This essay reads Žižek’s oeuvre, and especially his theorisation of the Real, as a form of modern Gothic. The aim is not to reduce his work to a ‘mere’ fiction, but to analyse Žižek’s deployment of Gothic devices as a mode of approaching truth, and the truth of the Real, in the guise or form of fiction. In particular I trace the transformations of these devices as Žižek refines and develops his conceptualisation of the Real, paralleling and recapitulating Lacan’s own (...) developments, from the Real as unrepresentable ‘outside’ to gradually integrating the Real as the ‘inner curvature’ of the Symbolic. At each point in this shift I trace the formal parallels with different forms of the Gothic, and the concomitant effects on the social and political formulations of the Real. Žižek’s de-reification of the Real is at one with his politicisation of the Real – shifting from inert and unrepresentable horror to potential site of transformation. Here, however, Žižek divests himself of the Gothic to eliminate the risk of posing the Real in mythic terms as unrepresentable horror. Taking more seriously the possible alliance between psychoanalysis and Gothic I instead trace the possibility of a new alliance between them predicated on a ‘geometric’ Gothic that can probe the horror of capitalist reality. (shrink)