Stephen Heath

Another convoluted psychoanalytic analyis. Nevertheless, has some provocative ideas, although you sometimes have to translate his prose into English. He speaks Academicese with a vengeance.

His writing is a performative machinery of opposition; it is pointed through the imaginary, at the Symbolic, via Cinema. To a Lacanian this means – via a sutured spectator. One would be wise to disregard any temptation to approach this book with cynicism. For there is urgency in his 'metatextual' warning. Heath: "...ideological systems in a capitalist mode of production [are] the achievement of a number of machines (institutions) which move - which 'movie' - the individual as subject - show more shifting and placing desire, the energy of contradiction - in a perpetual retotalisation of the imaginary." show less