Ideology is Not All

Abstract

The question of ideology and how it relates to criticism is a highly contested matter in literary theory. For some on the Left, the relation is merely one of subordination: criticism is ultimately reducible to ideology, and one can really talk only of an ideology of reading. Yet ever since his 1989 Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Žižek has reminded us and fellow Left-leaning critics of the necessity of becoming good readers of ideology. Indeed, against the twin deceptive attitudes of pessimism and optimism—pessimism about the prospects of effective critique and optimism about the end of history à la Fukuyama (i.e., about the fantasy of a postideological stance)— Žižek vigorously insists, “Ideology is not all; it is possible to assume a place that enables us to maintain a distance from it, but this place from which one can denounce ideology must remain empty, it cannot be occupied by any positively determined reality—the moment we yield to this temptation, we are back in ideology.”¹ Zižek’s comment comes after a thorough debunking of prior understandings of ideology. As one would expect, Žižek dismisses the common view of ideology as false consciousness, arguing along with other critical theorists that it is counterproductive to see ideology as simply being about falsification or distortion.