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Zizek and Media Studies: A Reader. Edited By Matthew Flisfeder & Louis-Paul Willis. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 299 pp. ISBN 9781137366245.
Zizek and Media Studies: A Reader attempts to establish the bombastic philosopher Slavoj Zizek's political insights, inspired by his specific blend of Jacques Lacan and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, as a sustained approach to media studies that offers up new potential analytic approach, which has been at times guilty of the confusion and conflation of its philosophical concepts, and for a critique of ideology that has seemingly been exhausted can appear anachronistic to those unfamiliar with the Slovenian philosopher's work. However, Matthew Flisfeder and Louis-Paul Willis argue for precisely this-to expand an updated perspective into the field of media studies, where a particular psychoanalytic approach has gone very much out of fashion, and to advance an ideological critique of a potentially post-ideological world.
Indeed, Flisfeder and Willis justify the need for such a reader by outlining the somewhat flawed history of psychoanalysis's previous intervention in media studies, which relied on an incomplete reading of Lacan with an oddly Foucauldian turn and an acknowledgement of the staid nature of a more traditional Kulturkritik. Their refocus on the discussion of symbolic efficiency both corrects for the oversights of previous psychoanalytic approaches and gives an entry point into modern political and cultural analysis through a discussion of a more complete Lacanian register, which emphasizes the interrelated real, imaginary, and symbolic, concentrating often on fantasy. The book then, is an open introduction to what a future "Zizekian" school of psychoanalytic interrogation of modern media could be.
Divided into four sections: Media, Ideology, and Politics; Popular Culture; Film and Cinema; and Social Media and the Internet, the volume explores a range of topics, such as trauma and the war on terror (p. 53), analogue filmmaking versus digital filmmaking and their relation to the psychoanalytic categories of anxiety and desire (p. 185), the gaps between 80s movie songs and their referent films (p. 91), and an aural approach to the rethinking of Lacanian discourses through record production (p. 103). It also puts Zizek in conversation with Stanley Cavell, proffering an exchange between skepticism and psychoanalysis via film analysis (p. 161). The text is a broad attempt to establish...