Monday, January 11, 2010

The Plague of Fantasies (2)

From Slavoj Žižek's The Plague of Fantasies, (London: Verso, 1997), p. 6:

As Pascal put it, if you do not believe, kneel down, act as if you believe, and belief will come by itself. This is also what Marxian 'commodity fetishism' is about: in his explicit self-awareness, a capitalist is a common-sense nominalist, but the 'purely material sincerity' of his deeds displays the 'theological whimsies' of the commodity universe. This 'purely material sincerity' of the external ideological ritual, not the depth of the subject's inner convictions and desires, is the true locus of the fantasy which sustains an ideological edifice.

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