Mapping Ideology

Master-Signifier stands for ‘the truly essential dimension’ about which we need not make any positive claim (for that reason, Lacan designates the Master-Signifier the ‘signifier without signified’)

following Kant, we could designate this impasse the ‘antinomy of critico-ideological reason’: ideology is not all; it is possible to assume a place that enables us to maintain a distance from it, but this place from which one can denounce ideology must remain empty, it cannot be occupied by any positively determined reality — the moment we yield to this temptation, we are back in ideology.

the third reversal of non-ideology into ideology: all of a sudden we become aware of a For-itself of ideology at work in the very In-itself of extra-ideological actuality.

and there are vital ideological themes such as nationalism which do not ‘belong’ to any particular social class but which, rather, provide a bone of contention between them

within the Fascist horizon, the very demand for rational argumentation that should provide grounds for our acceptance of authority is denounced in advance as an index of the liberal degeneration of the true spirit of ethical sacrifice – as Haug puts it, in browsing through Mussolini’s texts, one cannot avoid the uncanny feeling that Mussolini had read Althusser!

we live in a ‘society of the spectacle’ (Guy Debord) in which the media structure our perception of reality in advance and render reality indistinguishable from the ‘aestheticized’ image of it.

the elusive network of implicit, quasi-‘spontaneous’ presuppositions and attitudes that form an irreducible moment of the reproduction of ‘non-ideological’ (economic, legal, political, sexual . . . ) practices

the step from ‘in-itself to ‘for-itself, to ideology in its otherness-externalization

The Foucauldian counterparts to Ideological State Apparatuses are the disciplinary procedures that operate at the level of ‘micro-power’ and designate the point at which power inscribes itself into the body directly, bypassing ideology - for that precise reason, Foucault never uses the term ‘ideology’ apropos of these mechanisms of micro-power. T

Althusserian shift of emphasis from ideology ‘in-itself to its material existence in the ISA