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The Rhetorics of Interpretation and Žižek's Approach to Film
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The Rhetorics of Interpretation and Žižek’s
Approach to Film
Mario Slugan
During a conference held two years ago at the University of Chicago, film
historian Yuri Tsivian orally commented on a presentation scrutinizing the
methodology behind Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Emir Kusturica’s Underground
(1995).1 According to Tsivian, a film scholar with a neoformalist background,
one should not be overly concerned with the work of a cultural critic who
writes about film merely to advance preestablished social, political, or ide-
ological theses.2 Such work often proves methodologically suspect and be-
comes relevant only as a part of a larger corpus in the study of the reception
of given films. In Tsivian’s mind, then, Žižek’s work on film warrants little or
no scrutiny. Were Žižek only a cultural critic with no interest in film theory,
and, more important, had his work no currency among film scholars, I would
certainly follow Tsivian’s suit. In truth, neither condition holds. The fact that
scholars such as David Bordwell have felt compelled to tackle Žižek’s writing
is a clear proof that Theory, with psychoanalysis at its forefront, still holds
great sway over the discipline.3
This article is not directed against psychoanalysis as such. Karl Popper
has already produced an influential criticism of it as a science based on its
failure to meet the falsifiability criterion.4 Noël Carroll has argued that psycho-
analytic theory is ill-suited for film theory in general given its monolithic and
totalizing nature and its refusal to address alternative theories critically.5 Ste-
phen Prince has contended that psychoanalysis fails to produce researchable
problems and objects to its preponderance over cognitivism in the theory of
film spectatorship.6 Bordwell has also pointed out that the application of psy-
choanalysis in film criticism produces generic interpretative results and thus
1. For the reading in question, see Slavoj Žižek, “Underground, or, Ethnic Cleansing
as a Continuation of Poetry by Other Means,” InterCommunication 18, at www.ntticc.or.jp/
pub/ic_mag/ic018/intercity/zizek_E.html (last accessed 19 July 2013). For the presentation,
see Mario Slugan, “Some Methodological Concerns regarding the Study of Balkanism in
Cinema,” Slavic Forum (2011), at lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/theslavicforum/files/2011/12/
SLAVICFORUM_2011_SLUGAN_PUBLICATION.pdf (last accessed 19 July 2013).
2. Žižek’s recent work continues this trend. A whole chapter is devoted to the manner
in which ideology operates in the latest Hollywood productions. See Slavoj Žižek, Living
in the End Times (London, 2011), 54–80.
3. David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley, 2005);
David Bordwell, “Slavoj Žižek: Say Anything” (April 2005), at www.davidbordwell.net/
essays/zizek.php (last accessed 19 July 2013). Some have even referred to Žižek as the
“leading film scholar and theorist.” See Geoff rey Galt Harpham, “Doing the Impossible:
Slavoj Žižek and the End of Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 453–85.
4. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (London, 2002), 43–51.
5. Noël Carroll, “Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment,” in David Bord-
well and Noël Carroll, eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison, 1996),
37–68.
6. Stephen Prince, “Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Problem of the Missing Spec-
tator,” in Bordwell and Carroll, eds., Post-Theory, 71–87.
Slavic Review 72, no. 4 (Winter 2013)

The Rhetorics of Interpretation and Žižek’s Approach to Film 729
impoverishes the field rather than enriches it.7 Although I will also briefly
address Žižek’s brand of psychoanalysis and what, to my mind, represents
its central peril, the bulk of this article critiques what might best be called
“Žižek’s rhetoric.” While references to Žižek’s idiosyncratic style of writing are
commonplace, only a few extended analyses exist, and those primarily focus
on the relationship between his rhetoric and his politics.8 By contrast, I am
interested in rhetorics proper—that is, in the means of persuasion employed.
In this analysis, I will inspect the manner in which Žižek draws from the
philosophical tradition, scrutinize the ways he engages various theoretical
frameworks within film studies (including cognitivism, enunciation, and au-
teur theory), and, finally, focus on the key aspect of his engagement with film
that brings all of these issues together—his readings of specific films. My criti-
cism will draw on those works in which Žižek discusses film at length: Part 2
of Looking Awry, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan, The Art
of the Ridiculous Sublime, Enjoy Your Symptom!, and The Fright of Real Tears.9
Although a number of book-length critical introductions to Žižek exist, little
has focused specifically on this aspect of his work.10 Finally, the analytic tool-
box developed here may serve equally well for criticism of Žižek’s other works
and themes.
Whether we identify Žižek as a public intellectual or an academic insider,
he retains a ubiquitous and spectral presence within the humanities and so-
7. David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of

Cinema (Cambridge, Mass., 1991); David Bordwell, “Contemporary Film Studies and the
Vicissitudes of Grand Theory,” in Bordwell and Carroll, eds., Post-Theory, 3–37.
8. For extended analyses, see Harpham, “Doing the Impossible”; Justin Clemens,
“The Politics of Style in the Work of Slavoj Žižek,” in Geoff Boucher, Jason Glynos, and
Matthew Sharpe, eds., Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj Žižek (Burling-
ton, Vt., 2005), 3–22; Matthew Sharpe, “‘Then We Will Fight Them in the Shadows!’ Seven
Parataxic Views, On Žižek’s Style,” International Journal of Žižek Studies 4, no. 2 (2010), at
zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/261/339 (last accessed 19 July 2013). A nota-
ble exception focusing on Žižek’s use of examples is Edward R. O’Neill, “The Last Analysis
of Slavoj Žižek,” Film Philosophy 15, no. 1 (June 2001), at www.film-philosophy.com/index.
php/f-p/article/view/638/551 (last accessed 11 October 2013).
9. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacque Lacan through Popular Cul-
ture (Cambridge, Mass., 1991); Slavoj Žižek, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about
Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (London, 1992); Slavoj Žižek, The Art of the Ri-
diculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Seattle, 2000); Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your
Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, 2nd ed. (New York, 2001); Slavoj Žižek, The
Fright of Real Tears: Krzystof Kieślowski between Theory and Post-Theory (London, 2001).
10. These exceptions include Colin Davis, Critical Excess: Overreading in Derrida,
Deleuze, Levinas, Žižek and Cavell (Stanford, 2010), 108–34; Todd McGowan, “Intro-
duction: Enjoying the Cinema,” International Journal of Žižek Studies 1, no. 3 (2007), at
zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/57/119 (last accessed 19 July 2013); Robert
Miklitsch, “Flesh for Fantasy: Aesthetic, the Fantasmatic, and Film Noir,” in Boucher,
Glynos and Sharpe, eds., Traversing the Fantasy, 47–68; Gopalan Ravindran, “Žižek’s
The Fright of Real Tears: Theory, Post-Theory and Kieslowski,” International Journal of
Žižek Studies 1, no. 3 (2007), at zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/78/137 (last
accessed 19 July 2013); Laurence Simmons, “Slavoj Žižek,” in Felicity Colman, ed., Film,
Theory, and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (Montreal, 2009). The first book-length study
appears to be Matthew Flisfeder, The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of
Film (London, 2012).

730 Slavic Review
cial sciences. My critique here is specifically addressed to those within aca-

deme who invoke Žižek in order to give theoretical weight to their own work.
In doing so, they regularly fail (or refuse) to see the methodological pitfalls of
the authority they cite.
The Rhetorics of Interpretation

