Looking Awry

Source

Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

Review by Tony Myers

This text is often cited as the easiest of Zizek's books to navigate, a reputation underscored by the many and varied references to popular culture he makes throughout the text. However, as Zizek admits, this book should probably be subtitled "Everything He Wasn't Able to Put into The Sublime Object". Therefore, unless you already understand the Lacanian concepts of the Real and jouissance (the two aspects of Lacan's work upon which he concentrates here), then some of the analyses will seem unnecessarily foreshortened. If, on the other hand, you read The Sublime Object of Ideology first, you will be better able to grasp the subtleties of his arguments concerning detective fiction, pornography, democracy and Hitchcock.