The Symbolic, The Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek Theory of Film. By

It was more than two decades ago that Joan Copjec put forward hercompelling argument about the misappropriation of Lacanian psy-choanalysis by film theorists. At that time the problem concerned the tendency among film theorists to conflate Foucault’s theory of gaze and apparatus (dispositif) with Lacan’s theory of the gaze and mirror stage. She wrote: “[This is] [w]hat I take to be the central misconception of film theory: believing itself to be following Lacan, it conceives the [cinematic] screen as mirror; in doing so, however, it operates in ignorance of, and at the expense of, Lacan’s more radical insight, whereby mirror is conceived as screen ” (Copjec, 1994, pp. 15–17). To be sure, the prob-lem was not that true believers somehow misunderstood Lacanian psychoanalysis, but rather that their premature understanding of Lacan’s early theories, compounded by an overzealous use of bricolage as writing strategy (which strikes me as the scholarly equivalent of “dabbling”), ruled out the possible discovery of his more relevant insight about the necessity of the screen. More to the point, it seemed to Copjec that the valu-able psychoanalytic concept of the subject was eclipsed by an overemphasis on the Foucauldian notion of apparatus, so Copjec urged film theorists to put the subjec