The Sublime Object of Ideology

Žižek's first book in English, which rereads the theory of ideology through the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and the philosophy of Hegel. The opening chapter argues that Marx, in analysing the commodity, invented the notion of the symptom before Freud. Žižek then challenges the classic view of ideology as false consciousness. People today often see through official ideology and act as if they believe it anyway, a stance Peter Sloterdijk called cynical reason. Ideology, Žižek argues, lies less in what we know than in what we do, and in the fantasy that structures social reality itself. He uses Lacanian ideas such as the quilting point, a master signifier that fixes a field of meanings, the Real and the object-cause of desire, and draws examples from films, jokes, Kafka and Stalinism. The later chapters present the subject as a gap or lack and offer a reading of Hegel's dialectic. Critics find his arguments digressive and his use of Lacan contestable.

It remains the clearest statement of Žižek's influential theory of ideology, and it shows how belief can work through habits and fantasies rather than conscious opinions.