On Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology

A successful ideology allows its adherents to behave as though some irreducibly external and indefinable central term (God, Freedom, New World Order, Democracy) actually names some transcendent thing. The paradox is that although no sublime object is ever ‘there’ in any subject’s experience, nevertheless this indefinable central term is taken by the subject to be that which gives coherence to the entire field of all possible experiences. As a result, although any ideology is inherently incomplete and inconsistent, the very indefinability of the master signifier is tacitly assumed by believers to prove the validity of the system. This implies that any subject’s experience, any social system, and any regime or culture is unified by fantasy projections that are then externalised as unreflective behaviours. Consequently, postmodernist claims that we live in a post-ideological condition are not only false but dangerously misguided. On the contrary – as Žižek’s substantial analyses of contemporary culture demonstrate - if anything, today’s postmodern subjects believe more than ever. In fact, the anti-Enlightenment, Nietzschean tendencies of postmodernism (cynicism, indirections and distantiations, idiosyncratic and mutually exclusive interpretations of the same text) are symptomatic of the contemporary subject’s inability to overcome alienation.