Looking Awry An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular 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 sexual 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