In spite of their varied understandings of the value of interpretative practice,
scholars as diverse as Wayne C. Booth, David Bordwell, Jonathan Culler, Co-
lin Davis, Umberto Eco, Frederic Jameson, Richard Rorty, and James Stout all
recognize that novelty and force of conviction, not strict methodological rigor,
often provide the quickest route to fame within the academic community.11
According to Bordwell, the norms of academic criticism apropos interpreta-
tive rather than theoretical work allow for: no analysis of the propositions of
the theory employed, no requirements to search for counter examples, no es-
tablishment of criteria describing what does not count as proof of the theory,
and a great flexibility in application of semantic fields, that is, the relations of
meaning between conceptual or linguistic units.12 Furthermore, what Bord-
well finds to be weaknesses, proponents of overinterpretation such as Davis
identify as strengths. For Davis, interesting and innovative readings can often
only be accomplished by taking risks.
Although it would be practically impossible to agree on criteria for de-
termining what an “interesting” reading is and although such readings may
regularly prove to be methodologically lax, as described above, this does not
mean that they are free from all methodological requirements. The “lax stan-
dards” would certainly be a far cry from E. D. Hirsch’s normative set of pre-
scriptions laid out in Validity in Interpretation, but some minimums would still
have to apply.13 They would be even less stringent than Eco’s quasi-Popperian
criteria for distinguishing bad interpretations from good ones.14 These might
seem obvious, but for the sake of clarity let me note them here: factuality of
propositions on which interpretative inferences are made, and formal valid-
ity of arguments.15 Both of these conditions apply for any texts in which the
author makes a claim to being in the right on intersubjective matters, that is,
matters to which, unlike subjective mental states, nobody, in principle, has a
11. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1983); Bordwell, Making
Meaning; Jonathan Culler, “In Defense of Overinterpretation,” in Stefan Collini, ed., Inter-
pretation and Overinterpretation (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 109–24; Davis, Critical Excess;
Umberto Eco, “Overinterpreting Texts,” in Collini, ed., Interpretation and Overinterpreta-
tion, 45–66; Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic
Act (London, 1981), 1–88; Richard Rorty, “The Pragmatist’s Progress,” in Collini, ed., Inter-
pretation and Overinterpretation, 89–108; James Stout, “What Is the Meaning of the Text,”
New Literary History 14, no. 1 (Autumn 1982): 1–12.
12. D. A. Cruse, Lexical Semantics (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).
13. E. D. Hirsch Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, 1967).
14. Eco, “Overinterpreting Texts.”
15. I am also inclined to think that the logical coherence of semantic fields employed
in the analysis should be a further condition. I discuss a variant of this in the following
section on the status of Žižek’s brand of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

privileged epistemic access.16 Although the above two requirements appear

quite commonsensical, the apologists of overinterpretation do invoke three
points to defend positions that in one way or another still attempt to circum-
vent them: interpretative assertions need not be supplanted with arguments;
the interpreted text has no internal coherence; and the interpreted text is only
a prompt for interpretative work. Let us tackle each of these in order.
In his defense of overinterpretation, Davis claims that strong readers
make assertions that “are not subject to argument, demonstration or disproof.
We can take them or leave them.”17 This cannot be the case, however, for both
factual and institutional reasons. Factually, interpretations in general and
Žižek’s in particular regularly exhibit argumentative structures. The implicit,
if also formally invalid, argument in Žižek’s writing takes the form: if X is
an example of a theoretical proposition Z, it follows that Z holds (most often,
examples are from popular culture and the proposition is Lacanian). Further-
more, Žižek also asserts an appeal to authority in statements such as “this is
what psycho-analysis teaches us.”18 Finally, even if Žižek’s arguments only
consisted of single propositions—that is, of a string of conclusions, as Davis
suggests is the case in Stanley Cavell—we in the academic community can
and should subject them to argument, demonstration, or disproof. Otherwise,
as Culler and even Davis himself point out, we acquiesce in the abuse of in-
stitutional hierarchy. In other words, to claim that one’s statements are not
open to discussion and that they are to be accepted or discarded at leisure
is a luxury unavailable to lower-ranking members of the community and an
indulgence on behalf of high-ranking ones.19
Regarding the second objection, even if we accept the pragmatist view
espoused by Rorty and Stout that texts have no essence, that there is no such
thing as “what the text really is about” and that the text has no internal co-
herence prior to our description of it, it does not follow that there is no text to
check an interpreter’s statements against. In what follows, I will make a point
of checking Žižek’s statements against various texts for factual errors; every-
body is free to do the same for him- or herself. Moreover, the discussion of the
last objection demonstrates that Žižek is no pragmatist.
Turning to the last objection then, some interpretative practices foster
the development of semantic fields or the relations between them in new and
imaginative ways. In Eco’s vocabulary, such readings regard the text only as
the focal point of the possibilities of semiosis. Here the text really is only a
point of departure, and references to it may be as oblique, as cursory, as in-
complete, as faulty, and as incoherent as the interpreter wishes. No claim to
revealing the text’s hidden meaning is made. Žižek’s interpretations cannot be
understood in these terms, however, for he frequently asserts that his reading
does reveal what the text is about. Davis produces a list of these statements,
16. Strictly speaking, propositional factuality and argumentative validity may be

as relevant for purely intrasubjective texts (e.g., those that describe one’s own emotions
when engaging the text) as for texts that use arguments. In those cases, however, propo-
sitional factuality hinges primarily on the author’s sincerity.
17. Davis, Critical Excess, 16.
18. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 159.
19. See Culler, “In Defense of Interpretation,” 119; Davis, Critical Excess, 184.

732 Slavic Review
and we might quote another example from Enjoy Your Symptom!: “This is what
is ultimately at stake in the noir universe; the failure of the paternal meta-
phor . . . renders impossible a viable, temperate relation with a woman, as a
result, woman finds herself occupying the impossible place of the traumatic
Thing.”20
In the final analysis, to use Žižek’s words, the crucial issue is whether
or not matters of interest trump the demands of argumentative validity. Of
course, the formal invalidity of an interpretative argument does not discount
the possibility that the conclusions arrived at are correct. But possibility does
not entail probability either. Moreover, as Edward R. O’Neill reminds us in
his criticism of Žižek’s Cogito and the Unconscious, we should be deeply wary
about sacrificing the integrity of the scholarly procedure to the novelty of the
conclusions.21 According to O’Neill, the conclusions reached in the humani-
ties may be thought of as just repetitions of premises arrived at through some
rhetorical devices, primarily arguments. But even on this account, the fact
that there is a procedure the purpose of which is obviously to legitimize con-
clusions suggests it is the procedures, and not the conclusion, that should
be the loci of greater scrutiny. In other words, matters of interest should not
trump those of argumentative validity if an argument is produced within the
interpretation. Even if one thinks of arguments as nothing more than rhe-
torical devices that generate predetermined conclusions—as one of Žižek’s
apologists does—arguments are still regularly employed in interpretations
in order to persuade us.22 Arguments that lack propositional factuality and
formal validity are unpersuasive. Although a reading need not be interesting
and persuasive at the same time, current interpretative practitioners—Žižek
included—still find it necessary to be persuasive and regularly engage argu-
mentation in order to persuade.
This article is an appeal to maintain the norms for evaluating academic
interpretative practice. Some like Davis might say that in strong interpreta-
tions mistakes do not matter and there is no need to persuade. We could go
further and say that argumentative validity does not matter as long as we
have something interesting to say. Some interpretations will achieve the sta-
tus of exemplars, while most will simply be forgotten. Ultimately, however,
this line of thought leaves us with no criteria for adjudicating between what
is interesting and what is not. In the absence of criteria for both good and
bad interpretative work, it is reasonable to assume that those in the academic
community who have already made a name for themselves would effectively
become arbiters on all matters of interest.
Interlude, or the Curious Case of the Real in Žižek’s Writing

It might appear rather strange to proceed to discuss Žižek’s work without
even addressing psychoanalysis in general and Lacanian psychoanalysis, or
20. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 159–60. For the list of similar statements see Davis,
Critical Excess, 133.
21. O’Neill, “The Last Analysis of Slavoj Žižek.”
22. The apologist in question is Harpham, “Doing the Impossible,” 467–68.

