In The Cinematic Body, Steven Shaviro proposes a radical new approach to film viewing. Moving between Jerry Lewis and Andy Warhol, between Fassbinder’s gay sex icons and George Romero’s flesh-eating zombies, The Cinematic Body cuts across disciplinary boundaries and seeks to engage new currents in critical thought.

Shaviro radically critiques the Lacanian model currently popular in film theory and film studies, arguing against that model’s obsessive emphasis on the phallus, castration anxiety, sadistic master, ideology, and the structure of the signifier. In this groundbreaking volume, Shaviro effectively communicates a sense of the inescapable ambivalence and intensities of contemporary culture, ultimately affirming a thoroughly postmodern sensibility.

Steven Shaviro is associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Washington. He is author of Passion and Excess: Blanchot, Bataille, and Literary Theory and of several articles on the politics of difference, libidinal economy, and theories of sexuality.