Lacan for Dummies

Slowenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek is (in)famously know for bringing popular culture film and Lacan together; a match many people don't consider one made in heaven. Though crowned by success both in academia and outside it, most academics frown at Zizek's brazen interlacing, judging that his particular creation of "Zizek-film" does neither eludicate Lacan nor say very accurate or brilliant things about film.

Indeed, reading Zizek will make you feel uneasy at best, sometimes annoyed about the way he supposedly illustrates Lacanian concepts with his mostly filmic examples. It does sometimes have a hint of condescension and paternalism; if images, as someone once tellingly said, are for idiots, it seems that Zizek's project is similar to the book series "... for Dummies". One might also argue that Lacan had some strong reasons to go all the way of abstraction and complexity; that there is a particular virtue in theory being about making things more complex rather than explaining you the world in an easy way.

On a second look though, trying not to be put off by Zizek's often nonchalant style, you might also realize that his examples only on a first look supposedly illustrate Lacanian theory. Or rather: there is no simple evidence in his examples, and it is not as if the complexity of Lacan would be reduced. Taking the examples seriously and analysing them in detail might very often make you side their complexity and, most importantly, their unillustrativeness - the fact that they do as much illustrate as not illustrate but complicate or even contradict.

Fundamental in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory alike is the question of Darstellbarkeit, presentability. Freud's point about dream analysis is that one should neither focus solely on the dream image, nor on the history; that there is something in between or emerging from the two that is neither the one, nor the other - the mechanisms of the unconscious. And those are, in the end, absolutely unrepresentable. I guess it would be highly and dangerously underestimating someone with the wits of Zizek to suppose that he hasn't read his Freud.