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(2009) Sexual difference in European cinema, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Until now, psychoanalytic film theory has privileged the Lacanian category of the Imaginary and its corollary question of audience identification. It seems to me that despite their pioneering role in generating the right conditions for a long-term joint effort between psychoanalysis and cinema, the 1970s and 1980s appropriations of Lacan by film studies were (and still are) intrinsically reductive, as they resulted in the promotion of a discursive practice that concerned itself almost exclusively with the effects of cinematic production on the viewer (spectatorship theory). In so doing, these studies glaringly overlooked the order of the Real, especially in its symbiotic relationship with the symbolic texture of film. This means that the latter part of Lacan's teachings was practically ignored. Recently, it would appear that the potential for a fertile crossbreeding between psychoanalysis and cinema has either been absorbed by the depoliticised appeal of Cultural Studies, or reconsidered and eventually discarded by both cognitive-historicist approaches and conventional film theory. To my mind, Slavoj Žižek is the only theorist today who — despite being regularly criticised for not adhering to the standards of scholarship that define film studies as an academic discipline (see Bordwell 2005; Stamp 2007; Lebeau 2001) — advocates the convergence of psychoanalysis and film as part of a project for the radical re-politicisation of culture.
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Vighi, F. (2009). Introduction, in Sexual difference in European cinema, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1-14.
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