Man’s Best Friend

Slavoj Žižek had me at the title of his 1992 book Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). The words were a siren call to those of us who fear that vast essential insight lies locked in texts with which we simply don’t play well. It’s not that I’m not interested in Lacan’s writings, but rather that pleasure, of some variety, is always at the wheel of how I read. Books need to contain, ideally, at least some combination of the things I enjoy: narrative, imagery, gossip, puns, the whisper of the vicarious. I can persist with prose that restricts or denies me these pleasures, and often do, in pursuit of other rewards. Yet there are times when I feel truly helpless with theoretical concepts that have been left ungrounded in tangible example or evocative metaphor. Even if I forgo pleasure and fight my way through such material, there’s scant uptake.