at least Žižek’s version of it, in particular. Can a proper analysis of Žižek’s

rhetoric as it pertains to his reading of films be accomplished without tak-
ing his most important theoretical allegiances into account? Žižek does not
disguise the fact that he often discusses films in order to demonstrate how
a given formal procedure, film, an author’s oeuvre, or even a whole mode of
production exemplifies a particular Lacanian thesis. As he puts it in Enjoy
Your Symptom!: “Hollywood is conceived as ‘phenomenology’ of the Lacanian
Spirit.”23 As already noted, however, there is no shortage of broader, top-down
criticism of psychoanalysis in scholarly writing. That said, it is important to
keep in mind that exposing the faults in a given thesis or framework does
not imply that a film (or any other cultural product for that matter) does not
subscribe to that thesis or framework. To claim that a film cannot be about the
impossibility of a sexual relationship because Jacques Lacan’s thesis does not
hold is akin to claiming that a film like D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation
(1915) does not propagate racist values because racism has been discredited
on various levels.
Before proceeding to the bottom-up approach outlined in the previous
section, however, there is one top-down remark to be made about Žižek’s ver-
sion of Lacanian psychoanalysis and its relation to the question of the co-
herence of semantic fields. These relations of meaning between conceptual
or linguistic units include clusters (for example, overlapping themes), dou-
blets (for example, binary oppositions), propositions (for example, Greimas’s
semiotic square), and hierarchies (for example, Symbolic/Imaginary/Real).
Bordwell has suggested that interpretative practice is valuable because it al-
lows us, somewhat differently than theory, to “entertain, as an imaginative
possibility, the juxtaposition and development of certain semantic fields.”24 If
we espoused what should be an uncontroversial stance that theoretical and
interpretative work strives toward furthering our comprehension of the mat-
ters it tackles, it is unclear why one would try to explain things in terms of
the Real as often as Žižek does.25 The reason for this unclarity lies in Žižek’s
definition of the Real as “that [which] resists all symbolization.”26 As such, the
Real turns out to be a variant of Immanuel Kant’s thing in itself. But, follow-
ing Ludwig Wittgenstein, there is just nothing to say about it (and even to say
this is saying too much). We might ask ourselves then: what is added to our
comprehension of, among other things, montage as a formal device, the op-
position between voice-over/flashback and subjective camera in film noir, Ro-
23. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, xi. Another example of the same attitude: “It [this
book] mercilessly exploits popular culture, using it as convenient material to explain
not only the vague outlines of the Lacanian theoretical edifice but sometimes also the
finer details missed by the predominantly academic reception of Lacan.” Žižek, Looking
Awry, vii.
24. Bordwell, Making Meaning, 263.
25. Some have even suggested that all of Žižek’s work may be thought of as “think-
ing, writing and reading about the Real.” Sarah Kay, Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction
(Oxford, 2003), 1.
26. Slavoj Žižek, “The Undergrowth of Enjoyment: How Popular Culture Can Serve
as an Introduction to Lacan,” in Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright, eds., The Žižek
Reader (Oxford, 1999), 14. Even in his later distinctions between symbolic Real, imaginary
Real, and the real Real, the last again conforms fully to the above definition.

734 Slavic Review
berto Rossellini’s films, David Lynch’s universe, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s opus,

Alfred Hitchcock’s films ranging from The 39 Steps (1935) to The Birds (1963),
or the whole of the film noir universe if we describe them in terms of a seman-
tic field defined in advance as inaccessible to language—that is, the Real?27
Consider Žižek’s thesis that “a key constituent of Lynch’s universe [is] the Real
of an excessive life-intensity threatening to explode the framework of reality,”
or the claim that what montage produces is “a surplus that is radically hetero-
geneous to cinematic reality but nonetheless implied by it . . . [the] surplus of
the real . . . the gaze qua object.”28 How is this any different from explaining
these films or formal devices in terms of X without providing the content of X
or, even worst, producing content for it despite the explicit constraint that no
content can be produced?29 Because of this, we should think of the conceptual
coherence of semantic fields employed as an additional criterion for evalu-
ating interpretative work next to propositional factuality and argumentative
validity. Of course, as Žižek would later suggest, the Real might not resist all
symbolization after all.30 Then, however, we are dealing with something with
far less theoretical weight.
Rhetorics Proper
It is not only his detractors but Žižek himself who points out that what he says
and writes should not always be taken seriously. Bordwell addresses the case
in point in Fright of Real Tears.31 There, in an anecdotal recollection, Žižek ex-
poses himself as a bluffer who, when asked to comment on a painting, simply
invented the concept of a frame beyond the frame which, much to his own
27. On this opposition: “The discontinuity between the voice-over/flashback and the
subjective camera is ultimately the discontinuity between the Symbolic and the Real.”
Žižek, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan, 260. On Rossellini: “Herein
lies also the fundamental ‘Hegelian’ lesson of Rossellini’s films: the act qua real, trans-
gression of a symbolic limit, does not enable us to (re)establish a kind of immediate con-
tact with the presymbolic life substance, it throws us, on the contrary, back into that abyss
of the Real out of which our symbolic reality emerged.” Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 54.
Emphasis in the original. On Kieślowski’s opus, “If there ever was a film-maker obsessed
with this inner tension of our experience of reality, it is Kieslowski. In what is arguably
his paradigmatic procedure (as exemplified by the short post-office sequence in Decalogue
6), he elevates a common phenomenon like the glass reflection of a human face into the
momentous apparition of the Real for which there is no place in our experience of reality.”
Žižek, Fright of Real Tears, 66. Žižek’s interpretation of Hithcock’s work in terms of the
Real will be examined later in this article. For the reference about the noir universe, see
the previous section where “the Thing” acts as a variant of the Real.
28. Žižek, Fright of Real Tears, 96.
29. Perhaps for this reason the Real, unlike the Symbolic and the Imaginary, does not
make an appearance among the terms explained in Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand
Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis (London, 1973).
30. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 67–69. For my
understanding of Žižek’s varying accounts of the Real I am much indebted to Benjamin
Noys, “The Horror of the Real: Žižek’s Modern Gothic,” International Journal of Žižek Stud-
ies 4, no. 4, at zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/274/372 (last accessed 19 July
2013).
31. Bordwell, “Slavoj Žižek.”

consternation, was picked up in further discussion.32 Yet, when Žižek himself

uses this very same concept further on in Fright of Real Tears, Bordwell fails
to identify a criterion by which to judge whether this usage is also meant ironi-
cally or not. Thus, according to Bordwell, the possibility is opened that indeed
every assertion of Žižek’s might be taken as a bluff.
In light of the fact that Žižek is quite fond of repeating himself, however,
either by drawing on a set of ready-made examples or by copy-pasting his
own words across his works, it seems reasonable to say that there is a particu-
lar set of utterances Žižek holds dear and worth repeating.33 Groucho Marx’s
(or, more precisely, Rufus T. Firefly’s) famous line from Duck Soup (1933), is a
favorite: “Gentlemen, Chicolini here may talk like an idiot and look like an
idiot, but don’t let that fool you: he really is an idiot.”34 Similarly, Arbogast’s
murder from Psycho (1960) and the Bodega Bay aerial shot from The Birds are
perhaps his most often used film examples.35 As far as verbatim repetitions
are concerned, compare the discussion of Charlie Chaplin’s work in Enjoy Your
Symptom! and Looking Awry; Lynch’s work in Fright of Real Tears and The Art
of the Ridiculous Sublime; the discussion of art forms crossing media boundar-
ies in Fright of Real Tears and The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime; almost identi-
cal periodization of Hitchcock’s oeuvre in Looking Awry and Everything You
Always Wanted to Know about Lacan; and the discussion of Andrei Tarkovskii
in Fright of Real Tears and “The Thing from Inner Space.”36 I do not put this
forward as a criticism (as some have); someone who publishes as much ought
to be allowed to “steal” from himself. On the contrary, I mention it to demon-
strate a particular consistency in Žižek’s writing, which helps us ascertain
that most of the time, or at least in his most important points, he is not bluff-
ing. Moreover, because these repetitions and scene analyses occur in various
contexts and serve to substantiate different points, criticism of a single analy-
sis proves productive far beyond the claim that it is only here and there that
Žižek’s engagement with film is problematic.
Furthermore, to suggest that Žižek is constantly bluffing might also imply
that he is not presenting a conclusion when he frames it as a rhetorical ques-

33. Pertaining specifically to the example from Fright of Real Tears, Žižek later noted
that his second usage of the example was serious. Slavoj Žižek, “Afterword: With Defend-
ers Like These, Who Needs Attackers?,” in Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp, eds., The
Truth of Žižek (New York, 2007), 198.
34. Žižek, Looking Awry, 73; Žižek, Fright of Real Tears, 62.
35. For the discussion of Arbogast’s murder, see Žižek, Everything You Always Wanted
to Know about Lacan, 230–31, 247–49, and 254–55; Žižek, Fright of Real Tears, 36–38. For
the discussion of the Bodega Bay shot, see Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 9; Žižek, Every-
thing You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan, 236–37 and 256; Žižek, Fright of Real Tears,
38; and the documentary by Sophie Fiennes, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006).
36. On Chaplin, see Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 2; Žižek, Looking Awry, 73. On Lynch,
see Žižek, Fright of Real Tears, 53–54; Žižek, Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, 23–24. On art
forms crossing media boundaries, see Žižek, Fright of Real Tears, 78; Žižek, Art of the Ri-
diculous Sublime, 42. On Hitchcock, see Žižek, Looking Awry, 100–102; Žižek, Everything
You Always Wanted To Know about Lacan, 3–5. On Tarkovskii, see Žižek, Fright of Real
Tears, 104–7; Slavoj Žižek, “The Thing from Inner Space,” Mainview (September 2009), at
www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=ijp.080.1021a (last accessed 19 July 2013). This is not
meant to be a comprehensive list.

