Žižek's Exemplary Culture

Walter Benjamin commended as a theoretically productive and subversive procedure the reading of the highest spiritual products of a culture alongside its common, prosaic, worldly products. What he had in mind specifically was a reading of the sublime ideal of the love couple represented in Mozart's Magic Flute together with the definition of marriage found in Immanuel Kant (Mozart's contemporary), a definition that caused much indignation within moralistic circles. Marriage, Kant wrote, is “a contract between two adult persons of the opposite sex on the mutual use of their sex organs.” It is something of the same order that has been put to work in this book: a reading of the most sublime theoretical motifs of Jacques Lacan together with and through exemplary cases of contemporary mass culture: not only Alfred Hitchcock, about whom there is now some general agreement that he was, after all, a “serious artist,” but also film noir, science fiction, detective novels, sentimental kitsch, and up—or down—to Stephen King. … A kind of introduction to Lacanian “dogmatics” (in the theological sense of the term) … [this book] mercilessly exploits popular culture.

The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.

What lessons are we, Žižek's faceless audience, to learn by reading Lacan's most sublime motifs “with and through exemplary cases of contemporary mass culture”? Does the author of Looking Awry (and innumerable other works that teach Lacan through kitsch readings of culture) not enjoin us, his implied novitiates, to cultivate an aesthetics of political life? His primer, after all, proceeds from Hitchcock and Stephen King to include suc