Film theory is in crisis. Also, at present, the dominant psychoanalytic paradigm is contested by cognitive and post-theory models. At its core, there is a broader crisis in cultural studies, particularly with regard to the public role of the politically engaged intellectual. In this new study, the author challenges both the cognitivist-historicist accounts of cinema and the conventional theory of cinema. Arguing that the reading of Lacan's operation in the seventies and eighties was particularly reductionist, Zizek affirms that there is another Lacan ", in reference to whom film theory, cultural studies and critical thinking as such can be transformed and revitalized. We find in this book a great contribution that expands on these arguments with an extensive reading of Kieslowski's work and, in a substantial appendix, with a discussion of the relationship between Christianity, clinical structures, and the progressive digitization of our world. "