Abstract

Throughout Zizek’s work and especially in The Parallax View , he offers detailed cultural and film analyses in order to detect a “short circuit” between two realms, for example, between desire and drive, the particular and the universal, contingency and necessity, etc. Ultimately, the logic of parallax requires a contingent universe of encounters where a paradoxical choice is made, when free will and determinism collapse in a kind of signaling of something different and new to come. By way of filmic references this essay offers a closer look at the conditions of this “impossible” space of choice and how subjects’ acts work performatively to reconfigure things like causality, love, ethics, and freedom