Apropos of Nothing: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, and the Coen Brothers

The Coen Brothers’ films are rife with figures of absence. In The Big Lebowski, the Dude does nothing. He is put on the trail of a kidnapping that never took place, and pays the ransom to a gang of nihilists with 'a ringer for a ringer'. In The Man Who Wasn’t There, the eponymous protagonist is the shadow of a man, a “ghost,” as he describes himself, who remains virtually silent throughout most of the film. Burn After Reading features a conspiracy surrounding an utterly worthless computer disc. Intolerable Cruelty hinges on divorce proceedings that leave one spouse with absolutely nothing. And Barton Fink is a film that revolves around the absence of a film.

In Apropos of Nothing, Clark Buckner appeals to the voids that riddle the Coen Brothers’ oeuvre to clarify the close proximity and ultimate opposition between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean deconstruction. In the process, he situates both theories in relationship to Heidegger’s existential phenomenology, and undertakes a comparative analysis of the negativity in death, language, drive, anxiety, visual perception, paternity, ethics, and the unconscious. While formulating one of the most theoretically rigorous readings of the Coen Brothers’ oeuvre to date, Buckner thus contributes to central debates in contemporary continental philosophy and the renaissance in Lacanian critical theory spear-headed by Slavoj Zizek. The books also offers a readable overview of some central debates in late twentieth-century continental philosophy.