Why I've Become L'Etranger; Dr. Phil Update; Scary Movie

As many of my readers have probably realized, it's been quite awhile since a new Deconstructing Phil. post has appeared. I've been very busy traveling, writing a faux Supreme Court brief for a guy accused of importing cocaine because he was wearing a "life's better in the Bahamas" t-shirt, and most recently writing up a contract for a strip club owner. It turns out you don't need to be on a street corner to be slapped in the face with Absurdity, you're equally vulnerable in a law library.

We do hope to post at least once during the week (we have a really good one already in the works that links Dr. Phil to war criminals). In a nice odd turn, for those of us thinking that Dr. Phil is as Conservative as a troglodyte, today's episode is supposed to feature a much more progressive McGraw, apparently yelling at a Sex Ed teacher who refuses to teach anything but abstinence. While there probably won't be a Deconstructing Phil. post, we suggest watching it with a close reading of Macbeth (i.e. "Unsex me here," "Is this a dagger which I see before me,/ The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee." and "something wicked this way comes") to see how a frustrated sexual identity can lead to murderous rage and socio-political chaos.

Or, if you're not a do-it-yourself sort of critical theorist, first of all, work on that, seriously, and second of all, take a look at my friend Jesse's "Filmaday weblog" which usually features his adroit reviews of (mostly current) films, but today features a special guest reviewer (namely myself) providing something of a Lacanian critique of a bizarre PBS documentary called The Queen Family. Scroll down to the links section or check it out here:
http://filmaday.wordpress.com/

I Lacan Quit Any Time I Want

What exactly is Lacan’s idea of the Other? A short and surprisingly faithful gloss of the concept might be that the Other is absolutely everything. The Other affects subjectivity and the properties of language. For example, words can only be defined through other words, each in turn only definable through still more words, ad infinitum. This is what Lacan calls “the metonymy of speech,” yet the ultimate consequence is a radical division and subjectivity of virtually any concept that is verbalized or written (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis 188). Even more importantly, the Other is the vehicle, locus, and meaning of the unconscious. As Lacan writes, the unconscious is “that which is inside the subject, but which can be realized only outside.” (147). Of course, the Other is also essential to a Lacanian understanding of drives, since “transference [is] no more than the concept of repetition itself.” (129). Furthermore, “man’s desire is the desire of the Other” and there is a “handing back of truth into the hands of the Other.” (115, 36). Today’s episode of Dr. Phil—like most episodes—seemed to contain a vast amount of Otherness, though latent. The show introduced America to two “pill popping” twins, Yvette and Yvonne. Early on, it was clear how each subject “realized” herself in the opposite twin, trying to get out and pull free (188). This is not so simple in a Lacanian universe, where every subject is divided and significant only through outside forces. This is quite evident in the fact that, according to Dr. Phil, the twins “enable each other” which we might more usefully read as enabling each Other. It is not simply their identity as sisters that requires an appreciation of the Other to be fully understood, but rather the entire circular logic of addiction. As Dr. Phil explained to either Yvonne or Yvette—both were so high on Xanax, it’s hard to tell the difference—such behavior is entirely “outside the limits of acceptability.” However, one questions to what extent that alone is a problem. Would it be okay to be a drug addict if everyone saw such behavior as acceptable? Anyone who says “yes” should read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, paying close attention to the passages on “soma,” the wonder drug of the future that makes everyone feel great with no apparent negative side effects. A Lacanian, though, would still see the potential dangers in such a drug, and a society that accepts it, since it represents an act of uninhibited surrender to the Other, comprehensively ingesting part of which must remain outside. Instead, the morality and safety of the act itself has little to do with societal values or conventions. It is precisely through the twins’ intentional internalization of such outward unacceptability that their identity, moral culpability, consciousness, and drives are formed—regardless of any moral or empirical absolutes. While Dr. Phil seems to criticize the drug use because of the “side effects” on the children, physical and mental states, and so on, Lacan point to the drug abuse as the effect of the twins’ untenable, ill conceived Others. Thus, while Dr. Phil suggests: “you need to create order, standards,” Lacan would much more likely find that it is the very social, economic, political, and psychic order which, through the standards of the Other, has forced the two to seek out such an unhealthy, precarious existence. If it is clear that the Other reveals a deep and powerful aspect of the sisters’s relationships toward each other, larger societal mores, and their drugs of choice, it should also be unmistakable that the Other is governing many more relationships in this situation. For one, I find it difficult to find drug use blameworthy through the rational of moral absolutism. Foucault, for example, called an LSD trip in Death Valley National Park the greatest experience of his life. For each religion-based system of morality that condemns such chemicals one could no doubt find an equal number of traditions that condone, or encourage the behavior. In relativist terms, however, it is precisely through the mechanism of the other that such behavior is portrayed as damaging. For example, Dr. Phil often reminded one of the Y sisters that “your husband drove high: two people are dead!” Still more frequently Dr. Phil, or one of the more conventionally well-behaved family members would says something like “drug addicts cannot raise children properly” or “this is not the right way to raise children.” It is impossible to point directly at the twins’ drug use and say, “look, look what it’s doing to you!” The other effectively converts such criticism into the positive building blocks of drives, identities, and interpersonal or communicative relationships. Similarly, one cannot point to a perfect way to raise children, but it is much more easy—in fact, one could say it is even Dr. Phil’s ultimate goal—to show the world exactly how not to handle kids, so as to inspire Others positively. However, most of this analysis has focused on how the other “can be realized only outside” of the subject, though it is equally true that it is “inside the subject.” (147) Therefore, one must question exactly how drug and child abuse are present in Dr. Phil’s personal psyche, and, of course, one’s own. The Other also blurs the line between who and what is at stake to the point that, when Dr. Phil brought back the usual refrain that “I’m doing this for the kids...obviously” it was, in all actuality, far from obvious that he wasn’t doing it for himself, the audience, or more abstractly all non-children anywhere since, of course, one would be hard pressed to find a 7 year old on Xanax. It is in this way that, from a psychoanalytic point of view, common sense, all of Dr. Phil’s suggestions, and even trips to qualified detox centers are all useless unless the analyst can help the patients in “the reopening of the shutter” to reveal that which has been there in the unconsciousness of the actor from the very beginning, without being fully known (131, 130).

