This paper engages in a psychosocial exploration of ideology and women’s agency by analysing the suicide of Christa-Maria Sieland in the 2006 Oscar-winning German film drama Das Leben der Anderen [The Lives of Others] in conjunction with the subjugation of the subaltern woman in Spivak’s (1988/1993) text ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’. Comparing Althusserian and psychoanalytic views via Žižek’s theorisations, the paper argues that the subject neither makes ideology work, nor emerges as the failure of ideology. Western discourses construct woman as a remainder, rendering the subaltern woman a duplicate remainder through imperialism. Ideology emerges as a problem of representation, requiring a merger of Althusserian and Lacanian viewpoints.