A sequel to Awkwardness and Why We Love Sociopaths, Creepiness explores popular culture to examine the worst character trait of all.
A sequel to Awkwardness and Why We Love Sociopaths, Creepiness explores popular culture to examine the worst character trait of all.
Philosophy (general), Popular culture
A specter is haunting contemporary television—the specter of creepiness. In our everyday lives, we try to avoid creepiness at every cost, shunning creepy people and recoiling in horror at the idea that we ourselves might be creeps. And yet when we sit down to watch TV, we are increasingly entranced by creepy characters. In this follow-up to Awkwardness and Why We Love Sociopaths, Adam Kotsko tries to account for the strange fascination of creepiness. In addition to surveying a wide range of contemporary examples—from Peep Show to Girls, from Orange is the New Black to Breaking Bad—Kotsko mines the television of his 90s childhood, marveling at the creepiness that seemed to be hiding in plain sight in shows like Full House and Family Matters. Using Freud as his guide through the treacherous territory of creepiness, Kotsko argues that we are fascinated by the creepy because in our own ways, we are all creeps.
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Rarely do we find a book which combines detailed analysis of a concrete pop-cultural phenomenon – the rise of creepy characters in today’s sitcoms and TV series, from Sex and the City and Breaking Bad to Mad Men and Louie – with properly metaphysical reflections on the traumatic core of subjectivity. And, on the top of it all, the books is immensely readable, simply unputdownable, without sacrificing any of its theoretical stringency. Adam Kotsko not only provides the social and ideological context for the fascinating figure of a creep, as well as the Freudian account of what makes a subject creepy. His ultimate insight is that creepiness is a name for the uncanny dimension in all of us which makes us strangers to ourselves – a creep is ultimately our name for what the Judeo-Christian tradition calls a neighbor. Even creeps will enjoy this book… and only real creeps will not buy it! ~ Slavoj Zizek, philosopher and psychoanalyst
