My brother, in his capacity as a journalist (and Buffy fan), went to a “Buffy Symposium”, at which academics seriously discussed the ‘text’ that is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He emailed me this example abstract:

IS BUFFY A LACANIAN? OR: WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT? - Dr. Matthew Sharpe

This paper brings the Lacan-informed critical theory of Slavoj Zizek to bear upon BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. The paper looks at both the internal structure of the diegetic universe of BUFFY, and considers the T.V. as a 'symptomatic' product of the current later capitalist culturo-political conjuncture. In particular, as the subtitle indicates, the paper uses a consideration of BUFFY to raise questions concerning where we might stand today vis-a-vis the enlightenment project of opposing all things spectral and vampyric in the name of rendering social and political life transparent to reason.

The paper has three parts. Part 1 gives a detailed Lacanian analysis of BUFFY drawing especially on Lacan's theorisation of paranoia in Seminar 3. Part 2 then raises questions concerning the vampyre mytheme in its historicity. Following Zizek, the suggestion is that the vampyre should not be read as a premodern mytheme that troubles modernity from the outsider, so much as its own internal excess. Part 3 then raises the question of BUFFY and later, or 'post' modernity, considering the ironic mediation or distantiation that it brings to its refiguring of the vampyre theme. The concern of this third part is Zizek's identification of the essential cynicism entrenched in later modern social reproduction. Contemporary power can always laugh at itself, Zizek argues. How this positions BUFFY's light-hearted self-referentiality is my concern.

I think I speak for everyone when I say... What the...?