1. For the reading in question, see Slavoj Źižek, “Underground, or, Ethnic Cleansing as a Continuation of Poetry by Other Means,” Intercommunication 18, at http://www.ntticc.or.jp/pub/ic_mag/ic018/intercity/Źižek_E.html (last accessed 19 July 2013). For the presentation, see Mario Slugan, “Some Methodological Concerns regarding the Study of Balkanism in Cinema,” Slavic Forum (2011), at lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/theslavicforum/liles/2011/12/ SLAVICFORUM_2011_SLUGAN_PUBLICATION.pdf (last accessed 19 July 2013).

2. Źižek's recent work continues this trend. A whole chapter is devoted to the manner in which ideology operates in the latest Hollywood productions. See Źižek, Slavoj, Livingin the End Times (London, 2011), 54–80 Google Scholar.

3. Bordwell, David, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley, 2005)Google Scholar; David Bordwell, “Slavoj Źižek: Say Anything” (April 2005), at http://www.davidbordwell.net/essays/Źižek.php (last accessed 19 July 2013). Some have even referred to Źižek as the “leading film scholar and theorist.” See Harpham, Geoffrey Gait, “Doing the Impossible: Slavoj Źižek and the End of Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 453–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Popper, Karl, Conjectures and Refutations (London, 2002), 43–51 Google Scholar.

5. Carroll, Noël, “Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment,” in Bordwell, David and Carroll, Noël, eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison, 1996), 37–68 Google Scholar.

6. Stephen Prince, “Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Problem of the Missing Spectator,“ in Bordwell and Carroll, eds., Post-Theory, 71-87.

7. Bordwell, David, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation ofCinema (Cambridge, Mass., 1991)Google Scholar; David Bordwell, “Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory,” in Bordwell and Carroll, eds., Post-Theory, 3-37.

8. For extended analyses, see Harpham, “Doing the Impossible“; Clemens, Justin, “The Politics of Style in the Work of Slavoj Źižek,” in Boucher, Geoff, Glynos, Jason, and Sharpe, Matthew, eds., Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj iizek (Burlington, Vt., 2005), 3–22 Google Scholar; Matthew Sharpe, “'Then We Will Fight Them in the Shadows!’ Seven Parataxic Views, On Źižek's Style,” International Journal of lizek Studies 4, no. 2 (2010), at Źižekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/261/339 (last accessed 19 July 2013). A notable exception focusing on Źižek's use of examples is Edward R. O'Neill, “The Last Analysis of Slavoj Źižek,” Film Philosophy 15, no. 1 (June 2001), at http://www.film-philosophy.com/index.php/f-p/article/view/638/551 (last accessed 11 October 2013).

9. Źižek, Slavoj, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacque Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1991)Google Scholar; Źižek, Slavoj, Everything You Always Wanted to Know aboutLacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (London, 1992)Google Scholar; Źižek, Slavoj, The Art of the RidiculousSublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway (Seattle, 2000)Google Scholar; Źižek, Slavoj, Enjoy YourSymptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, 2nd ed. (New York, 2001)Google Scholar; Źižek, Slavoj, TheFright of Real Tears: Krzystof Kieślowski between Theory and Post-Theory (London, 2001)Google Scholar.

