The Horror of the Real: Žižek’s Modern Gothic

International Journal of Žižek Studies 4 (4) (2010)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

This essay reads Žižek’s oeuvre, and especially his theorisation of the Real, as a form of modern Gothic. The aim is not to reduce his work to a ‘mere’ fiction, but to analyse Žižek’s deployment of Gothic devices as a mode of approaching truth, and the truth of the Real, in the guise or form of fiction. In particular I trace the transformations of these devices as Žižek refines and develops his conceptualisation of the Real, paralleling and recapitulating Lacan’s own developments, from the Real as unrepresentable ‘outside’ to gradually integrating the Real as the ‘inner curvature’ of the Symbolic. At each point in this shift I trace the formal parallels with different forms of the Gothic, and the concomitant effects on the social and political formulations of the Real. Žižek’s de-reification of the Real is at one with his politicisation of the Real – shifting from inert and unrepresentable horror to potential site of transformation. Here, however, Žižek divests himself of the Gothic to eliminate the risk of posing the Real in mythic terms as unrepresentable horror. Taking more seriously the possible alliance between psychoanalysis and Gothic I instead trace the possibility of a new alliance between them predicated on a ‘geometric’ Gothic that can probe the horror of capitalist reality

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,593

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Žižek: silence and the real desert.Rob Weatherill - 2008 - International Journal of Žižek Studies 2 (4).
Zizek: a critical introduction.Sarah Kay - 2003 - Malden, MA: Distributed in the USA by Blackwell.
The real internet.Jodi Dean - 2010 - International Journal of Žižek Studies 4 (1).
El pensamiento de Slavoj Zizek.Roy Vargas - 2009 - Revista de Filosofía y Teoría Política 40:11-30.
Žižek and the Real Hegel.David Gunkel - 2008 - International Journal of Žižek Studies 2 (2).
Thinking The Political By Way Of “Radical Concepts”.Katerina Kolozova - 2009 - International Journal of Žižek Studies 3 (1):1-21.
Lacan and the concept of the 'real'.Tom Eyers - 2012 - New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Agalma at the void: Towards a theory of the evental sublime.Adam Drury - 2011 - International Journal of Žižek Studies 5 (2).
Habermas avec Žižek.Ricardo Camargo - 2010 - International Journal of Žižek Studies 4 (1).
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Slavoj Žižek’s Psychoanalytic Marxism.Kirk Boyle - 2008 - International Journal of Žižek Studies 2 (1).

Analytics

Added to PP
2015-01-22

Downloads
18 (#711,533)

6 months
2 (#668,348)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

Non-Identity and Parodoxicality in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber.Mohammadi Abolfazl & Momeni Javad - 2017 - International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences 75:32-40.
COVID-19 and the Real Impossible.Jack Black - 2020 - International Journal of Žižek Studies 14 (2).

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references