Maverick Slovenian cultural theorist, philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Å1/2iÅ3/4ek has made his name elaborating the complexities of psychoanalytic and Marxist theory through the exotic use of examples from film and popular culture. But what if we were to take Å1/2iÅ3/4ek's pretensions to cinephilia and film criticism seriously? In this book, adopting Å1/2iÅ3/4ek's own tactic of counterintuitive observation, the author reads the corpus of Alfred Hitchcock's films ('~one of the great achievements of Western civilization') and Å1/2iÅ3/4ek's idiosyncratic citation of them in order to identify the core commitments that inform Å1/2iÅ3/4ek's own work. From the practice of Hitchcock the author arrives at a theory of Å1/2iÅ3/4ek. To achieve this goal each chapter looks at a specific film by Hitchcock and explores a specific key concept crucial to the elaboration and core of Å1/2iÅ3/4ek's ideas.