10. These exceptions include Davis, Colin, Critical Excess: Overreading in Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Źižek and Cavell (Stanford, 2010), 108–34Google Scholar; Todd McGowan, “Introduction: Enjoying the Cinema,” International Journal of lizek Studies 1, no. 3 (2007), at Źižekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/57/119 (last accessed 19 July 2013); Robert Miklitsch, “Flesh for Fantasy: Aesthetic, the Fantasmatic, and Film Noir,” in Boucher, Glynos and Sharpe, eds., Traversing the Fantasy, 47-68; Gopalan Ravindran, “Źižek's The Fright of Real Tears: Theory, Post-Theory and Kieslowski,” International Journal ofŹižek Studies 1, no. 3 (2007), at Źižekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/78/137 (last accessed 19 July 2013); Simmons, Laurence, “Slavoj Źižek,” in Colman, Felicity, ed., Film, Theory, and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (Montreal, 2009)Google Scholar. The first book-length study appears to be Flisfeder, Matthew, The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj iizek's Theory ofFilm (London, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. Booth, Wayne C., The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bordwell, MakingMeaning; Culler, Jonathan, “In Defense of Overinterpretation,” in Collini, Stefan, ed., Interpretationand Overinterpretation (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 109–24Google Scholar; Davis, Critical Excess; Umberto Eco, “Overinterpreting Texts,” in Collini, ed., Interpretation and Overinterpretation, 45-66; Jameson, Frederic, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially SymbolicAct (London, 1981), 1–88 Google Scholar; Rorty, Richard, “The Pragmatist's Progress,” in Collini, , ed., Interpretationand Overinterpretation, 89–108 Google Scholar; Stout, James, “What Is the Meaning of the Text,“ New Literary History 14, no. 1 (Autumn 1982): 1–12 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. Cruse, D. A., Lexical Semantics (Cambridge, Mass., 1986)Google Scholar.

13. Hirsch, E. D. Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, 1967)Google Scholar.

14. Eco, “Overinterpreting Texts.“

15. I am also inclined to think that the logical coherence of semantic fields employed in the analysis should be a further condition. I discuss a variant of this in the following section on the status of Źižek's brand of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

16. Strictly speaking, propositional factuality and argumentative validity may be as relevant for purely intrasubjective texts (e.g., those that describe one's own emotions when engaging the text) as for texts that use arguments. In those cases, however, propositional factuality hinges primarily on the author's sincerity.

17. Davis, Critical Excess, 16.

18. Źižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 159.

19. See Culler, “In Defense of Interpretation,” 119; Davis, Critical Excess, 184.

20. Źižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 159-60. For the list of similar statements see Davis, Critical Excess, 133.

21. O'Neill, “The Last Analysis of Slavoj Źižek.“

22. The apologist in question is Harpham, “Doing the Impossible,” 467-68.

23. Źižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, xi. Another example of the same attitude: “It [this book] mercilessly exploits popular culture, using it as convenient material to explain not only the vague outlines of the Lacanian theoretical edifice but sometimes also the finer details missed by the predominantly academic reception of Lacan.” Źižek, LookingAwry, vii.

24. Bordwell, Making Meaning, 263.

25. Some have even suggested that all of Źižek's work may be thought of as “thinking, writing and reading about the Real.” Kay, Sarah, Slavoj lizek: A Critical Introduction (Oxford, 2003), 1 Google Scholar.

26. Źižek, Slavoj, “The Undergrowth of Enjoyment: How Popular Culture Can Serve as an Introduction to Lacan,” in Wright, Elizabeth and Wright, Edmond, eds., The lizekReader (Oxford, 1999), 14 Google Scholar. Even in his later distinctions between symbolic Real, imaginary Real, and the real Real, the last again conforms fully to the above definition.

27. On this opposition: “The discontinuity between the voice-over/flashback and the subjective camera is ultimately the discontinuity between the Symbolic and the Real.“ Źižek, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan, 260. On Rossellini: “Herein lies also the fundamental ‘Hegelian’ lesson of Rossellini's films: the act qua real, transgression of a symbolic limit, does not enable us to (re)establish a kind of immediate contact with the presymbolic life substance, it throws us, on the contrary, back into that abyss of the Real out of which our symbolic reality emerged.” Źižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 54. Emphasis in the original. On Kieslowski's opus, “If there ever was a film-maker obsessed with this inner tension of our experience of reality, it is Kieslowski. In what is arguably his paradigmatic procedure (as exemplified by the short post-office sequence in Decalogue 6), he elevates a common phenomenon like the glass reflection of a human face into the momentous apparition of the Real for which there is no place in our experience of reality.“ Źižek, Fright of Real Tears, 66. Źižek's interpretation of Hithcock's work in terms of the Real will be examined later in this article. For the reference about the noir universe, see the previous section where “the Thing” acts as a variant of the Real.

