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Critical theory: from ideology critique to the sociology of culture

whether this Other be the black, the Jew or the Communist. Para-
doxically, such displacement is actually a hatred of oneself and
of one’s own deep-seated desires, which, if allowed to come to
the conscious surface of subjectivity, would imperil the stability
secured by ideological fantasy. Hence, the key task of contem-
porary ideology critique: ‘to designate the elements within an
existing social order which—in the guise of “fiction”, that is, of
“Utopian” narratives of possible but failed alternative histories—
point towards the system’s antagonistic character, and thus
“estrange” us to the self-evidence of its established identity’ (p. 7).
If the central focus falls on individual subjectivity, this has
profound social and political implications. The ‘dispersed,
plural, constructed subject’ celebrated by much postmodernist
theory is, for Zizek, simply the ‘form of subjectivity that corresponds
to late capitalism’. Capital itself, he writes, ‘is the ultimate power
of “deterritorialization”, which undermines every fixed identity’;
late capitalism is the power that weakens the ‘traditional fixity
of ideological positions (patriarchy, fixed sexual roles, etc.)’, so
as to remove all possible barriers to the ‘unbridled commod-
ification of everyday life’ (Zizek, 1993, p. 216).
For Zizek, ideology involves both misrecognition and illusion,
but what people misrecognise is not so much their social reality
as the illusions that structure it. ‘They know very well how things
really are’, he writes: ‘but still they are doing it as if they did not
know. The illusion is therefore double: the illusion which is
structuring our real, effective relationship to reality. And this over-
looked, unconscious illusion may be called the ideological fantasy’
(Zizek, 1989, pp. 32–3).
In an essay aptly entitled ‘It’s the Political Economy, Stupid!’,
he argues that a crucial contemporary illusion is the refusal of
many in the new social movements to acknowledge the signifi-
cance of capitalist relations of production. Though conceding the
value and necessity of their politics, he insists that their goals will
be thwarted unless they can contribute towards ‘some kind of
radical limitation of Capital’s freedom, the subordination of the
process of production to social control—the radical repoliticization
of the economy’ (Zizek, 1999a, p. 353).
Zizek’s applications of Lacanian psychoanalysis to culture and

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