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Quote :Looking Awry
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…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…What the reader will find in this book is a whole series of "Lacan with…": Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Ruth Rendell, Patricia Highsmith, Colleen McCullough, Stephen King, etc. (If, now and then, the book also mentions "great" names like Shakespeare and Kafka, the reader need not be uneasy: they are read strictly as kitsch authors, on the same level as McCullough and King.)
Žižek is the sort of guy who says it like it is. And by "it," we mean a lot of name-dropping and highfalutin words mixed with the poppiest of pop. In this quote, from the introduction to his 1991 book linking psychoanalysis to the study of mass cultural phenomena, he sums up what notions of "the text" and "the author" have come to mean from a cultural studies perspective.
Unlike traditional ideas of literary canon and the superiority of "high" culture, Žižek likes to mix things up: Lacan may be one of the most revered names in psychoanalysis, but Žižek has no qualms about transporting him into the realm of pop culture. The same goes for literature, since Žižek mentions the likes of Shakespeare and Kafka in the same breath as authors of the bestselling paperbacks you'd find at the airport or supermarket.
Suffice it to say, Theodor Adorno would not be pleased.
Again, we see the drastically different ways in which scholars have approached cultural studies and, particularly, the shift away from Marxist and political concerns toward a more postmodern attitude where boundaries between "high" and "low" culture no longer matter. In fact, Žižek doesn't just discuss both popular and classic literature—he makes a point of treating the "greats" as kitsch authors, knocking Shakespeare off his pedestal for a start. Now that's how to incite the wrath of literary scholars the world over!