736 Slavic Review
tion. Often such a procedure is cued with the phrase “is it not”: “Is it not that
Shoah, this paradox of a documentary with the self-imposed limitation of not
using any documentary footage, thus enacts all the paradoxes of the icono-
clastic prohibition constitutive of Judaism?”37 A similar rhetorical device em-
ploys phrases such as “as it were” or “as if,” which appear again and again as
qualifications of his statements. The deliberately ambiguous language does
leave the door open for further (re)articulations. I would be skeptical of claims
maintaining that this is indicative of a general aversion to definitiveness on
Žižek’s part, however, for he does, when pressed, stand behind what he says
or at least insist that there are enough clues in his texts to discern whether a
statement was meant as a bluff, irony, or a joke.38 With this in mind, it is not
unreasonable to read Žižek’s writing at face value, even when it is supplanted
with the aforementioned rhetorical qualifiers and even when it appears as
outlandish provocation.
Žižek’s role as a provocateur might be best clarified through recourse to
his favorite rhetorical device—what might be called the “structural inversion.”
The logical form of this device varies. One can identify a variety of forms be-
ginning with the simple, “it is not that p, rather opposite of p.”39A more com-
plex version is, “it is not that p → q, rather q → p.”40Another couple of complex
forms are, “it is not that p → q, rather opposite of q → opposite of p”; or “it is
not that p → q, rather p → opposite of q.”41 A final variation is, “it is not that
p → q, rather opposite of p → q”: “So what is Véronique [from Double Life of
Véronique (1991)] retreating from when she abandons her lover? She perceives
this staging [his puppeteer show] as a domineering intrusion, while it is ac-
tually the very opposite: the staging of her ultimate unbearable freedom.”42
Žižek also frequently invokes the “logic” of “fight fire with fire” in his writing:

38. A good case in point is the episode of BBC’s HARDtalk on which he defended,
however problematically, Stalinism from liberal capitalism.
39. “Against this commonplace [Freud’s alleged “pansexualism”], one should assert
that the Freudian revolution consists in exactly the opposite gesture: . . . What Freud ac-
complishes here is precisely the radical desexualisation of the universe.” Žižek, Fright of
Real Tears, 172–73. Emphasis in the original. For other examples of this device, see Žižek,
Enjoy Your Symptom!, ix and x; Žižek, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan,
18, 19, 22, 25 and 42; Žižek, Fright of Real Tears, 161. This is not meant to be a comprehen-
sive list.
40. “Ripley’s coldness is not the surface effect of his gay stance, but rather the other
way around.” Žižek, Fright of Real Tears, 145. For other examples of this device, see Žižek,
Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, 33 and 36.
41. An illustration of the first of these would be: “In short, the problem with Kane
[in Citizen Kane (1941)] was not that for all of his adult life [as a mature subject] he was
in search of the lost incestuous object, trying to recapture it; the problem was rather the
exact opposite: he never really lost this object, he stuck to it to the end and thus remained
‘immature.’” Žižek, Fright of Real Tears, 51. Emphasis in the original. An illustration of the
second is “Such reversals in the order of narration might be expected to provoke an effect
of total fatalism: everything is decided in advance, . . . it is precisely the reversal of the
temporal order that makes us experience in an almost palpable way the utter contingency
of the narrative sequence, i.e., the fact that, at every turning point, things might have
taken another direction.” Žižek, Looking Awry, 71.
42. Žižek, Fright of Real Tears, 151. Emphasis in the original. Proposition q here is:
Véronique retreats. For another example of this device, see ibid., 33.

“what if we interpret the Tarkovskian sacrificial gesture as a . . . desperate

strategy of beating the meaninglessness of existence by its own means . . .
through a gesture that is itself utterly meaningless?”43 Colloquially speaking
we could summarize all these types of utterances as follows: “it is not what/
how you think it is, but just the opposite.” What is problematic here is that
Žižek exposes himself as somebody who thinks in rather crude binary cat-
egories, the relations of which, in his mind, only need be reversed in order to
arrive at their correct description. It is rather ironic that somebody who prefers
simple binary inversions to more nuanced accounts is regularly described as
the poststructuralist thinker par excellence.
Finally, Žižek is also fond of what some would call “eclecticism” and oth-
ers “name-dropping.” Invoking numerous philosophers and thinkers enables
one’s own thoughts to be reiterated and validated. Žižek regularly invokes
Lacan and Hegel; Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Kant, and Baruch Spinoza also
fare well in his writings. The problem here is not so much Žižek’s proximity to
the French academic style, often pilloried in the Anglo-American tradition for
its endless digressions. The problem is rather that, on occasion, Žižek simply
misunderstands what a given thinker has said. For instance, he invokes Pop-
per’s Third World as an equivalent to Lacan’s the big Other by claiming that
“the Lacanian big Other, the order of symbolic fictions [is] what Karl Popper
called the Third World, neither that of psychological self-experience nor that
of material reality.”44 Yet, although the Third World has an ontological status
different from both mental and physical phenomena, anybody familiar with
Popper’s work will know that the Third World strictly refers to entities such
as mathematical objects and not to the symbolic fictions, that is, “[the] un-
conscious level . . . , the non-psychological symbolic order itself.”45 Similarly,
Žižek misconstrues John Searle’s concept of declarative performatives: “one
closes the meeting by stating that it is closed, i.e., one pretends to describe
an already-given state of things [‘The meeting is closed’]—in order to be ef-
fective, the ‘pure’ performative (the speech act which brings about its own
propositional content) has to endure an inner split and assume the form of
its opposite, of a constative.”46 But no such inner split is necessary for the
speech act to bring about its propositional content for a nonconstative of the
following type would suffice: “I pronounce the meeting closed.” While these
mistakes do not pertain to arguments made specifically about film, they do
reveal striking unfamiliarity with some critical concepts. As such, they un-
dermine the rhetorical impact of Žižek’s writing specifically, and his status as
a well-versed philosopher more generally.
Other Theoretical Frameworks

As noted earlier, psychoanalysis is not the only theoretical framework Žižek
directly engages. In Fright of Real Tears Žižek takes issue with what he calls
43. Ibid., 106.

45. Ibid.
46. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 97. Emphasis in the original.

738 Slavic Review
post-theorists or cognitivists.47 Bordwell has adequately answered most of

Žižek’s concerns as they pertain to the connection between the history of
film style and cultural relativism, and to Žižek’s understanding of Carroll’s
usage of dialectics.48 But, because he focuses only on the first two chapters of
Fright of Real Tears, Bordwell only cursorily addresses three points I wish to
develop: Žižek’s distinction between post-theory and theory proper, Žižek’s
subscription to enunciation theory, and Žižek’s usage of auteur theory. Let us
consider these in sequence.
According to Žižek, “Post-Theory insists on multiple relatively indepen-
dent levels” of film, such as style, narrative, and material conditions of pro-
duction.49 Even when it “endeavour[s] to discern global correspondences be-
tween the different levels,” however, post-theory still “do[es] not yet reach the
level of Theory proper.”50 For Žižek, real theory is only attained by means of
a short-circuit when
we conceive of a certain formal procedure not as expressing a certain aspect
of the (narrative) content, but as marking/signalling the part of the content
that is excluded from the explicit narrative line, so that—therein resides the
proper theoretical point—if we want to reconstruct “all” of the narrative con-
tent, we must reach beyond the explicit narrative content as such, and include
some formal features which act as the stand-in for the “repressed” aspect of
the content.51
It appears then as though Žižek is setting up a demonstration of the cor-
rect course of action. Yet what follows is an example from melodramas where,
as Žižek points out, “the emotional excess that cannot express itself directly
in the narrative line finds its outlet in the ridiculously sentimental musical ac-
companiment or in other formal features.”52 If this is an example of true theo-
retical work, one wonders how it is any more productive than the cognitivist
analysis of Casablanca (1942) he himself discusses later in the text.53 How
does Žižek’s example differ from the standard neoformalist accounts of the
Hays Code he touches on in The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, where cutting
away to the fireplace following a lovers’ embrace signals the consummation
of the relationship?54 And how does this differ from neoformalist accounts of
simple classic Hollywood style procedures such as cuts on action that func-
47. In “Slavoj Žižek,” Bordwell takes issue with the term cognitivist being used as a
blanket term. I use the term in the remainder of the paper only because Žižek does.
48. Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light, 260–64; Bordwell, “Slavoj Žižek.” Incidentally,
although Gopalan Ravindran’s “Žižek’s The Fright of Real Tears” was initially published
in December 2005, clearly making it improbable that Ravandrian could have read Bord-
well’s “Slavoj Žižek,” since the time between the publication of the two was a matter of
months, it is curious that the 2007 reprint for the International Journal of Žižek Studies
makes no reference to Bordwell’s paper, especially because it deals with most of Ravin-
dran’s objections to cognitivists.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid., 58. Emphasis in the original.
52. Ibid., 59.
53. Richard Maltby, “‘A Brief Romantic Interlude’: Dick and Jane Go to 3½ Seconds of
the Classical Hollywood Cinema,” in Bordwell and Carroll, eds., Post-Theory, 434–60.
54. Žižek, Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, 11–12.

