We live in a world of the image. In many ways, images have replaced words as the defining aspect of cultural identity, whilst at the same time they have become part of our global culture. The rapidly developing discipline of visual cultural studies has become the key ares for examining the issues of our age. This book explains issues and concepts such as psychoanalysis, cultural theory, psotmodernism, queer theory, gender studies and narrative theory. The major theorists are all covered as the authors look at the significance of the visual in the works of Foucault, Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Baudrillard and Guattari. Taking up a range of themes such as spectatorship, pleasure, power, doubles, hallucination and the frame, the book explains them within the context of these theoretical developments.

Madness and Cinema offers a radical approach to the issue of what happens when we watch films. By exploring cinema's relationship to meaning and proposing new ways to read cinema through psychoanalysis, this book develops the idea that the spectator engages in what has previously been described as an act of madness. By considering some of the key concepts from Freud and Lacan, as well as ideas from Derrida and Foucault, we are shown the common features that cinema and madness share. The film spectator is shown as the psychotic, neurotic and hysteric, as the book examines the ways in which the foundations of culture and meaning are challenged when we become the spectator of a film.

In a "return" to Edmund Husserl and Sigmund Freud, Intimacy and the Anxieties of Cinematic Flesh explores how we can engage these foundational thinkers of phenomenology and psychoanalysis in an original approach to film. The idea of the intimate spectator caught up in anxiety is developed to investigate a range of topics central to these critical approaches and cinema, including: flesh as a disruptive state formed in the relationships of intimacy and anxiety; time and the formation of cinema's enduring objects; space and things; the sensual, the "real" and the unconscious; wildness, disruption, and resistance; and the nightmare, reading "phantasy" across the critical fields. Along with Husserl and Freud, other key thinkers discussed include Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mikel Dufrenne in phenomenology; Melanie Klein, Ernest Jones, Julia Kristeva, and Rosine Lefort in psychoanalysis. Framing these issues and critical approaches is the question: how might Husserlian phenomenology and Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis, so often seen as contradistinctive, be explored through their potential commonalities rather than differences? In addressing such a question, this book postulates a new approach to film through this phenomenological/psychoanalytic reconceptualization. A wide range of films are examined not simply as exemplars, but to test the idea that cinema itself can be a version of critical thinking.

Fuery explores the relationship between post-structuralism and absence. In order to understand the psychoanalytic theory of Lacan (and Freud), the deconstructionalist methodology of Derrida, Foucault's studies of systems of thought, and Kristeva's socio-cultural and psychoanalytic interests, Fuery believes it is necessary to take into consideration the function and operation of absence. He shows how post-structuralist theory can be seen as a system of studies of subjectivity in terms of absence, and how desire is based almost entirely on the precondition of absence. The study is divided into sections on subjectivity. desire, and meaning, with the final section working toward a hermeneutics and semiotics of absence.

We live in a world of the image. In many ways, images have replaced words as the defining aspect of cultural identity, whilst at the same time they have become part of our global culture. The rapidly developing discipline of visual cultural studies has become the key ares for examining the issues of our age. This book explains issues and concepts such as psychoanalysis, cultural theory, psotmodernism, queer theory, gender studies and narrative theory. The major theorists are all covered as the authors look at the significance of the visual in the works of Foucault, Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Baudrillard and Guattari. Taking up a range of themes such as spectatorship, pleasure, power, doubles, hallucination and the frame, the book explains them within the context of these theoretical developments.

Madness and Cinema offers a radical approach to the issue of what happens when we watch films. By exploring cinema's relationship to meaning and proposing new ways to read cinema through psychoanalysis, this book develops the idea that the spectator engages in what has previously been described as an act of madness. By considering some of the key concepts from Freud and Lacan, as well as ideas from Derrida and Foucault, we are shown the common features that cinema and madness share. The film spectator is shown as the psychotic, neurotic and hysteric, as the book examines the ways in which the foundations of culture and meaning are challenged when we become the spectator of a film.