The Third Worldwide Web

In the nearly two months and 15 entries that comprise the Deconstructing Phil. lifespan, no episode has presented such a dire need of drastic interpretation as this evening's. “Bringing Home Katherine” part one aired today (the second half set to hit the small screen tomorrow) where Dr. Phil introduced his audience to Katherine, a girl who, at 16, fell in love via myspace with Abdullah, a 20 year old Palestinian man, and procured a passport to leave the country surreptitiously. When she was then reported missing, the FBI intercepted her in Amman, but after she later turned 18, with her family unable to stop her, she “ran away” from home again to live with Abdullah and her sister called Dr. Phil for help. Dr. Phil, of course, agreeing that Katherine is in danger, blames the internet. The real culprit is Orientalism. As Edward Said wrote in his groundbreaking work Orientalism, “the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there.” Instead, Said writes, such concepts, in all their geographic and cultural facets, are “man-made.” It is clear that the Orientalist picture of Palestine presented on the Dr. Phil show is one manufactured and in many ways fantastic. In fact, the dialogue was eerily similar to one of the most famous pieces of literature addressing the topic: Othello. Mary, Katherine’s sister, described her as being “under a spell,” the same way Brabanzio, Desdemona’s father, describes how his daughter was “corrupted/ By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks.” (I.iii.60-61). The family also repeatedly alleged (with no apparent factual basis) that Katherine had been brainwashed. At least Brabanzio said it with a bit more sophistication and panache when he bemoaned “O, treason of the blood!/ Fathers, from hence trust not your daughters’ minds.” (I.i.170-171). They also characterized both of Katherine’s premeditated, voluntary, and mostly unaided journeys to the middle east as “kidnappings.” This is, of course, the jaundiced and Janused voice of Iago, starting the whole tragedy with the cry of “thieves, thieves, thieves!/ Look to your house, your daughter, and your bags./ Thieves, thieves!” (I.i.79-81). The similarities are astounding, and it would be interesting to further compare Katherine’s story with that of Desdemona and the famous Moor (who, interestingly, some Shakespeare commentators read as an Arab). The main point here, though, is that the picture of the middle east presented by Katherine's family (with the help of Dr. Phil) is very much based on and promoting a fiction. It is extremely unlikely that any of the guests, or even Dr. Phil, ever visited Palestine, and certainly none were experts. The next important thing that Said tells us about Orientalism is that “the relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony.” (Orientalism). As Shawn [sic!], Katherine’s mother says: “I don’t know anything about Abdullah.” Such lack of knowledge is utterly unacceptable for a hegemonic figure (an American, a matriarch, a mass media product, etc.) Instead, it must be filled in—with xenophobic, racist, and jingoist notions if those are all that’s available. Katherine’s liberal international relations stance was stated quite adroitly and succinctly when she said: “I respect [Abdullah’s] culture, and he respects mine.” Though no one explicitly voiced it, the ideological position of those left in California was clearly: I don’t respect his culture (hell, I don’t even know it), but he needs to respect mine. If more evidence is needed that this is really a power struggle in every sense of the word, simply consider the fact that Katherine’s mother was outraged that at “18, according to the state of Michigan, [my daughter is] an adult.” While most people would probably see this as an entirely reasonable, acceptable, and just matter of law, Shawn was so outraged at her lack of control over her daughter that she “considered taking her passport or having her kidnapped.” Here, we can see Said’s point that “Orientalism…as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world.” (Orientalism). Here Said seems very indebted to Lacanian psychoanalysis—the self being defined through the Other—when he writes, “Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist…makes