tion as ellipses?55 It would appear that Žižek faults cognitivists for not being
able to do proper theoretical work only to provide us with an example of this
theoretical work, which is in essence an even more simplified version of cog-
nitivists’ standard analyses.
The second point I wish to address is what in film studies is usually re-
ferred to as enunciation theory. This theory sets out to give an account of vari-
ous aspects of film narration and spectatorship in terms of the distinction be-
tween two types of utterances—histoire and discourse—developed originally
by the French linguist Émile Benveniste.56 The distinction between the two
boils down to the absence or presence of clear markers of enunciation, that is,
the act of linguistic expression. Thus, if we can fully understand the utterance
without any knowledge about the speaker, as is the case in “Slavoj Žižek is a
Slovene,” we are dealing with histoire. On the other hand, discourse stands for
utterances such as “Yesterday I took a walk,” which cannot be fully compre-
hended without knowing both the time of the enunciation (what “yesterday”
refers to) and the identity of the enunciator (who “I” refers to). Film theorists
have applied this linguistic model to fiction film in order to dispel the alleged
ideological effects that, according to them, are a product of mistaking fiction
film for histoire when it is in fact discourse. In narratological terms, this means
that the film story does not recount itself as it is usually assumed, rather it is
presented by a filmic enunciator, that is, a narrator responsible for all of the
film’s images and sounds.
Although Bordwell has been rightly criticized for merely replacing the con-
cept of the narrator with the concept of narration and for keeping much of the
narrator’s anthropomorphic properties and thus retaining a certain agency
that still enunciates its position, Carroll has more recently criticized enuncia-
tion theory more successfully.57 Interestingly, Žižek behaves as though the
arguments against enunciation theories written before Fright of Real Tears,
above all Bordwell’s and Carroll’s criticisms in Narration in the Fiction Film
and Mystifying Movies, respectively, do not exist.58 Without even addressing
their arguments, he proceeds to use the concept of enunciation throughout
Fright of Real Tears as if it was entirely unproblematic.
Žižek presents the logic of suture—a technical term for various procedures
informing the position of the spectator in relation to various sequences of
shots, most notably the shot/reverse-shot sequence—as a three-step process
and connects it to enunciation:59
55. A standard example is a shot of the hand on the handle followed by a shot of the
character in another room signaling the character has walked through the door.
56. Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables, 1973).
57. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi, “Introduction” to Part IV: Film Narrative/Narration,
in Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi, eds., Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures (Malden,
Mass., 2006), 175–84. Noël Carroll, “Narration,” in Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga,
eds., Routledge Companion to Film and Philosophy (Oxford, 2009), 196–206.
58. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison, 1985), 21–26; Noël Car-
roll, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York, 1988),
150–60.
59. For concise articulations of suture in film theory, see Daniel Dayan, “The Tutor
Code of Classical Cinema,” Film Quarterly 28, no. 1 (Fall 1974): 22–31; Kaja Silverman, Sub-
ject of Semiotics (New York, 1983), 194–235. For criticism of suture, also left unanswered by

740 Slavic Review
Firstly, the spectator is confronted with a shot, finds pleasure in it in an

immediate, imaginary way, and is absorbed by it.
Then, this full immersion is undermined by the awareness of the frame
as such: what I see is only a part, and I do not master what I see. I am in a
passive position, the show is run by the Absent One (or, rather, Other) who
manipulates images behind my back.
What then follows is a complementary shot which renders the place from
which the Absent One is looking, allocating this place to its fictional owner,
one of the protagonists. . . .
So, in order to suture the decentring gap, the shot which I perceived as
objective is, in the next shot, reinscribed/reappropriated as the point-of-view
shot of a person within the diegetic space. . . . When the second shot replaces
the first one, the “absent one” is transferred from the level of enunciation to
the level of diegetic fiction.60
The construction of the second paragraph suggests (especially given
Žižek’s adherence to auteur theory) that the Absent One who manipulates
images behind my back is none other than the author. This is further sup-
ported by the abundance of phrases such as “this long panning shot thus
directly renders Kieślowski’s fundamental notion of the ‘solidarity of sinner’”
or Hitchcock “engages us directly with the point of view of this . . . Gaze.”61
In other words, the fact that Žižek regularly and indiscriminately uses the
author-predicate constructions to talk both about film’s formal procedures, ef-
fects, and fictional aspects and about an author’s actions in actual life points
to an ontological conflation. But this conflation is a classical mistake that Gé-
rard Genette warned against at least as early as 1972. In Figures III, partly
translated into English as Narrative Discourse, Genette made absolutely clear
that the diegetic space-time and the actual time of production of the narrative
are not to be mistaken for one another.62 Of course, it could be said that I am
reading too much into Žižek’s use of the author-predicate construction for it
can be easily understood as common shorthand for how we talk about film.
Thus, when Žižek says that Hitchcock does so-and-so, he really means that
the film has such-and-such an effect.
If that is so, the alternative as far as the Absent One is concerned is that it
should be identified with what has usually been referred to as le grand imagier
since Christian Metz, or as the implicit fictional narrator since the discussions
of its (non-)ubiquity in fiction in analytic circles. Latter discussions have dem-
onstrated, however, that such a figure does not exist or exists in a very limited
number of fiction films.63 In fact, its existence pivots around the continuous
Žižek, see William Rothman, “Against the System of Suture,” Film Quarterly 29, no. 1 (Fall
1975): 45–50; Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 110–13; Carroll, Mystifying Movies,
183–99.
61. Ibid., 172, 35.
62. Gérard Genette, Figures III (Paris, 1972); Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An
Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, 1980).
63. Carroll and Choi, “Introduction” to Part IV: Film Narrative/Narration; Carroll,
“Narration”; Mario Slugan, “An Asymmetry of Implicit Fictional Narrators in Literature
and Film,” Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics 7, no. 2 (August 2010): 26–37, at www.

presence of some visual marker of enunciation, where enunciation is defined

as “the semiological act by which some parts of a text talk to us about this
text as an act.”64 Enunciation theorists usually take the following as mark-
ers of enunciation: exaggerated foreground, low angle point-of-view shot,
point-of-view shots replicating drunkenness or myopia, framing devices such
as keyhole image, shaky camera, artificial makeup, montage jump cuts, and
punctuations such as superimposition.65 These markers are thought of as vi-
sual equivalents to verbal deixis—terms such as “I,” “here,” and “yesterday,”
whose reference depends on the knowledge about the enunciator. As such,
they are thought to reveal the fictional agency in charge of relating the infor-
mation out of which the story is to be inferred. Among the examples listed,
however, only point-of-view shots suggest that there is somebody within the
diegesis who is responsible for seeing what we see on screen. And even then
it is only a character responsible for this particular vista and not a narrator
who is responsible for the whole of the film, that is, the one who manipulates
images behind my back. Moreover, this list clearly only includes shots that
are not objective, because objective shots are defined as shots where no such
intrusive markers may be found. And, in the above cited passage on suture
Žižek claims that the objective shot exists on the level of enunciation. Thus,
when Žižek refers to a fictional Absent One, not only is the fictional Absent
One theoretically an unsustainable term, but his description of an objective
shot as expressive of enunciation is not even in line with what counts as a sign
of enunciation in standard accounts of enunciation theory.
Another theoretical framework Žižek invokes is auteur theory. Among
various authors Žižek discusses, his most comprehensive analyses are of Ros-
sellini in Enjoy Your Symptom!, of Hitchcock in Everything You Always Wanted
to Know about Lacan and Looking Awry, of Kieślowski in Fright of Real Tears,
and of Lynch in The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime. The methodological irregu-
larities that plague Žižek’s writings generally are brought into sharp relief in
his specific treatment of these authors. They include assumptions about direct
translation of authorial intentions to the effects of their work; assumptions
about the coherence of the author’s vision over his entire oeuvre; key conclu-
sions drawn from the interviews with Kieślowski rather than from the films
themselves (this is where the title of Fright of Real Tears comes from); privileg-
ing scripts over the final versions of the film; and identifying fictional charac-
ters as the author’s alter egos (Véronique in Double Life of Véronique, the Judge
in Red [1994]).66 But it is not these standard irregularities in the application
of auteur theory on which I want to dwell. Rather, by turning more closely
to Looking Awry and Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan, I
pjaesthetics.org/index.php/pjaesthetics/article/view/70/67 (last accessed 19 July 2013);

Slugan, “The Problem of General Narrator in Fiction Film,” Hrvatski filmski ljetopis, no. 67
(2011): 33–41.
64. Christian Metz, “The Impersonal Enunciation, or the Site of Film (In the Margin of
Recent Works on Enunciation in Cinema),” New Literary History 22, no. 3 (1991): 747–72.
65. André Gaudreault and François Jost, “Enunciation and Narration,” in Toby Miller
and Robert Stam, eds., A Companion to Film Theory (Oxford, 1999), 45–64.
66. Žižek, Fright of Real Tears, 121–22, 137, 163.

742 Slavic Review
want to demonstrate the ease with which Žižek proposes a periodization of

Hitchcock’s work.67
The periodization is put forward in chapter 5 of Looking Awry and in the
introductory chapter of Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan.
In Looking Awry it is based on the three variations on the impossibility of sex-
ual relationship, and in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan
on Jameson’s triad of realism–modernism–postmodernism. Everything You
Always Wanted to Know about Lacan expands on the thematic periodization
by providing the formal traits of each period. In fact, five different periods in
Hitchcock’s oeuvre are proposed in Everything You Always Wanted to Know
about Lacan, but the three that correlate with Jameson’s triad are identified as
crucial in both texts, and, at least thematically, described almost identically.
“Realism,” according to Žižek, correlates with Hitchcock’s English films of the
second half of the 1930s, from The 39 Steps (1935) to The Lady Vanishes (1938).
Formally they belong to the classical film style, though thematically their
function is “to put the love couple to the test and thus to render possible their
final reunion.”68 “Modernism” correlates with the “Selznick period”—from Re-
becca (1940) to Under Capricorn (1949)—and is centered on the female heroine
caught in the triangle with “the elderly figure of a villain . . . and the younger
somewhat insipid ‘good guy’ whom she chooses in the end.”69 Formally, it
is characterized by “long, anamorphically distorted tracking shots.”70 “Post-
modernism,” formally characterized by the problematization of enunciation
and spectatorship within diegesis, correlates with the big films of the 1950s
and early 1960s. These films, from Strangers on a Train (1951) to Birds (1963),
are thematically centered on “the male hero to whom the maternal superego
blocks access to a normal sexual relationship.”71 The additional two periods
include films before The 39 Steps during which Hitchcock’s classical style is
consolidated, and the films from Marnie (1964) onward characterized by dis-
integration and the decline in quality.
The problem of this periodization is not merely one or two films that some-
how fall in-between periods and thus elude easy classification. For instance,
Jamaica Inn (1939)—an English film of the second half of the 1930s made after
The Lady Vanishes—does not make Žižek’s list.72 Similarly, when we move to
the divide between “modernism” and “postmodernism,” the rather (in)fa-
mous Stage Fright (1950)—shot between Under Capricorn and Strangers on a
Train—is not categorized at all.73 The greatest problem is rather that the peri-
odization does not hold up even for the films that are named.
67. For Davis, interestingly, this is one of the moments of “patient, scholarly
coherence-building” in Žižek’s work, which stands out against more “outrageous leaps of
interpretative imagination.” Davis, Critical Excess, 128.
68. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 3.
69. Ibid., 4.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid., 5.
72. In Looking Awry, it is noted as an exception from the “realism” period.
73. It was not a Selznick production so it is highly unlikely it can be put under the
period correlating with modernism. On the other hand, long tracking shots do play an
important role there and the (in)famous false flashback may be interpreted as another way

Let us briefly consider the “Modernism” or the “Selznick” period. In Re-

becca the female protagonist (Mrs. de Winter) never finds herself in the tri-
angle described by Žižek. The relationship between her, her husband Maxim,
and his deceased wife Rebecca bears no resemblance to Žižek’s triad. The
triangle described by Žižek is evident in Foreign Correspondent (1940), but the
action in fact revolves around the male protagonist—American journalist John
Jones—rather than the female one—the conspirator’s daughter Carol Fisher. In
Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941), there is no privileging of the protagonists and the
love triangle is again not of the sort Žižek describes, but between Mrs. Smith,
her husband, and his business partner. In the case of Saboteur (1942), no love
triangle—real or imagined—exists at all and, to boot, the action centers on the
male protagonist. The absence of triangles also holds for both Lifeboat (1944),
which is better described in terms of couples connecting after they literally
cannot get away from each other, and Spellbound (1945).74 The Paradine Case
(1947) harbors three different love triangles, but in every case the criminal is
a woman not a man. The Paradine Case is also a good example for demon-
strating how poorly Žižek uses narratological terminology. He notes that the
story in this period is “narrated from the point of view of the woman,” which
means that she is a focalizer in the narratological sense of the word.75 Yet in
the film Mrs. Paradine is presented as a sphinx whose motifs are unknown
and the focalizer is her attorney, Anthony Keane. Finally, in his discussion
of Under Capricorn Žižek again misreports the triangle. It is again the woman
who commits the crime for which the elderly man is accused. Žižek, however,
makes it seem as though Henrietta’s final admission of guilt is a lie, whereas
it is clear from the film that the lie resides in her husband’s initial admission
of guilt.76
There are also four short propaganda films from this period that are regu-
larly described as having no traits particular to Hitchcock whatsoever. These
are, of course, not even mentioned by Žižek. Finally, to claim that the key
formal characteristic of the “Selznick” period is its long takes is effectively
to postulate Rope, Under Capricorn, and perhaps The Paradine Case as the
only films of the period. Out of twelve films of the period (supposing we do
not even count the propaganda ones), three are representative in their formal
of diegetic problematization of film spectatorship. Thematically, however, there is neither

a love triangle fitting Žižek’s description nor a maternal superego at play here.
74. It is not impossible Žižek would claim that the triangle in Lifeboat includes a rug-
ged John Kovac, the female journalist “Connie” Porter, and the scheming German captain
Willy. In Spellbound, it should not be forgotten that Dr. Constance Peterson’s true mentor
is not the evil Dr. Murchison but the good Dr. Alexander Brulov. Moreover, Spellbound,
together with Marnie, is the film in which Hitchcock explicitly addresses psychoanalysis
and does so in an extremely simplistic manner. In Spellbound the key to John Ballant-
yne’s mystery proves to be his dream, but the psychoanalytic reading of this is extremely
simplistic. Marnie’s kleptomania is also explained with recourse to no more developed
understanding of psychoanalysis. With Groucho Marx’s maxim in mind, it is rather curi-
ous that at no point does Žižek tackle the most explicit treatments of psychoanalysis in
Hitchcock’s films.
75. Žižek, Looking Awry, 101; Žižek, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about
Lacan, 4.
76. Žižek, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan, 12.

744 Slavic Review
traits, and five in their thematic ones.77 For Žižek’s argument, at least, these
are rather bad numbers.
A similar argument may be produced for the “Postmodernism” period.
There no maternal superego stops the male protagonist from a sexual affair in
Dial M for Murder (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Trouble with Harry (1955),
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), or The Wrong Man (1956). Furthermore,
it is unclear why Žižek claims a maternal superego stops Bruno in Strangers on
a Train from a sexual affair. Although there is a peculiar relationship between
him and his mother, it is his father who he feels keeps him away from leading
the life he wants. In the end, it is his father he wants to murder, not his mother.
Finally, Bruno is shown as quite capable of having amorous exploits—he ef-
fectively charms his female victim into meeting him alone.
As far as the other thematic trait is concerned, one could argue that nei-
ther Dial M for Murder, Psycho, or The Birds centers on the male hero (Tony
Wendice, Mitch Brenner, and Norman Bates, respectively) but on the female
one (Margot Wendice, Melanie Daniels, and Marion and Lila Crane, respec-
tively). Similarly, Strangers on a Train does not take Bruno (the potentially
sexually traumatized male, according to Žižek) as its focus, but rather the
wrongfully suspected Guy. Also, The Trouble with Harry is better described
as centered on two couples. Again, at least half of the twelve films from the
period are not thematically representative of the period. It is even worse as
far as the formal aspect is concerned, for only Rear Window (1954), Vertigo
(1958), and Psycho diegetically problematize conditions of film spectatorship.
Finally, it should not be forgotten that next to these twelve “postmodernist”
films, Hitchcock directed altogether twenty episodes from different television
series (seventeen of which from Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which ran from
1955 to 1961). What might strike one as odd is that somebody who pays a lot of
attention to Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990–91) and Kieślowski’s Decalogue (1989)
does not even mention this.
My intention here is not, of course, to lay down strict statistical criteria for
periodizing a director’s oeuvre. Yet when at least half the films (and frequently
even more) assigned to a particular category do not fit the mold, the model
surely lacks credibility. Žižek’s periodization of Hitchcock’s films is specula-
tive, at best, and specious at worst.78 His approach should first and foremost
be criticized by proponents of auteur theory because it gives their (far more
nuanced) efforts a bad name.
As far as more interpretative gestures are concerned, Žižek does not miss
the opportunity to cast Hitchcock’s three periods in terms of the Lacanian
triad: Symbolic/Imaginary/Real. “Realism”: “The McGuffin is clearly the objet
petit a, a gap in the centre of a symbolic order—the lack, the void of the Real
setting in motion the symbolic movement of interpretation, a pure semblance
77. For one of the five a rather suspicious interpretative move is made when the “pas-
sive” member of the supposedly homosexual couple from Rope (1948) is identified as torn
between his partner and his professor.
78. Similar problems arise in the discussion of the Colors trilogy. Žižek claims they
are centered on the female protagonist. It is true he recognizes White as a counterfactual,
but he terms it an exception. One mismatch out of three seems to me to be something more
than an exception.

