Matrix Reloaded: Žižek’s Ideology Critique

Abstract

At the outset of his essay ‘The Spectre of Ideology’, which would probably qualify as his most consistent piece of writing on the subject,¹ Žižek defines the term in question as the ‘generative matrix that regulates the relationship between visible and non-visible, between imaginable and non-imaginable’ (Žižek, 1994b, 1). Such a definition introduces us to Žižek’s psychoanalytic conceptualisation of ideology as a radically split domain, or rather an elusive kind of knowledge divided between its explicit manifestation (a rationally constructed and linguistically transparent set of ideas) and its uncanny ‘appearance beyond appearance’ (an unthinkable, unrepresentable and unmediatable nucleus of disavowed enjoyment). By claiming that ideology regulates the dialectical relationship between the above two orders (in Lacanian terms, between the order of the Symbolic and the order of the Real), Žižek also undermines the parameters of critical theory ‘as we know it’, for he shifts the object of critical analysis onto what has hitherto been regarded as the non-ideological field par excellence: the obscure realm of enjoyment — which, however, is not to be mistaken with mere pleasure, as it stands for the excessive and fundamentally disturbing dimension of libido that Lacanian psychoanalysis knows as jouissance.