"What is really disturbing about The Name of the Rose, however, is the underlying belief in the liberating anti-totalitarian force of laughter, or ironic distance. Our thesis here is almost the exact opposite of this underlying premise of Eco's novel: in contemporary societies, democratic or totalitarian, that cynical distance, laughter, irony, are, so to speak, part of the game. The ruling ideology is not meant to be taken seriously or literally."
"...the real aim of ideology is the attitude demanded by it, the consistency of the ideological form, the fact that we 'continue to walk as straight as we can in one direction'; the positive reasons given by ideology to justify this request -- to make us obey ideological form -- are only there to conceal this fact: in other words, to conceal the surplus enjoyment proper to the ideological form as such."
"...the real aim of ideology is the attitude demanded by it, the consistency of the ideological form, the fact that we 'continue to walk as straight as we can in one direction'; the positive reasons given by ideology to justify this request -- to make us obey ideological form -- are only there to conceal this fact: in other words, to conceal the surplus enjoyment proper to the ideological form as such."
(Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology)