28. Źižek, Fright of Real Tears, 96.

29. Perhaps for this reason the Real, unlike the Symbolic and the Imaginary, does not make an appearance among the terms explained in Laplanche, Jean and Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, The Language of Psycho-Analysis (London, 1973)Google Scholar.

30. Źižek, Slavoj, The Puppet and the Dwarf (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 67–69 Google Scholar. For my understanding of Źižek's varying accounts of the Real I am much indebted to Benjamin Noys, “The Horror of the Real: Źižek's Modern Gothic,” International Journal of Źižek Studies 4, no. 4, at Źižekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/274/372 (last accessed 19 July 2013).

31. Bordwell, “Slavoj Źižek.“

32. Źižek, Fright of Real Tears, 5.

33. Pertaining specifically to the example from Fright of Real Tears, Źižek later noted that his second usage of the example was serious. Slavoj Źižek, “Afterword: With Defenders Like These, Who Needs Attackers?,” in Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp, eds., TheTruth oftizek (New York, 2007), 198.

34. Źižek, Looking Awry, 73; Źižek, Fright of Real Tears, 62.

35. For the discussion of Arbogast's murder, see Źižek, Everything You Always Wantedto Know about Lacan, 230-31, 247-49, and 254-55; Źižek, Fright of Real Tears, 36-38. For the discussion of the Bodega Bay shot, see Źižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 9; Źižek, EverythingYou Always Wanted to Know about Lacan, 236-37 and 256; Źižek, Fright of Real Tears, 38; and the documentary by Sophie Fiennes, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema (2006).

36. On Chaplin, see Źižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 2; Źižek, Looking Awry, 73. On Lynch, see Źižek, Fright of Real Tears, 53-54; Źižek, Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, 23-24. On art forms crossing media boundaries, see Źižek, Fright of Real Tears, 78; Źižek, Art of the RidiculousSublime, 42. On Hitchcock, see Źižek, Looking Awry, 100-102; Źižek, EverythingYou Always Wanted To Know about Lacan, 3-5. On Tarkovskii, see Źižek, Fright of RealTears, 104-7; Slavoj Źižek, “The Thing from Inner Space,” Mainview (September 2009), at http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=ijp.080.1021a (last accessed 19 July 2013). This is not meant to be a comprehensive list.

37. Źižek, Fright of Real Tears, 19.

38. A good case in point is the episode of BBC's HARDtalk on which he defended, however problematically, Stalinism from liberal capitalism.

39. “Against this commonplace [Freud's alleged “pansexualism“], one should assert that the Freudian revolution consists in exactly the opposite gesture:… What Freud accomplishes here is precisely the radical desexualisation of the universe.” Źižek, Fright ofReal Tears, 172-73. Emphasis in the original. For other examples of this device, see Źižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, ix and x; Źižek, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan, 18,19,22, 25 and 42; Źižek, Fright of Real Tears, 161. This is not meant to be a comprehensive list.

40. “Ripley's coldness is not the surface effect of his gay stance, but rather the other way around.” Źižek, Fright of Real Tears, 145. For other examples of this device, see Źižek, Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, 33 and 36.

41. An illustration of the first of these would be: “In short, the problem with Kane [in Citizen Kane (1941)] was not that for all of his adult life [as a mature subject] he was in search of the lost incestuous object, trying to recapture it; the problem was rather the exact opposite: he never really lost this object, he stuck to it to the end and thus remained 'immature.'” Źižek, Fright of Real Tears, 51. Emphasis in the original. An illustration of the second is “Such reversals in the order of narration might be expected to provoke an effect of total fatalism: everything is decided in advance,… it is precisely the reversal of the temporal order that makes us experience in an almost palpable way the utter contingency of the narrative sequence, i.e., the fact that, at every turning point, things might have taken another direction.” Źižek, Looking Awry, 71.

42. Źižek, Fright of Real Tears, 151. Emphasis in the original. Proposition q here is: Veronique retreats. For another example of this device, see ibid., 33.

43. Ibid., 106.

44. Źižek, Fright of Real Tears, 61.

