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

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Apropos of Nothing: Or, What Does It Mean to Be “Blood Simple”?
	Blood Simplicity
	The Deadlock in the Coens’ Critical Reception
	The Supplement at the Origin
	Screen/Play
	A Sign!
	Raw Intelligence
	The Criminal and the Commonplace
	The Eruption of the Real
	Beyond the Metaphysics of Presence and Absence
	Everything You Always Wanted to Know
1 All-American Nihilism
	The Ballad of Sheriff Bell
	The Film That Wasn’t There
	The Question of the Meaning of Being
	Being-in-the-World
	mr.loser.com
	Yo’ Ass!
	Anxiety Has No Object
	The Grim Reaper in West Texas Denim
	Resoluteness
	True Love and True Crime
2 The Symbolic Object and the Subject of Fantasy
	Assuming the Worst
	The Subject of Fantasy
	The Divided Self-Image
	Why So Uptight, Osborne Cox?
	Narcissistic Aggression and Existential Negativity
	The Instance of the Letter
	The Dialectics of Demand
	Seducing Surveillance
	The Dude Supposed to Know
	The Vacuous Truth
3 Jouissance, the Real
	Dirty Little Secrets
	The Sublime Ass of Impossible Enjoyment
	Anxiety Is Not without an Object
	Unbearable Enjoyment
	Enter the Real
	Lack of Lack
	Beyond the Undecidability Principle
	The Plural Logic of the Aporia
	Reassuring Aporia
	Hell Is the Other’s Jouissance
	(Divorce) Courtly Love
	Razing Big Dave’s Annex
	The Patter of Little Lawyer’s Feet
4 Superego Overdrive
	Mattie’s Law
	Beyond the Hermeneutics of Desire
	The Drive’s Circuit
	The Lone Biker of the Apocalypse
	As if by Chance
	Glen Jr., Gale Jr.
	Smooth Smooth
	Call It, Friendo
	The Unconscious Sense of Guilt
	Mark It Zero, Dude!
	The Conspiracy of Car Dealers
	Ozzie and Harriet
	Swedish Meatballs
	Force of Law
	Jerry’s Jouissance
5 Ex Nihilo
	Reinventing the Wheel
	Anamorphosis
	The Dignity of the Thing
	A Man Chasing His Hat
	Sublimation, Superego
	Are You in Pictures?
	Traversing the Fantasy
	Pastiche, Surrealism, Realism
Notes
Bibliography
Index