Editorial

In this issue, we present a cluster of articles that take up the relation between psychoanalysis and film. The fields of cultural studies and film theory have been marked from their very beginnings by psychoanalysis: one has only to consider the groundbreaking work of Screen theorists in the 1970s and 1980s, who, influenced by Lacan and Althusser, exposed cinema as an ideological state apparatus (see Easthope (1983) for a review of this work). Laura Mulvey (1975), Stephen Heath (1981), Christian Metz (1982), and many others examined, for example, the ideological effects of standard Hollywood editing techniques, relations between spectators and spectacle, and the way subjects are interpellated into particular sexist, racist, and heterosexist subject positions. Both during and after the heyday of Screen theory, literary and film critics also drew on object relations, self psychology, and other versions of Lacanian theory to produce a large body of work about the relation between cultural representations, the institutions in which they emerge, and the formation and development of subjectivity. Janice Radway (1984), for example, created a paradigm for audience study that blended feminist psychoanalytic object relations with the ethnographic model developed by the Birmingham School. To mention just one more example, Žižek turns repeatedly to film and fiction to exemplify such Lacanian concepts as the Real (e.g., Žižek, 1991) and to point to the fantasmatic underpinnings of contemporary socio-political relations.

Each of the articles in this issue, as well as Jan Haaken's field note, further develops different strands of the rich and hybrid 30-something-year-old tradition of left-wing psychoanalytic cultural criticism. In “Lacan for Cinema Today: the Uncanny Pouvoir de la Vérité”, Fabio Vighi revisits Screen Theory's work on editing, suture, and the gaze, demonstrating the way that the Lacanian concept of the Real alters our understanding of these processes, and elucidatin