45. Ibid.

46. Źižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 97. Emphasis in the original.

47. In “Slavoj Źižek,” Bordwell takes issue with the term cognitivist being used as a blanket term. I use the term in the remainder of the paper only because Źižek does.

48. Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light, 260-64; Bordwell, “Slavoj Źižek.” Incidentally, although Gopalan Ravindran's “Źižek's The Fright of Real Tears” was initially published in December 2005, clearly making it improbable that Ravandrian could have read Bordwell's “Slavoj Źižek,” since the time between the publication of the two was a matter of months, it is curious that the 2007 reprint for the International Journal of Źižek Studies makes no reference to Bordwell's paper, especially because it deals with most of Ravindran's objections to cognitivists.

49. Źižek, Fright of Real Tears, 56.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid., 58. Emphasis in the original.

52. Ibid., 59.

53. Richard Maltby, “'A Brief Romantic Interlude': Dick and Jane Go to 3Vi Seconds of the Classical Hollywood Cinema,” in Bordwell and Carroll, eds., Post-Theory, 434-60.

54. Źižek, Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, 11-12.

55. A standard example is a shot of the hand on the handle followed by a shot of the character in another room signaling the character has walked through the door.

56. Benveniste, Émile, Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables, 1973)Google Scholar.

57. Carroll, Noël and Choi, Jinhee, “Introduction” to Part IV: Film Narrative/Narration, in Carroll, Noël and Choi, Jinhee, eds., Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures (Maiden, Mass., 2006), 175–84Google Scholar. Carroll, Noël, “Narration,” in Livingston, Paisley and Plantinga, Carl, eds., Routledge Companion to Film and Philosophy (Oxford, 2009), 196–206 Google Scholar.

58. Bordwell, David, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison, 1985), 21–26 Google Scholar; Carroll, Noël, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York, 1988), 150–60Google Scholar.

59. For concise articulations of suture in film theory, see Dayan, Daniel, “The Tutor Code of Classical Cinema,” Film Quarterly 28, no. 1 (Fall 1974): 22–31 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Silverman, Kaja, Subjectof Semiotics (New York, 1983), 194–235 Google Scholar. For criticism of suture, also left unanswered by Źižek, see Rothman, William, “Against the System of Suture,” Film Quarterly 29, no. 1 (Fall 1975): 45–50 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 110-13; Carroll, Mystifying Movies, 183-99.

60. Źižek, Fright of Real Tears, 32.

61. Ibid., 172, 35.

62. Genette, Gérard, Figures III (Paris, 1972)Google Scholar; Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse: AnEssay in Method, trans. Lewin, Jane E. (Ithaca, 1980)Google Scholar.

63. Carroll and Choi, “Introduction” to Part IV: Film Narrative/Narration; Carroll, “Narration“; Slugan, Mario, “An Asymmetry of Implicit Fictional Narrators in Literature and Film,” Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics 7, no. 2 (August 2010): 26–37 Google Scholar, at http://www.pjaesthetics.org/index.php/pjaesthetics/article/view/70/67 (last accessed 19 July 2013); Slugan, , “The Problem of General Narrator in Fiction Film,” Hrvatski filmski Ijetopis, no. 67 (2011): 33–41 Google Scholar.

64. Metz, Christian, “The Impersonal Enunciation, or the Site of Film (In the Margin of Recent Works on Enunciation in Cinema),” New Literary History 22, no. 3 (1991): 747–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65. Gaudreault, André and Jost, Francois, “Enunciation and Narration,” in Miller, Toby and Stam, Robert, eds., A Companion to Film Theory (Oxford, 1999), 45–64 Google Scholar.

66. Źižek, Fright of Real Tears, 121-22,137,163.

67. For Davis, interestingly, this is one of the moments of “patient, scholarly coherence-building” in Źižek's work, which stands out against more “outrageous leaps of interpretative imagination.” Davis, Critical Excess, 128.

68. Źižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 3.

