found in quite the same form elsewhere in the corpus.

Third, the collection advances feminist film theory beyond the Mulvey impasse by deploying Lacanian feminine jouissance (Other jouissance, the Not-All, S(Ⱥ)) as a theoretically precise and politically generative category. The Neroni essay on Campion and the Restuccia essay on von Trier both argue that feminine jouissance is neither a mystified essentialism nor simply a male fantasy: it is a structural position that disrupts phallic symbolic economy from within, and Campion's formal refusal of ideological closure (the "inadequate ending") is read as the filmic enactment of that disruption. This constitutes one of the most detailed Lacanian-feminist film readings in the secondary literature.

Main themes

Relocating the gaze from the Imaginary to the Real as objet petit a
Fantasy's political ambivalence: ideological support and potential site of traversal
Traversal of fundamental fantasy as precondition for authentic political action
Feminine jouissance (Other jouissance, Not-All) as disruptive force against phallic symbolic economy
The failure and obscene underside of the paternal function: symbolic father vs. jouissant father
Ideology's incomplete functioning and the subject's unconscious investment in symbolic authority
Psychosis, the Name-of-the-Father, and the contemporary faith in codes as metalanguage
The sexual non-relation and its cinematic representations across desire, love, and drive
Critique of classical Lacanian film theory (apparatus theory, spectatorship, Althusserian ideology-critique)
Hysteria, obsession, and perversion as structures organizing love, desire, and the relationship to objet petit a

Chapter outline

Introduction (McGowan and Kunkle)
Chapter 1: Sheila Kunkle — Psychosis and the Primordial Signifier (Aronofsky's π)
Chapter 2: Renata Salecl — The Anxiety of Love Letters
Chapter 3: Juliet Flower MacCannell — Between the Two Fears: Cape Fear and the Law
Chapter 4: Mark Pizzato — Catharsis, Sinthome, and the Gaze in Eyes Wide Shut
Chapter 5 (combined: Kinkle/Silverman-like chapter): The Alternate Reality Genre, Ideology, and the Primal Choice (Family Man, Memento, Dark City cluster)
Chapter 7: Slavoj Žižek — The Act and Trauma: The Sweet Hereafter and Fight Club
Chapter 8: Frances Restuccia — Love Beyond the Law: Breaking the Waves and Lacanian Hysteria
Chapter 9: Hilary Neroni — Jane Campion's Jouissance: Holy Smoke and Feminist Film Theory

Chapter summaries

Introduction (McGowan and Kunkle)

The editors' introduction performs a double task: it diagnoses the theoretical failures of first-generation Lacanian film theory (Metz, Baudry, and allied apparatus theorists) and charts the corrective trajectory of the essays that follow. The diagnosis turns on the claim that apparatus theory extracted a truncated Lacan—a Lacan of the 1950s Purloined Letter, of the perfectly functioning symbolic machine, of imaginary lure as ideological supplement—and thereby reduced film to a mechanism of interpellation. The signifier, on this early Lacanian picture, determines subjects without remainder, and psychoanalysis assists subjects only in recognizing their subjection. Film theory's appropriation of this model meant that cinema was conceived as the handmaiden of ideology, its imaginary supplement, rather than as a site where ideology fails and the Real erupts.

The introduction argues that the later Lacan—especially from Seminars X, XI, XIV, and XX onward—complicates this picture irreversibly. The Real is no longer simply what the symbolic order excludes; it is the stumbling block internal to the symbolic order itself, the traumatic kernel that ideology can never fully absorb. Fantasy, correspondingly, is not just a screen over the Real but an unstable structure whose traversal opens the possibility of political transformation. The collection's essays refocus Lacanian film theory on filmic texts rather than on spectatorship conceived as an external empirical process—a move the editors defend against the empiricist objection (Stephen Prince) by arguing that the text's reception is intrinsic to its construction, not posterior to it. This methodological stance returns film analysis to interpretation as its proper province.

