Abstract

This essay explores the prolific filmography of Alfred Hitchcock in an attempt to untangle the Lacanian thread that has been traced through it by Slavoj Žižek, while also giving considerable focus to the Hegelianism underlying Hitchcock's dialectical engagement with Lacan's thesis "there is no such thing as a sexual relationship." Charting through particularly salient films in the Hitchcock labyrinth, including Notorious , Vertigo , and Marnie , this essay offers commentary on the presence throughout Hitchcock's work of such Lacanian concepts as desire, lack, the phallus, and the formulae of sexuation, while also elucidating the unmistakable and fundamental presence of the Hegelian dialectical shift that Žižek has spent so much of his career elaborating and which represents the highest point of Hitchcock's cinematic artistry, the point at which he reaches a level of sublimity that firmly situates him on the same philosophical plane as Hegel and Lacan