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The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost by Slavoj Žižek

By Slavoj Žižek

"The paintings of the Ridiculous Sublime" is firstly the specific studying of David Lynch's "Lost Highway", in line with the premises of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Lynch's particular universe of the 'ridiculous sublime' is interpreted as a simultaneous playful staging and traversing of the elemental ideological fantasies that maintain our past due capitalist society. A grasp of reversals, Zizek invitations the reader to re-evaluate with him effortless assumptions, obtained opinion, and present serious developments, in addition to pose tricky questions on the ways that we comprehend our global and tradition. He bargains provocative readings of "Casablanca", "Schindler's List", and "Life Is Beautiful" within the strategy of analyzing subject matters as varied - and as heavily associated - as ethics, politics, and our on-line world. Slavoj Zizek is senior researcher within the division of Philosophy, college of Ljubljana, Slovenia. he's the writer of greater than 70 books together with eleven in English.

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Extra resources for The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway (Occasional Papers (Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities), 1.)

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35 The final alternative with which cyberspace confronts us is thus: are we necessarily immersed in cyberspace in the mode of the imbecilic superego compulsion-to-repeat, in the mode of the immersion into the “undead,” perverse universe of cartoons in which there is no death, in which the game goes on indefinitely? Or is it possible to practice a different modality of relating to cyberspace in which this imbecilic immersion is perturbed by the “tragic” dimension of the real/ impossible? There are two standard uses of cyberspace narrative: the linear, single-path maze adventure, and the undetermined, “post-modern” hypertext form of rhizome fiction.

The Institution speaks through him), and therefore nobody expects him to be “sincere” since that is simply not the point (in the same way a judge who passes a sentence is not expected to be “sincere,” but simply to follow and apply the law, whatever his sentiments). On the other hand, the public sharing of inner turmoil, the coincidence between public and private, even and especially when it is psycho-logically “sincere,” is cynical - not because such a public display of private doubts and uncertainties is faked, concealing true privacy: what this display conceals is the objective socio-political and ideological dimension of the 36 THE ART OF THE RIDICULOUS SUBLIME policies or decisions under discussion.

Is the inserted story just Fred’s hallucination? Or is it a kind of flash- back, so that the intersected noir part provides the rationale for the killing? 34 It is often claimed that Lynch throws into our (the spectators’) face the underlying fantasies of the noir universe - in-deed, but he simultaneously renders visible the INCONSISTENCY of this fantasmatic support as well. The two main alternative readings of Lost Highway can thus be interpreted as akin to the dream-logic in which you can “have your cake and eat it too,” like in the “Tea or coffee?

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