of the Mystery to be explained, interpreted . . . The first period [“Realism”]

stands clearly under the sign of a, i.e. McGuffin.”79 “Modernism”: “This is the
basic situation in a whole series of Hitchcock’s films: . . . the imaginary bal-
ance changes into a symbolically structured network through a shock of the
Real.”80 “Postmodernism”: “The birds are Phi, the impassive, imaginary ob-
jectification of the Real . . . In the third period [“Postmodernism”] the different
forms of the big Phi become predominant.”81 Thus, even if there were no other
issues, already this broad periodization drawing heavily on a conceptually
inaccessible term—the Real—would be sufficient to make us wonder whether
in his interpretative work Žižek brings anything of substance to the table.
The Unbearable Lightness of Interpreting

In this last section of methodological analysis proper, I wish to consider some
of Žižek’s readings of films. The goal of this analysis is not to posit the su-
periority of one interpretative framework over another but to highlight how
often Žižek’s readings contain theoretical misunderstandings or plain errors.
For instance, Žižek’s reading of The Double Life of Véronique fails on both ac-
counts; his readings of the previously mentioned sequences from Psycho and
The Birds, “only” on the latter.82
The theoretical framework for Žižek’s interpretation of Kieślowski’s work
is Kant’s distinction between morality and ethics, that is, “[the] choice [be-
tween the two that] runs through Kieślowski’s entire” work.83 Given the im-
perative to preserve the theoretical coherence of Kieślowski’s opus, it is no
wonder Žižek sees a choice between morality and ethics in The Double Life
of Véronique where there is none: “This choice [is] staged at its purest in The
Double Life of Véronique—vocation (leading to death) and a quiet satisfied life
(when/if one compromises one’s vocation).”84 Žižek claims that Weronika is
aware of her heart condition and that “she has to choose—to continue singing,
with all the stress and strain which this involves, and risk her life or to give
79. Žižek, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan, 8. Emphasis in the
original.
80. Ibid., 7.
81. Ibid., 8.
82. Another point worth considering is the presence of factual errors in Žižek’s texts,
which, although no further interpretative claims are based on them, evidence lack of
methodological discipline. In Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1948) it is not the
father’s milk that is poisoned, as Žižek would have it, but the tea. See Žižek, Enjoy Your
Symptom!, 35. In Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950) Ingrid Bergman’s character is not Estonian
but Lithuanian. Ibid., 41. Where evil spirits dwell in Twin Peaks is not Red but Black Lodge.
Ibid., 163; Žižek, Fright of Real Tears, 53; Žižek, Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, 24. There are
even direct contradictions: in The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime three different characters
(Mystery Man on p. 18 and both Pete and Fred on p. 20) are identified as killing Mr. Eddy.
In Andrei Tarkovskii’s Stalker (1979) nobody enters the room at all, and, moreover, they do
not fail to express their wishes “because of their lack of faith” but because they know it is
not their pronounced wishes that will be realized, rather those deepest secret ones. See
Žižek, “The Thing from Inner Space.”
84. Ibid.

746 Slavic Review
up her singing career and lead a normal life.”85 In the film, though, no cue is
given that Weronika knows about her illness. It is Véronique who knows of
her own condition (which can be inferred from the fact she is in possession of
her EKG), not Weronika. This clearly demonstrates that Weronika is not in a
position to make any choices, for there is no choice to make.
One might object that Žižek’s interpretation is only partly invalidated—
that, although it does not apply to Weronika, it still holds for Véronique. The
problem with this claim is that even Véronique finds out about her condition
only after she has made her choice not to sing again. When asked by her men-
tor why she is quitting, she simply responds: “I don’t know.” Véronique’s la-
conic response barely supports Žižek’s central argument that the choice be-
tween singing and not singing is the one between ethics and morality. For
Kant, of course, the subject cannot make an ethical choice without knowing
she is making one.86
In order to substantiate his points about The Double Life of Véronique and
the coherence of Kieślowski’s opus, Žižek invokes Camera Buff (1979). First, he
incorrectly states that the protagonist’s wife leaves him in the final scene and
that he “turns the camera on himself and his wife, recording her departure on
film.”87 On the contrary, Filip’s wife has left him some time ago, and she does
not reappear in the final scene. Žižek then claims that Filip’s filming of him-
self at this moment “is the ultimate proof that he has truly elevated filming
into his ethical cause.”88 This is again factually incorrect. Filip has just had
his hopes raised that his wife has returned; he starts to film only after discov-
ering that it was the milkman who rang the bell. Filip films the story of how
he lost his family and, arguably, he does it in order to somehow reclaim them.
Such a heteronomous action is certainly not ethical in Kant’s sense. And even
if Žižek did not make a factual error, it is unclear why filming oneself during
the departure of one’s wife and daughter should count as ethical. Acting con-
trary to one’s desire (in Filip’s case, the desire to stop his wife from leaving
him) does not mean one is acting in accordance with a universal moral law.
Turning to interpretations deriving from factual errors and leading to
theoretical and interpretative fallacies, in Fright of Real Tears Žižek groups
together the aerial view of Bodega Bay from The Birds with Arbogast’s killing
from Psycho as shots that, by constructing the place of impossible subjectiv-
ity (of the Thing itself construed as another variation of the Real), undermine
suture.89 These two examples, which in his writings on film exemplify various
theses, now play a pivotal role in Žižek’s exposition of suture in Hitchcock’s
films. Demonstrating the factual errors at the foundation of his argument ren-
ders numerous subsequent theoretical and interpretative discussions otiose.
Except for the theoretical discussion of suture, these include numerous inter-
85. Ibid., 151.

86. Žižek also says the following: “Is the topic of our first chapter, the choice between
Theory and Post-Theory, not yet another case of the ethical choice between event and Be-
ing, between ethics and morality, between mission and life?” Ibid., 148. Given that I have
argued Žižek should be taken at face value I must reply, “No, it is not.”
87. Ibid., 138.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid., 36–38.