69. Ibid., 4.

70. Ibid.

71. Ibid., 5.

72. In Looking Awry, it is noted as an exception from the “realism” period.

73. It was not a Selznick production so it is highly unlikely it can be put under the period correlating with modernism. On the other hand, long tracking shots do play an important role there and the (in)famous false flashback may be interpreted as another way of diegetic problematization of film spectatorship. Thematically, however, there is neither a love triangle fitting Źižek's description nor a maternal superego at play here.

74. It is not impossible Źižek would claim that the triangle in Lifeboat includes a rugged John Kovac, the female journalist “Connie” Porter, and the scheming German captain Willy. In Spellbound, it should not be forgotten that Dr. Constance Peterson's true mentor is not the evil Dr. Murchison but the good Dr. Alexander Brulov. Moreover, Spellbound, together with Mamie, is the film in which Hitchcock explicitly addresses psychoanalysis and does so in an extremely simplistic manner. In Spellbound the key to John Ballantyne's mystery proves to be his dream, but the psychoanalytic reading of this is extremely simplistic. Mamie's kleptomania is also explained with recourse to no more developed understanding of psychoanalysis. With Groucho Marx's maxim in mind, it is rather curious that at no point does Źižek tackle the most explicit treatments of psychoanalysis in Hitchcock's films.

75. Źižek, Looking Awry, 101; Źižek, Everything You Always Wanted to Know aboutLacan, A.

76. Źižek, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan, 12.

77. For one of the five a rather suspicious interpretative move is made when the “passive“ member of the supposedly homosexual couple from Rope (1948) is identified as torn between his partner and his professor.

78. Similar problems arise in the discussion of the Colors trilogy. Źižek claims they are centered on the female protagonist. It is true he recognizes White as a counterfactual, but he terms it an exception. One mismatch out of three seems to me to be something more than an exception.

79. Źižek, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan, 8. Emphasis in the original.

80. Ibid., 7.

81. Ibid., 8.

82. Another point worth considering is the presence of factual errors in Źižek's texts, which, although no further interpretative claims are based on them, evidence lack of methodological discipline. In Roberto Rossellini's Germany Year Zero (1948) it is not the father's milk that is poisoned, as Źižek would have it, but the tea. See Źižek, Enjoy YourSymptom!, 35. In Rossellini's Stromboli (1950) Ingrid Bergman's character is not Estonian but Lithuanian. Ibid., 41. Where evil spirits dwell in 7\vin Peaks is not Red but Black Lodge. Ibid., 163; Źižek, Fright of Real Tears, 53; Źižek, Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, 24. There are even direct contradictions: in The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime three different characters (Mystery Man on p. 18 and both Pete and Fred on p. 20) are identified as killing Mr. Eddy. In Andrei Tarkovskii's Stalker (1979) nobody enters the room at all, and, moreover, they do not fail to express their wishes “because of their lack of faith” but because they know it is not their pronounced wishes that will be realized, rather those deepest secret ones. See Źižek, “The Thing from Inner Space.“

83. Źižek, Fright of Real Tears, 137.

84. Ibid.

85. Ibid., 151.

86. Źižek also says the following: “Is the topic of our first chapter, the choice between Theory and Post-Theory, not yet another case of the ethical choice between event and Being, between ethics and morality, between mission and life?” Ibid., 148. Given that I have argued Źižek should be taken at face value I must reply, “No, it is not.“

87. Ibid., 138.

88. Ibid.

89. Ibid., 36-38.

90. These interpretative discussions take place in Źižek, Everything You AlwaysWanted to Know about Lacan, 252-63. Additionally, in the case of Arbogast's murder, these include interpretative discussions of subjectivization, passage from hysteria to perversion, and of the triad of visual “negation of negation” in Psycho. Ibid., 247-53.

91. Ibid., 36.

92. Źižek, Fright of Real Tears, 36.

93. Ibid.

94. Źižek, Looking Awry, 93.

95. Ibid., 96-97.

96. Ibid., 117.

97. Other types of interpretations may be imagined for which my evaluative criteria would not be relevant. For instance, accounts that appear to be intrasubjective but make no claim that they involve one's own engagement with the text, but instead describe a possible engagement with it.