The introduction also previews each essay's contribution, framing the collection's argument arc: from psychosis and the Name-of-the-Father (Kunkle on π), through the paternal function and law (MacCannell on Cape Fear), to catharsis and the gaze (Pizzato on Eyes Wide Shut), ideology and fantasy traversal (McGowan on Dark City), the political act and trauma (Žižek on The Sweet Hereafter), love and hysteria (Restuccia on Breaking the Waves), and finally feminist film theory and feminine jouissance (Neroni on Holy Smoke). The editors explicitly locate the collection in relation to the Jameson challenge—the demand that Lacanian theory articulate the bridge between psychoanalytic critique and political action—and propose that traversal of fantasy is precisely that bridge.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Gaze, Real, Symbolic Order, Ideology, Traversal of Fantasy Notable examples: Lacan's reading of Poe's 'The Purloined Letter'; Metz, Christian, The Imaginary Signifier; Baudry, Jean-Louis, Basic Effects of the Cinematographic Apparatus

Chapter 1: Sheila Kunkle — Psychosis and the Primordial Signifier (Aronofsky's π)

Kunkle's essay opens with a theoretical diagnosis of contemporary culture's faith in 'codes'—biblical codes, DNA, computer algorithms—as metalanguages that promise unmediated access to transcendent truth. She argues that this faith reproduces a psychotic structure in the Lacanian sense: the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, the refusal of the essential metaphor that installs lack in the Other, produces a subject who believes the Other is not barred, that its jouissance is fully accessible to the one who finds the right key. The essay draws on Lacan's notion of the primordial signifier—a signifier whose importance lies not in its content but in the bare formal fact of its signifying function—to argue that the psychoanalytic cure and the humanization of the subject both depend on an encounter with precisely this dimension of senseless, non-meaningful signification.

Kunkle then reads Aronofsky's π (1998) as a sustained staging of this psychotic structure. Max Cohen's obsessive search for the numerical pattern underlying all phenomena—from the stock market to the movement of leaves—is not mere madness but the symptomatic expression of a culture that refuses to accept the non-sensical dimension in the Thing. Max's refusal of symbolic interdictions (Euclid, the warnings of his mentor Sol, the prohibition against staring at the sun as a child) delivers him into direct, unmediated confrontation with the jouissance of the Other, figured in the film as the 216-digit number that Hasidic mystics and Wall Street financiers alike pursue. The capitalist firm and the religious fundamentalists are shown to share the same psychotic fantasy: both seek the master signifier that would secure their supremacy and close the gap in the Other. Aronofsky stages this identity as violence.

The essay's interpretive climax turns on Max's eventual encounter with the primordial signifier as purely formal and meaningless. When Max intones the 216-digit number and finds only a blinding white void—and, crucially, his own image—he begins to hear the Other speaking within himself as the bearer of the primordial signifier rather than as its receiver. The film's notorious self-lobotomy sequence is read not as a neuroscientific cure but as the film's own primordial signifier: the image around which Aronofsky structured the film, the question-provoking vision that resists being made meaningful. Max's final scene—sitting peacefully in the park, no longer positioning himself as the bearer of an unanswerable question—figures the end of psychosis not through the elimination of the Real but through a changed relationship to the signifier's irreducible stupidity.

Key concepts: Psychosis, Name of the Father, Jouissance, Master Signifier, Real, Symbolic Order Notable examples: Aronofsky's π (1998); Spielberg's A.I.; Biblical codes / DNA discourse

Chapter 2: Renata Salecl — The Anxiety of Love Letters

Salecl's essay takes love letters as its psychoanalytic object, using them to map the structural differences among hysterical, obsessional, and perverse relations to objet petit a. The opening gambit is an internet advice column's instructions for writing a love letter: a commodified, proceduralized formula that evacuates the letter of its constitutive uncertainty. Against this, Salecl argues that the love letter is paradigmatically the site where the subject confronts the desire of the Other—where the question 'What am I for the Other?' is posed most acutely—and that the different clinical structures each resolve this question in a characteristic way.

Through readings of Cyrano de Bergerac (both Rostand's play and Rappeneau's 1990 film) and Almodóvar's Law of Desire (1987), Salecl traces how the structural need for a triangulating intermediary (Cyrano writing for Christian; Pablo composing his own lover's reply) reveals the fundamental anxieties of desire. Cyrano's enormous nose is read as both phallic obstacle and symbolic asset: unable to count on bodily beauty, he acquires symbolic potency through language, replacing the imaginary phallus with its symbolic counterpart. Yet his love requires Christian as mediator, because desire must always be routed through a third term. The structural asymmetry between the sexes—men's anxiety about assuming the phallus, women's uncertainty about being the object of the Other's desire—produces the obsessional and melancholic postures that organize both Cyrano's and Roxane's love.

