ABSTRACT
Zizek is credited with a revival of interest in Lacanian psychoanalytical film criticism, but his approach represents a decisive shift from the traditional psychoanalytical film focus of Laura Mulvey's analysis of the gaze of mastery and Jean-Pierre Oudart's notion of suture and cinematic identification, to concentrate on questions of fantasy and spectator enjoyment. Zizek takes up Hitchcock as a "postmodern phenomenon par excellence", a master text he can use to chart a populist reading of late Lacan. In his mapping of Hitchcock's subject beyond subjectivity, concepts of gaze and identification in Zizek's film commentary are linked to issues of desire and fantasmatic support of reality as a defence against the real. The real is a limit, a pure negativity, a traumatic limit that prevents the final totalization of the social-ideological field. According to Zizek, Hitchcock's films perform the work of analysis, they expose their own mechanisms; they make visible the relation of our symbolic and imaginary reality to the real.