pretative analogies to Hitchcockian Jensenism, Lacan’s initial articulation of

the big Other, and most importantly, to the void of the Real as the constitutive
kernel of the subject.90
First, bearing in mind Žižek’s account of suture and enunciation quoted
above, one would imagine that this type of procedure, which establishes a
diegetic source for the point of view presented would be exemplary of suture,
not the obverse. Second, like the Bodega Bay shot, the sequence of Arbogast’s
murder gives no reason to think that the shot of Arbogast falling down the
stairs is “the ‘subjective’ shot from the standpoint of the murderous Thing
itself.”91 There are two clearly objective tracking shots of Arbogast ascending
the stairs that keep the same distance from him throughout. The shot of Arbo-
gast falling down the stairs inverts these earlier shots as far as the direction
of the camera is concerned, but retains their objective character. Moreover,
the camera does not move away from Arbogast’s face as he falls down the
stairs. If this were a subjective shot, it would mean that the murderer must be
following Arbogast down the stairs as Arbogast traverses them backwards.
Yet, when Arbogast eventually comes to rest at the foot of the staircase, the
murderer’s feet are seen running down the steps to finish him off. Continuity
editing would demand that the murderer was already there, ready to strike,
when Arbogast collapsed.
Žižek appears most interested in analyzing a film’s formal features in his
interpretation of the aerial shot of Bodega Bay from The Birds. This shot fol-
lows the explosion of the gas station and gives us an overview of the attacked
town. During the shot, birds enter from off-screen, signaling the imminence
of another attack. As noted earlier, Žižek’s discussion of the shot is repeated
on numerous occasions in his work and the gist of it remains the same: what
is initially perceived as an objective shot of the town from above is, “with
the entry into the frame of the birds, resignified, subjectivised into the point
of view of the evil aggressors themselves.”92 This reading obviously miscon-
strues what happens on screen, however. No cue marks the transformation
into the subjective shot; the camera does not shake nor does it start to move
together with the flock of birds. It just remains fixed as more and more birds
fill the frame. What seems particularly worrisome about Žižek’s insistence on
this reading is that it contradicts his own guidelines for the transformation of
objective shots into subjective ones. Žižek clearly states that there needs to
be a “codified marker” such as the trembling of the camera or a subjectivized
soundtrack for this transformation to take place, yet he identifies neither de-
vice in the Bodega Bay shot.93
To compound the problem, the discussion of the Bodega Bay shot in Look-
ing Awry is connected with the categorization of various tracking shots, which
are, according to Žižek, privileged Hitchcockian procedures “for isolating the
90. These interpretative discussions take place in Žižek, Everything You Always
Wanted to Know about Lacan, 252–63. Additionally, in the case of Arbogast’s murder,
these include interpretative discussions of subjectivization, passage from hysteria to per-
version, and of the triad of visual “negation of negation” in Psycho. Ibid., 247–53.
91. Ibid., 36.
93. Ibid.

748 Slavic Review
stain, this remainder of the real that ‘sticks out.’”94 Žižek argues that the aerial
shot of the town is exemplary of the “immobile tracking shot,” apparently
depicting the shift from the reality to the Real (of the Thing). This “immobile
tracking shot” is contrasted to a “hystericized tracking shot” (in fact, not a
tracking shot at all but a move-in on the object through rapid cuts). Žižek also
finds the exemplary “hystericized” shot in The Birds—namely, the move-in
shot on the pecked-out eyes of Mitch’s mother’s dead neighbor.95 The fact that
two out of the four types of tracking shots Žižek identifies are not in fact track-
ing shots at all evinces either his carelessness about clearly defined termi-
nology or his modest talents as a film theorist. In other words, Žižek makes
accepted film terminology accommodate Lacan and not the other way around.
These comments should not be understood to suggest that I am preventing
Žižek from making any typology of shots based on whatever criteria would
suit his purposes. It is merely to say that if he presents his discussion as a ty-
pology of the tracking shot as he does and then proceeds to introduce external
elements to a clearly defined set, then I have every right to call him on it.
Finally, the conclusion to part 2 of Looking Awry on Hitchcock—a discus-
sion of Hitchcockian montage—establishes another faulty generalization. For
the “zero degree of Hitchcockian” montage—the dissection of scenes in which
a character approaches the Thing such as Lila’s approach toward the house
in Psycho—two injunctions are given: “Forbidden are the objective shot of
the Thing, of the ‘uncanny’ object, and—above all—the subjective shot of the
approaching person from the perspective of the ‘uncanny’ object itself.”96 A
counterexample for the former may easily be found. The final scene of The
Birds in which the protagonists exit the bird-surrounded house and enter their
getaway car abounds with objective shots of the birds, that is, the Thing. I have
not been able to find a counterexample for the latter, but it is noteworthy that
Žižek implicitly does so. His account of Arbogast’s murder as seen through a
subjective shot of the murderous Thing, although inaccurate, demonstrates
internal inconsistency. Yet again we are faced either with Žižek’s hasty gener-
alizations or with his sketchy understanding of film analysis vocabulary.
Having come this far, two things might worry the reader. The first is an
almost naive faith in propositional factuality that these pages appear to elicit,
which is unheard of today given the work of thinkers such as Michel Foucault
or Thomas Kuhn. The other is what might seem overconfidence in the exis-
tence of some universal norms of interpretative practice. Allow me to assuage
these concerns with my concluding remarks.
In the first case, although it has been demonstrated that it is very un-
likely there are any theory-independent facts, that Žižek is practically never
defended by resorting to claims that his mistakes are only mistakes from a
theoretical point of view he does not subscribe to, strongly suggests that there
is a consensus within the academic community about what an incorrect de-
scription of a particular textual segment is. (And this does not contradict Fou-
94. Žižek, Looking Awry, 93.

95. Ibid., 96–97.
96. Ibid., 117.

cault’s or Kuhn’s findings but suggests that whatever the theory employed in
identifying incorrect descriptions is, it is shared by the community.) Rather,
the most common line of defense is to argue, like Davies does, that in the
grand scheme of things local mistakes do not really matter or that they should
be understood as provocations, the value of which lies in generating further
discussions. In this article, I have argued that both lines of defense are mis-
taken. The latter fails because whatever values provocation might hold, Žižek
does not intend his assertions merely as provocations but as genuine appeals
to truth as well. Therefore, it is completely legitimate and worthwhile to draw
attention to cases when these assertions are false. The former type of defense
falters because the supposedly irrelevant local mistakes are stepping stones
for further discussions. One cannot build a house on compromised founda-
tions and hope it will levitate once they collapse.
As far as the second point is concerned, I have never claimed that there
are or should be universal norms for interpretative practice. If at one point in-
terpretations that consist of nothing but strings of conclusions about various
aspects of the work were to appear, this would not immediately warrant their
dismissal even if my criteria were to be employed. It would just mean that, if
the conclusions were compelling enough, we might want to try to see whether
there is an argumentatively valid manner according to which the conclusions
could be arrived at. Nor have I argued against interpretations that are strictly
intrasubjective, that is, exclusively concerned with expressing one’s own phe-
nomenological engagement with the text and disinterested in argumentation.
Such work is perfectly legitimate and may be as illuminating as any other.97
Having said this, the fact remains that such cases, if there even are any in the
pure form described above, are exceptions. The bulk of interpretative practice
generally and certainly that of Žižek relies on intersubjective assertions about
the text in question and arguments based on these assertions in order to se-
cure their rhetorical effect, that is, to persuade their readers into accepting
them as accurate descriptions of the text. What the main claim of this article
boils down to is that in such cases the best way to gauge the rhetorical ef-
fects of such interpretations and, in turn, to decide whether to accept them or
not is to check the assertions, arguments, and concepts employed therein for
propositional factuality, argumentative validity, and conceptual coherence.
The key advantage of these criteria over matters of interest is that their clarity
and relative ease of application allows for a greater number of participants to
take part in the process of arbitrage on an equal footing.
97. Other types of interpretations may be imagined for which my evaluative criteria
would not be relevant. For instance, accounts that appear to be intrasubjective but make
no claim that they involve one’s own engagement with the text, but instead describe a
possible engagement with it.


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The Rhetorics of Interpretation and Žižek's Approach to Film

Author(s): Mario Slugan

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Slavic Review 72, no. 4 (Winter 2013)

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7. David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of

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cial sciences. My critique here is specifically addressed to those within aca-

The Rhetorics of Interpretation

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privileged epistemic access.16 Although the above two requirements appear

16. Strictly speaking, propositional factuality and argumentative validity may be

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Interlude, or the Curious Case of the Real in Žižek’s Writing

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at least Žižek’s version of it, in particular. Can a proper analysis of Žižek’s

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berto Rossellini’s films, David Lynch’s universe, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s opus,

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consternation, was picked up in further discussion.32 Yet, when Žižek himself

32. Žižek, Fright of Real Tears, 5.

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37. Žižek, Fright of Real Tears, 19.

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“what if we interpret the Tarkovskian sacrificial gesture as a . . . desperate

Other Theoretical Frameworks

43. Ibid., 106.

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post-theorists or cognitivists.47 Bordwell has adequately answered most of

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Firstly, the spectator is confronted with a shot, finds pleasure in it in an

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presence of some visual marker of enunciation, where enunciation is defined

pjaesthetics.org/index.php/pjaesthetics/article/view/70/67 (last accessed 19 July 2013);

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want to demonstrate the ease with which Žižek proposes a periodization of

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Let us briefly consider the “Modernism” or the “Selznick” period. In Re-

of diegetic problematization of film spectatorship. Thematically, however, there is neither

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of the Mystery to be explained, interpreted . . . The first period [“Realism”]

The Unbearable Lightness of Interpreting

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85. Ibid., 151.

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pretative analogies to Hitchcockian Jensenism, Lacan’s initial articulation of

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94. Žižek, Looking Awry, 93.

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