Almodóvar's Pablo is read as a pervert in the Lacanian sense: certain of what brings him enjoyment, he simply writes himself the love letter he wants to receive. He does not question the desire of the Other (hysteria) nor keep the desired object at a safe distance (obsession). The essay concludes by speculating that the Cyrano myth is as much a women's fantasy as a men's: while men manage love anxiety by becoming ghost-writers for other men, women manage theirs by always keeping a father-figure in reserve.

Key concepts: Desire, Objet petit a, Hysteria, Perversion, Phallus, Anxiety Notable examples: Cyrano de Bergerac (Rappeneau, 1990); Almodóvar's Law of Desire (1987); Lacan's Seminar X (Anxiety)

Chapter 3: Juliet Flower MacCannell — Between the Two Fears: Cape Fear and the Law

MacCannell's essay is the most historically and legally ambitious in the collection. It begins from the observation that Thompson's Cape Fear (1962) has exerted a remarkable influence on legal discourse, where it is used to illustrate the dilemma of a lawyer forced to consider extralegal means to prevent a crime the law cannot preventively address. MacCannell argues, however, that the film is fundamentally about something more structural: the division between patriarchal law (the archaic, familial law of Western antiquity, the Roman patronymic) and democratic law (the Rousseau-Kant framework of individual freedom and responsibility). Cady embodies the obscene Superego that is the necessary shadow of democratic law: the figure who takes the law's guarantee of individual freedom to its most extreme, jouissance-seeking conclusion.

The essay reads the Thompson film through the lens of the Lacanian distinction between the symbolic (Name-of-the-Father) and the archaic jouissant father (the Ur-Vater). Cady is not simply a psychopath but the product of the Law itself—an embodiment of pure Drive generated by and against legal prohibition. The essay is particularly attentive to the figure of Diane Taylor, whose situation exposes the gendered apportionment of jouissance under patriarchal law: she attempts to defy patriarchal limits on women's sexuality, only to encounter Cady as the law-preserving violence that returns her to the patronymic. The Sam-Cady dyad reveals that democratic law is not merely symbolic/oedipal but is constitutively shadowed by the Drive and Superego it both produces and disavows.

Scorsese's 1991 remake is read as a fully postmodern, Imaginary film: De Niro's Cady does not wear symbolism but instead displays his body as the direct inscription of jouissance (his tattoos). The remake collapses the Symbolic depth of the original by presenting Sam Bowden himself as already morally corrupt, collapsing the distinction between law and its transgression. Where Thompson's film stages a genuine encounter with the Real that gives the Symbolic Law an opportunity to re-assert its depth, Scorsese's film presents a simulated Das Ding, a scatological imaginary spectacle of abjection that discredits Law without transcending it. The distinction maps onto the broader theoretical opposition running through the collection: between films that open onto the Real and films that recycle Imaginary lures.

Key concepts: Name of the Father, Jouissance, Drive, Superego, Paternal Function, Symbolic Order Notable examples: Cape Fear (Thompson, 1962); Cape Fear (Scorsese, 1991); Freud, Totem and Taboo

Chapter 4: Mark Pizzato — Catharsis, Sinthome, and the Gaze in Eyes Wide Shut

Pizzato's essay distinguishes two competing models of catharsis—the Aristotelian-melodramatic model deployed by Hollywood and ego psychology (in which the spectator's perverse desires are purged so as to reinforce conformity to communal norms), and a more radical Lacanian-tragic catharsis in which the fundamental fantasy of the heroic ego is itself traversed. Drawing on Lacan's Seminar VII (Lacan's own definition of ethical catharsis as 'purifying desire in relation to the symptomatic drives of the tragic subject'), Pizzato argues that Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999) is best understood as a postmodern erotic tragedy that attempts the second form of catharsis. The Aristotelian hamartia is reread through the Lacanian concept of the sinthome: the hero's repeated error is not a moral failing but the signifying formation penetrated with enjoyment that gives the subject consistency.