the Orient speak.” When Katherine returned to America after her first, unsuccessful expatriation attempt, her sister Mary said “I’m glad she’s here on American soil and alive.” The Orient is where danger is located, the Occident is, by way of contrast within an artificially constructed binary, the place of safety. But in this globalized, post-September-the-11^th-of-2001 world, how far does Mary have to broaden the Other in order to make herself and the place she lives safe seem safe? Of course, her secure and harmless Occident could not include the inner city, or the American military "nuclear" family. Could it include NRA members' houses, where every room has 3 loaded guns? The first generation immigrant living next door to the vigilante Minuteman border patrol? The very idea of liminality seems to become the territory of the Orient as exteriority and “a re-presence, or a representation” become vital since there is, in fact, no interiority and “no such thing as a delivered presence” (Orientalism). When Dr. Phil says “that situation over there…is highly unstable” he was apparently talking about Palestine, but he could have just as easily been talking about dozens of “Oriental” countries from Iraq and Iran to Venezuela and Cuba. But it masks (or, in fact, redefines) a more important question: in what way is the United States “highly stable”? Every episode from the Dr. Phil canon illustrates precisely how unstable America is. In this particular case, Shawn was so worried that Abdullah and his family would “kidnap” Katherine and prevent her from filing the proper paper work to travel across the Atlantic, yet that is precisely what she had previously contemplated. Katherine’s aunt callously cried that “Katherine needed her butt whipped” and yet expressed horror that the Oriental Arab/Muslim might be abusing her. Similarly, when she complained to Dr. Phil, “in America, men don’t call women ‘bitch,’” Dr. Phil could only respond “well, I wish that was true.” In fact, this reveals it all. The essence of Orientalism, wherever it may be found, is that it expresses what Orientalists want for their Orient and (perhaps more subversively) what they would like to see in their Occident too. When Dr. Phil says, so matter-of-factly, “at 16, Katherine shocked the world” he is—as an Orientalist—the one applying the questionable shock therapy to the world, re-shaping (and not just reporting) the Orient in his own warped and equally dangerous western space. Said is insistent, though, that Orientalism is not escaped or surpassed by academics, instead Orientalism is precisely “a distribution of geopolitical awareness in aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts.” (Orientalism, see also the picture from The XXth Century Citizen's Atlas, John Bartholomew, Edinburgh, pp7). Perhaps the most important question, then, is: in this supposed critique of Dr. Phil’s Orientalism, even in breaking down his superficially Occidental world, have we really helped to define a true Orient? No, of course we can’t, nor can anyone. There isn’t one.

The Birth of Phil Studies

Today’s episode of Dr. Phil was rather uninteresting, unless, of course, you enjoy listening to former child star Danny Bonaduce recount his failed marriage and the myriad of other problems he so clearly continues to have despite being “sober.” Still, there was some theory that we could talk about. Phil made his usual reproductive futurist rant about how the important thing is the children and their lives. We get it, you’re a heterosexual—yawn. We also had the astute point by our esteemed Dr. that “there are two Danny Bonaduces—Danny Bonaduce the personality and Danny Bonaduce the real person that I know, who cares about his family and his kids.” It would be interesting to take this to the next step: people on t.v., or in any theatrical situation, are not real people. We could think of Žižek’s idea of acting “as if,” Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality, Lacan’s Borromean knot, Brecht’s alienation effect, and so much more! It will be fun, and Dr. Phil is one thing, but I’m not going to do it with Danny Bonaduce, at least not until he starts calling himself a poet or a philosopher, or something like that.

