• The Critical Review of Religion and Culture
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• no.25
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• pp.77-122
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• 2014

A Japanese director Sion Sono(園子溫, born in 1961), who is not so familiar to us yet, has been depicting the world of violence and sexuality filled with poetic and philosophical messages through the shockingly impressive works such as Strange Circus(2005), Love Exposure(2008), Cold Fish(2010), Guilty of Romance(2011), and so forth after the great success of Suicide Circle(2001) and its second film Noriko's Dinner Table(2005). In addition to these, he has also presented a kind of realistic visions in much more direct ways by Himizu(2011) or Land of Hope(2013) after 3 11 disaster. The purpose of this paper is to try a psychoanalytic interpretation of Sion Sono's film, centering on his Guilty of Romance(愛のむきだし), in terms of the concepts of Jacques Lacan(1901-1981), for example, gaze, objet petit a, fantasy, desire, the imaginary-the symbolic-the real, jouissance, etc. In so doing, this paper will pay special attention to the discourse of love on one hand, exploring the way how to show any new perspective to the religious studies by reading film and religion in association with Lacan on the other hand.