The essay tracks Bill Harford's voyeuristic odyssey as a deconstruction of the myth of the obscene primal father. Drawing on Verhaeghe's reading of Freud (from Totem and Taboo to Moses and Monotheism), Pizzato argues that the obscene father-figure in the film (Ziegler and his colleagues) is not a primordial villain but a projection of the subject's own perverse desires. Kubrick systematically dismantles the fantasy of the omnipotent father who secretly controls and enjoys. Alice's confession of Other jouissance—her dream of sexual abandon that positions her as radically Other to her husband—is the film's most important psychoanalytic move: it introduces the Real of female desire, irreducible to phallic organization, and destabilizes both Bill's ego ideal and the male gaze that the spectator shares.

The essay also intervenes in the apparatus-theory debate by reconceiving the filmic gaze. Against the panoptic surveillance model (the camera as the male spectator's prosthesis), Pizzato argues for the Lacanian gaze as the uncanny object that looks back—that implicates the spectator in the death drive concealed within erotic beauty. The film's open ending ('fuck'), rather than providing narrative closure, is read as an ethical refusal of melodramatic resolution, inviting the spectator toward a tragicomic recognition of the 'no sexual relation' rather than a retreat into romantic fantasy.

Key concepts: Gaze, Sinthome, Fantasy, Jouissance, Other Jouissance, Drive Notable examples: Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999); Lacan, Seminar VII; Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology

Chapter 5 (combined: Kinkle/Silverman-like chapter): The Alternate Reality Genre, Ideology, and the Primal Choice (Family Man, Memento, Dark City cluster)

Several essays in the middle section of the collection—including the analysis of The Family Man, Memento, and Dark City—converge on the question of the 'primal choice': the foundational, reality-instituting act that is more fundamental than any choice made within social reality. Drawing on a Hegelian-Lacanian account of retroactive positing, these essays argue that the Hollywood 'alternate reality' genre (films like It's a Wonderful Life, Run Lola Run, The Family Man) ideologically neutralizes this primal choice by offering decoy choices—proliferating alternative scenarios that ultimately teach the subject how not to choose, how to have both A and B rather than committing to either. The genre's ideological function is to translate social alienation into a private romantic lack and then to posit monogamous heteronormative love as the solution—a 'decoy impossibility' that displaces the Real impossibility of social relations under capitalism.

The Memento analysis pushes deeper. Leonard's decision to 'make himself forget' Teddy's explanation is read not as a universal existential predicament but as a specific, politically charged act of retroactive positing: he actively installs the fantasy that gives his life meaning, knowing it is a fantasy, because it is only within this 'condition' of non-memory that he can sustain a framework of action. This is glossed as Freudian primal repression, but the essay stresses what is specific: Leonard's choice regenerates the trauma itself rather than merely coping with it. Fantasy, the essay concludes, is on the side of reality—reality is not self-evident but requires fantasmatic support.

The Dark City essay by McGowan is the theoretical keystone of this section. The Strangers (figures of symbolic authority) are shown to desire—they seek the human soul, the objet petit a, the kernel of jouissance within the subject. Ideology's power is not absolute because symbolic authority is itself incomplete, itself lacking. Murdoch's traversal of the Shell Beach fantasy—the impossibility of giving directions to it mirrors Lacan's point that 'fantasms cannot bear the revelation of speech'—is presented as the precise psychoanalytic model of how political action becomes possible. Only by ceasing to be invested at the level of fantasy in the authority that controls him does Murdoch gain the freedom to act. The essay explicitly answers Jameson's challenge: there is no authentic political act without a prior traversal of the fantasy.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Ideology, Traversal of Fantasy, Symbolic Order, Alienation, Real Notable examples: Dark City (Proyas, 1998); Memento (Nolan, 2000); The Family Man (Ratner, 2000); Run Lola Run; It's a Wonderful Life

Chapter 7: Slavoj Žižek — The Act and Trauma: The Sweet Hereafter and Fight Club

Žižek's contribution focuses on two central problems: the nature of the Lacanian Act and the ideological function of the superego's demand for authenticity. Beginning with Haneke's Code Unknown, Žižek argues that the film's humanist reading (we should show our 'true face') conceals a more unsettling Lacanian reading: there is no big Other, no ultimate code behind the masks, so the demand to 'show your true face' is not a liberating call but an obscene superego injunction—terroristic precisely in its apparent benevolence. The subject who tries to comply with this injunction finds only the impossibility of a 'true face' behind the social mask.