Instead, tonight we have a bit of meta-analysis to do as it has recently come to my attention that I did not, in fact, create the field of Phil studies. I had hoped that, like Freud or Marx, I was working as a “founder of discursivity” (Foucault, What is an Author?) Therefore, it was quite a surprise to find that, over two years ago, a pair of professors from St. Lawrence University had written a good-sized scholarly article on Dr. Phil in The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, a web-based periodical from the Department of Religious Studies and Anthropology at The University of Saskatchewan. Professor Egan and Papson’s full article, “You Either Get It or You Don't”: Conversion Experiences and The Dr. Phil Show,” is available here: http://www.usask.ca/relst/jrpc/art10-drphil.html.
I encourage you to at least read the abstract. Egan and Papson are observant enough to realize that there is no religious content in the Dr. Phil show, but do assert that the episodes follow the structural pattern and the narrative of a religious conversion (particularly of the televangelist ilk) with a confession and testimonial followed by conversion and transformation. The authors conclude that “the televised presentation of reoccurring conversions functions to produce a sense of moral authority, self-empowerment, and an imagined community [and] that the boundary between the sacred and the secular blur in this highly commodified television spectacle.” Now, I have a friend who says he likes theory, but thinks a lot of theorists argue too much with each other. I find these two positions difficult to reconcile, as it should be the duty of any decent theorist to envisage critiques and theories that can hold up against the entire world to reinvent and reinvigorate its intellectual understandings and possibilities. The idea, the theory itself, might stand out in (or against) reality, but it does not reach the level of discourse until it is acknowledged, reproved, and re-proved. Egan and Papson are already, of course, part of the discourse within Religious studies. They’ve cited authorities within the field and it’s periphery (at least, not being an expert on theology, I assume that’s what they’ve done). They’ve been reviewed to reach publication, and have likely been cited or read as a result. But this is all as religion experts, or, perhaps in the amorphous field of cultural criticism. When it comes to Phil studies, however, it is safe to assume that this is—as Dr. Phil would say—their first rodeo. We can remedy that. Firstly, I think Egan and Papson are wise to bring in things like Neilson ratings and advertising. Economics and politics are central organs in Phil studies. Egan and Papson also sagaciously pick up on the fact that the Dr. Phil we see on television is actually a staged personification. The analysis has only one glaring deficit in that Egan and Papson do not seem to pick up on the fact that there is a Phil canon. Instead, they simply observe two shows, “Addiction” and “The Weight Loss Challenge.” This ignores the fact that Dr. Phil often brings back guests, revisits segments, issues, or mini-series like the Dr. Phil house and obviously expects his viewers to watch regularly, visit his website, and read his books. More importantly, it seems to skew their findings slightly. While both the episodes they chronicled might have taken on the mode and style of a conversion, there have also been many that might more aptly be described as promoting reversion (to better times, etc.), aversion (when something just needs to stop), or diversion (for preventing that which hasn’t actually even begun to occur). From outside the actual mechanism of the Dr. Phil Show, the possibilities are even more numerous. As we’ve tried to demonstrate, the show can also be seen as the location of perversion and subversion. Even limiting oneself to the domain of theology, it might be just as fitting to describe the arc of most shows as an exorcism or, in some cases, an excommunication. The fact is, the Dr. Phil canon is large and often contradictory. This is also a part of Egan and Papson’s largest mistake. While they seem to see an insidious side to Dr. Phil because he attempts to become the high priest, carving out his own commodified religion, mixing the secular and the sacred, there is an equally dark side. Failing to promote the scriptures, the pillars of psychology—the great psalmists like Freud, Jung, etc. and their seminal works—is tantamount to heresy. If Nietzsche and Marx are correct in their assertions that “God is dead” and “religion is the opium of the people,” then we must conclude that—if Dr. Phil is attempting to rule over a conversion to a half secularized, half sacred televangical reality—he is continuing to feed his guests’ various addictions, refusing help, and instead embracing philosophical death for all parties involved (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right").

The Queerest Dr. Phil Yet

“Queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one.” -Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive

Boy, oh boy—it’s episodes like today’s that make me happy I write a blog that applies post-structural theory to the Dr. Phil Show. After introducing us to Kim and Cory, a teenage couple in a tumultuous marriage with two neglected children, Dr. Phil went on a maniacal crusade. The mission was not to promote family planning or contraceptives, nor was it even to sound the clarion call of abstinence, but instead Dr. Phil pleaded with parents of teens and the teens themselves, begging them to listen as he shouted: you’re not really in love! By the way, this isn’t his first rodeo. As usual, there’s a large body of literature we might wish to consult in order to deconstruct Phil’s sophism. Since it is fairly inconceivable that any teenage lover would listen to this episode without a fit of Romantic giggles, it seems only fair that we pick a theorist who—despite his or her value—would likewise be ignored by Phil. That brings us to queer theorist Lee Edelman and his recent book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. But Edelman’s queerness isn’t exactly the queerness that so rarely shows up on the Dr. Phil show. Rather, it’s the queerness that is always somehow present in the Dr. Phil show. As Edelman writes, queerness “names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children,’ the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism” (5). We see this nearly every episode when Dr. Phil says something to his guests like “Your [insert destructive behavior here] would be fine, except you have kids!” or, more subtly, when he makes comments like “it’s time for you guys to grow up and be adults!” Thus, Dr. Phil sets himself up in the most favorable ideological position; he’s the one fighting for the children. His guests are always the queer ones—man, oh man do they need help—those queer folks who aren’t acting like adults or taking proper care of the kids, their future, their Other-to-come. Surely it is not a coincidence that virtually every episode is in some way an incarnation of a plagued marriage or perverted parent-child relationship. That’s the queerness—the lack of reproductive futurism—that must be mended. At least that’s what Dr. Phil—indeed all politics and society—would have us believe. Edelman sees it differently. To disregard for a moment the specific, non-theoretical children with diaper-rashes and growling stomachs, we can begin to see what Edelman terms the “sinthomosexual”(33). Building off of the Lacanian concept of the sinthome, Edelman writes that sinthomosexuals assert themselves “against futurity [and] against its propagation, insofar as it would designate an impasse in the passage to the future and, by doing so, would pass beyond, pass through, the saving fantasy futurity denotes” (Ibid). Instead, sinthomosexuals are “insisting on access to jouissance in place of access to sense.” (37). In this radical juxtaposition, there is now something wrong with Dr. Phil. He’s the one continuously restaging his “dream of eventual self-realization by endlessly reconstructing, in the mirror of desire, what [he takes] to be reality itself” (79). Of course you’re miserable now, it’s about your children…What? They’re miserable too? Well, then it’s about their children…We need not applaud the guests for mistreating their children, but perhaps they should be congratulated for standing up against the tyranical “belief in a final signifier” and their attempts to undermine “the promise of futurity” (37, 35). Kim and Cory from this “troubled teen love” episode are indeed unfit in many ways. They aren’t great examples of the sinthomosexuals who triumphantly live for the jouissance not the unreachable desire of futurity. Of course, Dr. Phil is also not a perfect and blameless reproductive futurist as he steps in with his Texas justice to spank the “children raising children.” The admission that children themselves—traditionally non-sexual and without agency—can be corrupted and destined to an unhappy future is something of a precarious step for Dr. Phil. While certain aspects of mainstream psychology focus on how the curable adult subject was influenced as a child (with the events and impacts reappearing through symptoms as an adult) Dr. Phil has never seemed to agree. At one point Dr. Phil suggested that he should have been involved all along (even before Kim and Cory had their kids) in order to insure a happy childhood and future. Dr. Phil is not promoting sinthomosexuality or the toned down and mitigated version of reproductive futurism inherent in most psychoanalytic thought—instead he’s demanding to be involved in every conception of the future to come personally (whether it’s queer or not) from the very childish beginning, to the equally childish future that will not end.

That's not so Thanatos, Daddy

“Hobo Daddy,” tonight’s episode of Dr. Phil focused entirely on the story of Kayla, and her Father Jerry, who left when she was a young child to live life as a homeless hobo, floating up and down the Mississippi River. We also learned how Jerry had treated his son, and Kayla’s older brother, like a friend, partying and drinking with him when he was only 14 or 15. Later, when Jerry had begun his itinerant life, Micah became embroiled in drug problems, committing suicide and effectively abandoning his own family. Kayla and her mother both blamed Jerry for Micah’s problems. With such a confused, envious daughter and a wild, norm-defying father, the Oedipus complex might be a good place to start. On the other hand, we might also want to consider theories like Lacan’s jouissance or Name of the Father, in light of Jerry’s perpetual, rambling journey and Kayla’s apparent dependence on a paternal image to allow signification and prevent psychosis. It is implied that the show is meant to be told from the Kayla’s perspective (already an incestuous, taboo turn for a traditionally objective science) and yet, quite often, Jerry comes across as the hero. He thinks of himself as “a modern day Huck Finn,” appears as the protagonist in a documentary about his life as a hobo, and appears on the show as a genuinely naïve, well-meaning, foreigner. One way to theorize across the teleological and ontological river that seems to be dividing the father and daughter, without unduly privileging one over the other—as Dr. Phil had great trouble doing, first chastising Jerry and sympathizing with Kayla, then adopting the opposite view—would be to consider the relationship as that between Eros and Thanatos. First developed as a psychoanalytic concept by Freud, the idea is that human nature is in constant conflict between the drive for life and the drive for death, Eros and Thanatos respectively. Eros, the drive for life involves repetitive, compulsory (and, perhaps counter-intuitively, often discontented) compulsions for life, sex, art, and wholeness. Thanatos, conversely, is characterized by the drive to repeat unpleasant events from one’s past, to cause destruction, to revert to an earlier state, and to seek death. In seeking death, however, the drive is really seeking an end to chaos and diverse sensations in favor of finality and the cessation of inordinate pain. For the most part, Jerry seemed to personify Eros, living the Romantic life on the river, drinking, constantly reminding people to live their life, emotionally lucid, and giving birth not only to Kayla and Micah, but also a film. Kayla seems more obsessed with the drive toward death. She constantly relives not only Micah’s death, but all the unhappy moments of her life. It appeared to be a compulsory need for destruction which caused her to angrily shout out things like “I’m fine—this is about Micah!” “I could never abandon [my own] kids!” and “you’re not my father!” From the death drive’s point of view, Kayla is fine, unable to abandon her kids, and fatherless. Not because she’s a better person, but because she’s the dead one. If not reliving her past memories as the ghost of her three-year-old self, she’s projecting herself onto the dead brother. This binary is in no way frozen, or complete, however, but this seems to be an important issue, if not the implicit subterranean cause, of the entire model. There is, of course, a perspective where Jerry is the one seeking death (via alcohol, drugs, and danger) while Kayla seeks life. It is this struggle which causes the conflict between the two instincts, and between the two main guests on tonight’s show. It also helps to explain why the usually rigid and confident Dr. Phil had trouble picking sides. Ultimately, this is relationship between life and death drive is also an important concern or contributing factor in topics as various as Jung’s (significantly different) conception of the motherly archetype of Eros or Lacan’s idea of jouissance. Similarly, this concept might be revealing when applied to the reasoning and reasoners behind the energetic hero-worshiping of (read as: “long live”) Dr. Phil and those who wish he’d just shut up, or die.

Philling in the Gap

What does Dr. Phil—the eponymous man and the daytime talk show—have to do with analytical psychology, cultural criticism, and poststructuralist philosophy? At first, the appropriate answer seems to be: nothing, nothing at all. The decision to disregard these shamans, branded by pedagogues as “quacks,” cannot be assumed to be completely naïve or immaterial. Valuable things are lost, suppressed, and denied. But can hyperreality be said to inexorably mesh reality and fantasy when we maintain that Dr. Phil’s philosophy is pure fantasy? Is not Dr. Phil the Other from (and, in fact, for) Lacanian philosophy; lacking and detached, the Other is still that which constructs and defines the very polemic that spurns disassociates with it? Are there not essential Marxist issues of class, cultural hegemony, and production at work here? Indeed, the hypothesis of Deconstructing Phil. is that every celebrated and worthwhile facet of modern psychology, cultural criticism, and philosophy cannot avoid a dialogue with subjects like Dr. Phil. Instead, they will benefit from a glimpse at this “short circuit,” where—following Slavoj Žižek’s example in The Parallax View—we will examine “the inherited decentering of the interpreted text,” in order to “discern its subversive core” and playing with “this gap between meaning and the pure Real” (ix, 4, 7) While this will hopefully help to elucidate the relationship between Dr. Phil and doctors of philosophy, Žižek points out that the parallax gap lives in the kernel of philosophy, the psychoanalytical experience, and politics itself (7, 19, 10). By reading Dr. Phil in various contexts, we might be, at the very same time, interpreting contextuality and the reading process. Join us, as we put the Phil in philosophy and the philosophy in Phil. We hope to have some fun, perhaps learn something, and, of course, make a différance .