How about squints?

In the group image of French intellectuals in the 20th century, Jacques Lacan has always been an unknown person. Especially compared with Sartre, Aaron, Camus and others, Lacan's theoretical knowledge is even less. This is because Lacan's psychoanalytic theory is self-contained and obscure, especially difficult to translate and spread, and there is no comprehensive translation and introduction so far. The appearance of Slavoj Zizek, a famous western philosopher, made up for this defect to some extent. When he gave speeches, attended conferences and held lectures all over the world, he appeared as Lacan's traditional successor. On the one hand, he went to France in his early years to study psychoanalysis under the guidance of Jacques Alan Miller, Lacan's son-in-law and intellectual heir. On the other hand, one of the themes of Zizek's works in recent years is to apply Lacan's psychoanalysis to various practical fields, especially in the study of popular culture, and to make a wonderful interpretation of popular movies and novels. Of course, Zizek didn't want to just spread Lacan's theory. In fact, before he went to France, his academic interests had covered Derrida, Christeva, Marxism, popular culture and so on. For Zeke, Lacan's theory is just one of the most mysterious and analytical theories he has mastered. Theory is theory after all. Without the function of guiding practice, it can only be reduced to a kind of "theoretical poverty". The boldest thing about Zizek is that he dares to break the limitations of various schools of philosophical theory, mix all kinds of theories together, form his own school, and analyze today's bizarre cultural situation. The book "Squinting Eyes" has a subtitle "Looking at Lacan through popular culture", which is actually the phased achievement of this kind of cultural research. If you pay a little attention, in 2007, Shanghai People's Publishing House published the book Dare not Ask Hitchcock, Just Ask Lacan, edited by Zizek, which basically continued the same theoretical purport, that is, "juxtapose and interpret the highest spiritual products in a certain culture with ordinary, ordinary and secular spiritual products", and analyze popular cultural products, such as Hitchcock's movies and secular spiritual products, with Lacan's psychoanalytic theory. Don't misunderstand that squints are boring essays. What Zizek is best at is his unscrupulous writing style. His words seem to be full of dazzling theoretical terms, but when he states a certain theory, he will definitely start from the details and examples of a certain text and try to explain his theoretical theme clearly in extremely popular language. This may also be the most controversial place for him in recent years. Many people regard him not as a philosopher, but as an academic star who can be skillfully integrated through serious psychoanalysis and low-level pornographic jokes. Generally speaking, serious philosophers are only interested in abstruse theories and will sneer at popular culture. Zizek, on the other hand, needs the theory of "facing up", but he just wants to "squint"; Analysis that needs to be taken seriously, he must ridicule it and face the theory with a deconstructive attitude. Reading his words is easy to produce reading pleasure. Those profound psychoanalytic terms were dismembered one by one in his works and became flowing and vivid words, as if the pent-up passion was released, resulting in a carnival of theory and text, a carnival of paradox and contradiction, a carnival of elegant culture and popular culture. Reading Zizek's theoretical carnival anthology "Squint", I have no intention to introduce various text terms and evidence. In fact, I am a very interesting example myself. I read this book intermittently during a long train trip. What impressed me most was Zizek's explanation of an important concept "the real world" in Lacan's theory. Zizek used a car metaphor. We've all had this experience. For people sitting in the car, the external reality seems far away, just at the other end of the glass window. The world outside the car and the world inside the car seem to be two completely different worlds, separated by a glass window, which plays a certain protective barrier and keeps us at a safe distance from the external reality. Although this distance is actually close at hand, when we look at the world outside the car from the inside, it seems that its existence is far away and unreal. When we open the window, we suddenly feel that the two worlds are connected, and that unreal feeling is gone. At this time, the window is equivalent to the "real world". The real world intrudes into reality, disrupting the boundary between reality and illusion. Explain dreaming with the real world. For example, we have all had similar experiences and often have nightmares. When we wake up from a dream, we will relax and think it is just a dream: "It is just a dream. In reality, I am no different from others, a normal person, not a murderer! " But according to Lacan's theoretical analysis, such a dream conveys a message: in the depths of our consciousness, as far as our desire reality is concerned, we are all murderers. We wake up from a dream in order to continue dreaming-dreaming that we become normal people like others-we think that waking up from a dream is waking up from an illusion, but we ignore an important reality. Even when we are awake, we are only in the state of consciousness of his dreams. In the words of Zizek, we thought we were decent and kind people in real life, but we became murderers in our dreams. On the contrary, what we see is essentially a murderer, but he dreams of becoming a decent and kind person in his daily life. Let me emphasize my experience again. I read the book "Squinting" intermittently on the train that went out for a long trip. When I finished reading this part and fell asleep in the roar of the rickety train, I clearly remembered my nightmare: I strangled my creditor in my sleep. I can't forget this horrible reading experience. It seems that through Zizek's psychoanalytic text, the real world of self-desire breaks the limitations of reality and fiction, and some evil desires spread as far as possible and are everywhere. Can we take Zizek's theory seriously? As an article about Zizek published in The New Yorker wrote, "We don't always have to take his views too seriously, because it will lead to category misunderstanding." Maybe even Zizek won't take his views seriously. He likes to demonstrate his views in absurd theoretical dilemmas. He likes to theorize about any phenomenon. He likes to mix all kinds of theories together to form a theoretical carnival. After all, he is an unclassified philosopher, psychoanalyst, presidential candidate, old urchin, detective novel lover, Hitchcock fan ... Yu Si 2011-4-/4 squint: Lacan through popular culture, written by Slovenians, translated quarterly, published by Zhejiang University Press.