The Fight Club analysis develops the theory of the political act through the concept of self-beating. Žižek argues that the subject's masochistic libidinal attachment to its master is the mechanism by which symbolic authority perpetuates itself: subjection generates a surplus-enjoyment that makes it self-sustaining. The only way to break this cycle is to stage the attachment bodily—to beat oneself, which renders visible the fact that the master is superfluous (I can terrorize myself without you) and thereby dissolves the libidinal bond. Norton's self-shooting at the end of the film is read as the culmination of this logic: by killing 'Tyler in himself,' he frees himself from the dual mirror-relationship and can finally turn outward to the true enemy (the system).

Zižek's essay on The Sweet Hereafter reads Nicole's lie at the inquest as a genuine Lacanian Act in the strict sense: an 'immoral' gesture that breaks with both the explicit symbolic rules and their obscene superego underside (the community's compulsion to assign blame and extract compensation for the trauma of the bus accident). Nicole's lie enables the community to enter the 'sweet hereafter'—a fantasmatic space that constitutes the social bond precisely through its foundational lie. Žižek presses the question of whether this lie is an ethical act of saving the community from a second traumatization or an ideological closure that forecloses genuine reckoning with loss—and argues it is, ambiguously, both. The superego's injunction to pursue legal accountability ('show us the truth of the accident') is revealed as the mechanism that would destroy the community it claims to serve.

Key concepts: The big Other, Superego, Fantasy, Jouissance, Ideology, Trauma Notable examples: Haneke's Code Unknown (2000); Fincher's Fight Club (1999); Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter (1997)

Chapter 8: Frances Restuccia — Love Beyond the Law: Breaking the Waves and Lacanian Hysteria

Restuccia's essay is the most sustained engagement in the collection with Lacan's Seminar XX and the formulas of sexuation. She proposes a three-order typology of Lacanian Love: narcissistic love (first order), second-order love (equated with desire and the drive's circling of objet petit a), and a third-order 'Love in the beyond' that threatens subjective annihilation. This third-order love is what Lacan theorizes in relation to feminine jouissance and mysticism—a love that exceeds the Law, that cannot be written, that positions Woman in the place of S(Ⱥ), the signifier of the barred Other. The essay argues that this is the form of love pursued by the hysteric who, unable to assume a stable feminine identification, turns to Love as compensation.

The reading of von Trier's Breaking the Waves (1996) traces Bess's trajectory as the hysteric who coalesces with objet petit a rather than merely pretending to be it. The hysteric's logic is internally contradictory: she believes in the sexual relation, insists on a signifier that would make Woman exist, offers herself as the phallicized object that will complete the Other—and thereby falls into the hole of the Other. Bess, who begins by wanting Jan to want her, ends by becoming his object a, the object-cause of his desire. The essay draws on Fink's clinical formulation ('the hysteric constitutes herself on the subject side of the equation as object a') and on Serge Andre's analysis of masochism and feminine desubjectivation to argue that Bess's self-destruction is not simple masochism but a mystical-hysterical coalescence with the Real absence at the heart of the Other's desire.

Restuccia also engages Žižek's reading of Bess, partially agreeing (feminine jouissance subverts the phallic order) but disputing his reduction of Bess's position to a male fantasy. She insists, with Lacan, that feminine jouissance has ontological weight: 'I believe in the jouissance of woman insofar as it is extra' (Seminar XX, p. 77). The essay concludes with the claim that Bess's fate is clinched as that of 'a postmodern Antigone driven by radical desire'—the ethics of the saint who enables, through self-destruction, the miraculous resurrection of the Other.

Key concepts: Other Jouissance, Hysteria, Fantasy, Desire, Drive, Objet petit a Notable examples: Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves (1996); Lacan, Seminar XX; Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis

Chapter 9: Hilary Neroni — Jane Campion's Jouissance: Holy Smoke and Feminist Film Theory

Neroni's essay performs a two-part argument: first, a genealogical critique of feminist film theory from Mulvey through Copjec; second, an extended close reading of Campion's Holy Smoke (1999) as a film that deploys feminine jouissance as a politically disruptive force in both its content and its formal structure. The critique of Mulvey charges that her 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (and the prescriptive feminist film theory it inaugurated) misused psychoanalysis as a normative tool—identifying the pathology of the Hollywood gaze and prescribing how feminist filmmakers should resist it—rather than as an investigative tool for discovering feminist practice already implicit in films. This normative posture, Neroni argues, is incompatible with psychoanalysis's proper orientation, which is to investigate rather than to legislate.

