Critical Theory and Film

Fabio Vighi is Senior Lecturer and co-director of the Žižek Centre for Ideology Critique at Cardiff University, UK. He is the author of Žižek: Beyond Foucault (2007, with Heiko Feldner), Sexual Difference in European Cinema (2008), and On Žižek's Dialectics: Surplus, Subtraction, Sublimation (2010).

• Introduction1. The Dialectic's Narrow Margin: Film Noir between Adorno and Hegel Self-limitation in film noirThe noir panorama beyond spectatorshipAdorno goes to HollywoodThe negative and the wholeOntology of self-deception in film noirThe Narrow Margin and double visionsA detour on ideology2. On Critical Theory's Dialectical Dilemma Horkheimer's methodThe Kantian subtextHegel: contradiction (not) resolvedFrom mimesis to utopiaCritical Theory's fetishistic disavowal3. A Configuration Pregnant with Tension: Fritz Lang for Critical Theory Beyond the doubt of appearancesOn polaroids and truthFraming the subjectSublimation in The Blue GardeniaFrom paranoia to repetitionThe gaze in the frameThe art of excremental paintingCoda: the enjoyment of film in theoryReferences

Fabio Vighi's Critical Theory and Film: Rethinking Ideology in Cinema is a kind of Everything You Wanted to Know about Theodor Adorno but were Afraid to Ask Film Noir. But it's also more than that. It makes the largest claims about ideology and the way society is structured and it marries them to the most detailed and nuanced readings of a series of not-so-well-known film noirs. And it shows that these two are exactly the same: that it is exactly in the detail of these films that we see most clearly the biggest and most important truths about our society. The book is a triumph of both film scholarship and theoretical speculation.