Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)

287 Pages·1992·11.49 MB·English

by  Slavoj Zizek

Everything You Always Wanted
to Know about Lacan
(But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)
V
Everything You Always
Wanted to Know about
Lacan (But Were Afraid to
Ask Hitchcock)
Edited by
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
V
VERSO
London • New York
First published by Verso 1992
© Verso 1992
Individual chapters © contributors
All rights reserved
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London Wl V 3HR
USA: 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001-2291
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN 0-86091-394-5
ISBN 0-86091-592-1 (pbk)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Baskerville by Leaper & Gard Ltd
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Biddies Ltd, Guildford and Kings Lynn
Contents
INTRODUCTION Alfred Hitchcock, or, The Form and its
Historical Mediation Slavoj %iz.ek 1
PART I The Universal: Themes
'1 Hitchcockian Suspense Pascal Bonitzer 15
2 Hitchcock's Objects MladenDolar 31
• 3 Spatial Systems in North by Northwest Fredric Jameson 47
4 A Perfect Place to Die: Theatre in Hitchcock's Films
Alenka ^upancic 73
5 Punctum Caecum, or, Of Insight and Blindness
Stojan Pelko 106
PART II The Particular: Films
/l Hitchcockian Sinthoms Slavoj Zifek 125
2 The Spectator Who Knew Too Much MladenDolar 129
•3 The Cipher of Destiny Michel Chion 137
-4 A Father Who Is Not Quite Dead MladenDolar 143
5 Notorious Pascal Bonitzer 151
6 The Fourth Side Michel Chion 155
7 The Man Behind His Own Retina Miran Bofovic 161
8 The Skin and the Straw Pascal Bonitzer 178
V
9 The Right Man and the Wrong Woman Renata Salecl
10 The Impossible Embodiment Michel Chion
PART III The Individual: Hitchcock's Universe
'In His Bold Gaze My Ruin Is Writ Large' Slavoj Qzek
What's wrong with The Wrong Man ? • The
Hitchcockian allegory • From I to a • Psycho's
Moebius band • Aristophanes reversed • 'A triumph
of the gaze over the eye' • The narrative closure and
its vortex • The gaze of the Thing • 'Subjective
destitution' • The collapse of intersubjectivity
Notes on the Contributors
Index
vi
Sources
Pascal Bonitzer's 'Hitchcockian Suspense' was first published in
Cahiers du cinema no. 8 hors-serie; Michel Chion's 'The Cipher of
Destiny' was first published in Cahiers du cinema, no. 358, April 1984;
Pascal Bonitzer's 'Notorious' was first published in Cahiers du cinema
no. 309, 1980; Michel Chion's 'The Fourth Side' was first published
in Cahiers du cinema, no. 356, February 1984; Pascal Bonitzer's 'The
Skin and the Straw' was first published in L'Ane, no. 17, July-
August 1984; Michel Chion's 'The Impossible Embodiment' was
first published in his La Voix au cinema, Cahiers du cinema/Etoile
1982. Thanks are due to the copyright holders for permission to
reproduce them here. All appear for the first time in English and are
here translated by Martin Thorn.
vii

INTRODUCTION
Alfred Hitchcock, or, The Form
and its Historical Mediation
SLAVOJ 2I2EK
What is usually left unnoticed in the multitude of attempts to inter­
pret the break between modernism and postmodernism is the way
this break affects the very status of interpretation. Both modernism and
postmodernism conceive of interpretation as inherent to its object:
without it we do not have access to the work of art — the traditional
paradise where, irrespective of his/her versatility in the artifice of
interpreting, everybody can enjoy the work of art, is irreparably lost.
The break between modernism and postmodernism is thus to be
located within this inherent relationship between the text and its
commentary. A modernist work of art is by definition 'incompre­
hensible'; it functions as a shock, as the irruption of a trauma which
undermines the complacency of our daily routine and resists being
integrated into the symbolic universe of the prevailing ideology;
thereupon, after this first encounter, interpretation enters the stage
and enables us to integrate this shock - it informs us, say, that this
trauma registers and points towards the shocking depravity of our
very 'normal' everyday lives In this sense, interpretation is the
conclusive moment of the very act of reception: T.S. Eliot was quite
astute when he supplemented his Waste Land with notes on literary
references such as one would expect from an academic
commentary.
What postmodernism does, however, is the very opposite: its
objects par excellence are products with a distinctive mass appeal
(films like Blade Runner, Terminator or Blue Velvet) - it is for the
l
INTRODUCTION
interpreter to detect in them an exemplification of the most esoteric
theoretical finesses of Lacan, Derrida or Foucault. If, then, the
pleasure of the modernist interpretation consists in the effect of
recognition which 'gentrifies' the disquieting uncanniness of its
object ('Aha, now I see the point of this apparent mess!'), the aim of
the postmodernist treatment is to estrange its very initial homeli­
ness: 'You think what you see is a simple melodrama even your
senile granny would have no difficulties in following? Yet without
taking into account ... /the difference between symptom and
sinthom; the structure of the Borromean knot; the fact that Woman
is one of the Names-of-the-Father; etc., etc./ you've totally missed
the point!'
If there is an author whose name epitomizes this interpretive
pleasure of 'estranging' the most banal content, it is Alfred Hitch­
cock. Hitchcock as the theoretical phenomenon that we have
witnessed in recent decades - the endless flow of books, articles,
university courses, conference panels — is a 'postmodern' pheno­
menon par excellence. It relies on the extraordinary transference his
work sets in motion: for true Hitchcock aficionados, everything has
meaning in his films, the seemingly simplest plot conceals un­
expected philosophical delicacies (and - useless to deny it - this
book partakes unrestrainedly in such madness). Yet is Hitchcock,
for all that, a 'postmodernist' avant la lettre? How should one locate
him with reference to the triad realism—modernism—postmodernism
elaborated by Fredric Jameson with a special view to the history of
cinema, where 'realism' stands for the classic Hollywood — that is,
the narrative code established in the 1930s and 1940s, 'modernism'
for the great auteurs of the 1950s and 1960s, and 'postmodernism' for
the mess we are in today - that is, for the obsession with the
traumatic Thing which reduces every narrative grid to a particular
failed attempt to 'gentrify' the Thing?1
For a dialectical approach, Hitchcock is of special interest
precisely in so far as he dwells on the borders of this classificatory
triad2 - any attempt at classification brings us sooner or later to a
paradoxical result according to which Hitchcock is in a way all three
of them at the same time: 'realist' (from the old Leftist critics and his­
torians in whose eyes his name epitomizes the Hollywood ideo­
logical narrative closure, up to Raymond Bellour, for whom his
2