Front Cover -- Contents -- Introduction -- Figurations of the Real: locating the unconscious -- Pasolini as a reader of Hegel -- The minimal gap between Othello's two headsd -- Suturing void -- Blow-up: about nothing, with precision -- A theorem on the non-existence of Terence Stamp -- The desert and the park -- Infinite repetitions of the same thing -- On neo-realism: excursus 1 -- Editing as Real, or death-drive in film theory -- Enjoying the Real: unconscious strategies of subversion -- The vraie femme's redemptive violence -- From the virtual revolutionary to the revolutionary virtual -- Masochism and the law -- Drive unbound -- Accattone : the excremental remainder -- Salò : the executioner's whip -- Kafkaesque encounters in the law -- Passionate attachments in the torture room -- On neo-realism: excursus 2 -- Adventures in the Real of sexual difference -- Negotiating the impossible -- The Lady who wasn't there -- Of love letters and undelivered messages -- La Femme n'existe pas! -- Mimesis and sublimation -- War of the sexes -- The abyss of feminine sexuality: unconscious figurations unlimited -- The postmodern Real: notes on the return of Oedipus -- La stanza del figlio: radicalising neurosis with Nanni Moretti -- The narcissism of the Beautiful Soul -- Father, can't you see I'm burning? -- L'ora di religione: gazing backwards with Marco Bellocchio -- The Oedipal legacy -- Virtuality and the demise of the symbolic -- Noir is noir -- Smile as objet a -- More paradoxes of feminine inconsistency -- I cento passi: resuscitating Oedipus with Marco Tullio Giordana -- Works Cited -- Index of Names -- Back Cover.