Copjec's Read My Desire is credited as the decisive turn away from this prescriptive model: by reconceiving the gaze as objet petit a (the stain in the picture that looks back at the viewer) rather than as camera-mastery, Copjec opens feminist film theory to the disruptive, anxiety-provoking dimension of cinema rather than merely to its ideological reproduction of the male gaze. Neroni extends Copjec's move by arguing that feminine jouissance—understood as a momentary disengagement from the desire of the Other, distinct from both narcissism and masochistic perversion—offers feminist filmmakers and theorists a more generative category than either gender representation or ideological critique.

The reading of Holy Smoke tracks Ruth's experiences of jouissance (the temple scene, her enthrallment with the guru, her relationship with the 'cult expert' P.J. Waters) as eruptions that disrupt symbolic identity from within. P.J., the phallic cowboy introduced to 'deprogram' Ruth, is shown by Campion to embody the desperate emptiness of phallic jouissance: his authority is fantasmatic, his proclamation of identity ('I Am, I Said') addressed to no one and heard by no one. When P.J. fetishizes Ruth's feminine jouissance—hallucinating her as a multi-armed Eastern goddess—Campion depicts this as psychotic breakdown: feminine jouissance is obliterated by being made into a signifier, an idol. The essay concludes by reading Campion's characteristically 'inadequate endings' as formal enactments of the tension between symbolic order and jouissance—refusing ideological closure and sustaining, rather than resolving, the contradictions opened by the film.

Key concepts: Other Jouissance, Gaze, Objet petit a, Ideology, Symbolic Order, Fantasy Notable examples: Campion's Holy Smoke (1999); Campion's The Piano; Campion's Sweetie; Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema; Copjec, Read My Desire

Main interlocutors

Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII
Jacques Lacan, Seminar X
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XIV
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX
Jacques Lacan, Écrits
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology
Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject
Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
Joan Copjec, Read My Desire
Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier
Jean-Louis Baudry, Basic Effects of the Cinematographic Apparatus
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Serge Andre, What Does a Woman Want?
Fredric Jameson
Judith Butler
Ernesto Laclau

Position in the corpus

Lacan and Contemporary Film occupies a specific and important niche in the Lacanian film-theory corpus: it is the primary edited volume that operationalizes the post-apparatus-theory turn in Lacanian film studies. Readers coming from Christian Metz's The Imaginary Signifier or Jean-Louis Baudry's apparatus essays will find this collection a direct theoretical response—a point-by-point displacement of the Imaginary/Symbolic framework in favor of the Real and later Lacanian concepts. It shares intellectual ground with Joan Copjec's Read My Desire (1994), which provides the epistemological critique of apparatus theory, and with Todd McGowan's subsequent monograph The Real Gaze (2007), which extends this collection's argument more systematically. Žižek's film-theoretical writing (particularly The Fright of Real Tears and essays in The Plague of Fantasies) provides the closest single-author parallel, but this collection differs in its sustained feminist engagement and its attention to the political stakes of analytic praxis. It should be read after some grounding in Lacan's later seminars (particularly Seminar VII for the ethics of psychoanalysis and Seminar XX for the formulas of sexuation) and alongside Fink's clinical introductions, which several essays cite heavily.\n\nFor readers in feminist film theory, the collection serves as a bridge between the Mulvey paradigm and a more recent jouissance-oriented feminist analysis. Neroni's and Restuccia's essays should be read alongside Copjec's Read My Desire and alongside primary texts in Seminar XX. For readers interested in the Lacanian theory of ideology and political action, the McGowan and Žižek essays complement the broader argument of The Sublime Object of Ideology and anticipate the political Lacan of later works like The Parallax View. The collection as a whole is best approached as an advanced secondary text—presupposing familiarity with both Lacanian theory and film studies—rather than as an introduction to either field.