SOURCE: Kurzweil, Edith. Review of Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, by Slavoj Žižek. American Journal of Sociology 97, no. 6 (May 1992): 1786-88.

In the following review, Kurzweil asserts that Looking Awry is a work of postmodern theory and faults Žižek for assuming that his readers are already familiar with the theories and concepts of Jacques Lacan.

Slavoj Zizek is gifted and versatile: he was a researcher at the Institute of Sociology in Ljubjana, and had run as a proreform candidate for the presidency of the republic of Slovenia, before writing Looking Awry—a book he “conceived as a kind of introduction to Lacanian ‘dogmatics,’ … as an excuse for indulging in the idiotic enjoyment of popular culture” (pp. vii-viii). He took time off from his political commitments in order to indulge in “post-deconstructionism”—his strictly Lacanian reading of the “Real” (in relation to the...