Slavoj Zizek, Popular Culture, and Social and Psychoanalytic Theory

• In Event: Public Pedagogies: Torture, Paranoia, and Popular Culture

Abstract

This paper explains how Slavoj Zizek’s critical reading procedure of “short circuiting” was engaged in as part of a graduate course titled “Cultural Studies and Education.” Zizek asks his readers: “Is not one of the most effective critical procedures to cross wires that do not usually touch: to take a major classic (text, author, notion), and read it in a short-circuiting way, through the lens of a ‘minor’ author, text, or conceptual apparatus?” This paper session will develop an example of this “short circuiting way” of analyzing social theory texts by Lukacs, Althusser, Debord, Horkheimer and Adorno, and Foucault through popular films such as The Matrix, I Heart Huckabees, Crash, and Network— and vice versa.

Author

• James Trier, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill