The Sound of Sci(l)ence: Žižek's Concept of Ideology-Critique

This is the second of two articles on the social theory of Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. In its predecessor (Resch, “Empty”) I demonstrated that what I called the “Žižek effect in social theory,” namely Žižek's ability to generate seemingly profound yet maddeningly elusive interpretations of cultural phenomena, is created by violating the rules of logic, in particular, by combining subjective and objective, internal and external perspectives into an impossible unity. Žižek's obscurantism, I argued, emerges in the service of an ideological conception of the subject as emptiness, a fantasy of absolute Freedom that moves Žižek from a realist Lacanian theory of a concrete subject to a Lacanian mysticism of a sublime Subject. Based upon a mistaken identification of the Cartesian cogito and the Lacanian subject of the unconscious, Žižek's sublime Subject is posited as the antithesis of all determination. However, as I showed at some length, determinism is a demon that cannot be exorcised without slipping into irrationalism and incoherence.1

The present essay is a critique of Žižek's attempt, in “The Spectre of Ideology” (1994), to develop a concept of “ideology-critique” consistent with his fantasy of Freedom and the sublime Subject. In this well-known article, Žižek rejects all positive knowledge as indistinguishable from ideology and proposes to relocate the ground of ideology-critique in the immediate life experiences of the subject, specifically in experiences of social relations of domination. For Žižek, society is created on the basis of a traumatic antagonism that cannot be grasped or represented from within (without society itself disintegrating). Since all so-called social science (all positive knowledge of society) is structured on the basis of traumatic origins it cannot grasp, to believe that one possesses positive knowledge of society is an illusion; there is no way for positive knowledge to distinguish between ideology and science. However, the immediate