Ideology Today: Living Without Illusions?

“Ideology” is one of those terms that never seems to die. We keep declaring its end - the death of ideology in the 1960s, the “end of history” in 1989, the supposed triumph of technocratic reason or neoliberal pragmatism - but the word keeps coming back, mutating, taking on new lives. What is at stake when we use it today? And more importantly, what kind of relationship to ideology is even possible now?

At first sight, ideology sounds like something external, like a mask covering reality, glasses through which we see the world, or a propaganda machine that deceives the masses. But for thinkers from Marx to Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Žižek, ideology is far more insidious and far more constitutive. It is not a veil we can simply lift, but part of the very texture of reality. Ideology is not something added to an otherwise “real” experience. It is the medium through which reality itself becomes thinkable, livable, contestable.

Defining Ideology: From Distortion to Structure

Part of the difficulty lies in the word’s history. Ideology has been defined in contradictory ways: as the production of meaning, signs, and values in social life; as false ideas that legitimate political domination; as “socially necessary illusion”; or as the lived relation of individuals to social structures. Some of these definitions are neutral and descriptive, others openly critical. The incompatibility reflects two distinct lineages.

One lineage - running from Hegel through Marx and Lukács - sees ideology primarily as distortion, illusion, mystification. Here ideology functions to conceal exploitation or domination. The other, more sociological, lineage is less concerned with truth or falsity and more with how beliefs and practices organize social life. Language itself is the paradigmatic example: not the product of individual speakers, but an autonomous system that produces meaning. We don’t invent it; we inherit and repeat it. What matters is not its origin but its function now. Structures, not subjects, generate meaning.

This structuralist orientation was crucial for Althusser, Lacan, and later Žižek. It leads to a dramatic redefinition: subjects are not pre-existing individuals who happen to “have” ideologies. Subjects are produced through ideology. Our desires are formed in such a way that we feel national pride, loyalty, belonging, or even security in hierarchy. Ideology is not what we believe - it is what makes belief possible.

The Postmodern Impasse

By the late twentieth century, critics faced a paradox. If ideology is everywhere, if reality itself is already structured ideologically, then how can one ever step outside to critique it? Postmodern theory tended to radicalize this point: there is no neutral ground, no “outside” from which to launch an attack. Every discourse is already implicated.

Žižek acknowledges the force of this insight but resists the conclusion that critique is impossible. His wager is that the Lacanian concept of the Real offers a way through. The Real is not some positive content hidden behind ideology, but rather a traumatic void, the point of impossibility that no symbolic order, no language or culture, can represent or assimilate. While everything is ideological, the cracks, contradictions, and breakdowns of ideology themselves can reveal the Real. These failures are not accidents - they are structurally necessary.

Max Ernst, Europe After the Rain II (1940–42)

Ideology as Sublime Object

To make sense of this, Žižek famously draws on Kant’s notion of the sublime. For Kant, the sublime names an overwhelming experience - mountains, storms, abysses - that exceeds the imagination but points to our inner freedom. Faced with what cannot be grasped or pictured, we discover in ourselves a capacity to rise above our nature, to find meaning and orientation in the intellect where the senses fall short. It terrifies and elevates at once. For Lacan and Žižek, the sublime is not about natural grandeur but about desire itself. The “sublime object” is not a positive thing but an empty place, a gap we fill with significance. It functions as the object-cause of desire, what Lacan calls the objet petit a.

Ideology, Žižek suggests, works in exactly this way. Money, the nation, freedom, law, the people, the market - these are treated as sublime objects, untouchable and absolute. We act as if they hold society together. Just as Kant said we must act as if we are free (even though freedom cannot be proven scientifically), we must act as if money has intrinsic value. We know it is only paper, but our entire economy rests on treating it otherwise.

This “as if” structure is crucial. Ideology is not simply what we believe in our heads. It is enacted in our practices, our rituals, our habits. The worker may know very well that money is only symbolic of social relations, but in the act of exchange he behaves as though it were intrinsically valuable. Ideology resides in the doing, not the knowing.

Desire, Lack, and Surplus Enjoyment

For Lacan, desire is not about reaching some lost object (as in Freud’s story of separation from the mother) but about circulating around lack. Lack is not a deficiency to be eliminated; it is the very motor of the system. Desire moves precisely because it cannot be satisfied.

Every object is only a stand-in, a temporary placeholder for the unattainable objet petit a.

This is where enjoyment enters. Lacan and Žižek emphasize that we do not simply suffer from lack - we enjoy it. We stage it, repeat it, savor it. This is surplus enjoyment: the strange pleasure derived from the persistence of desire itself, even when painful. Ideology organizes and channels this surplus enjoyment. We don’t just obey social norms because we must; we enjoy performing them for the Big Other.

The “Big Other” is Lacan’s term for the agency of social norms, the symbolic order that guarantees meaning. It is not a real person watching us, but the invisible horizon against which we perform. We act as if there is a Big Other who sees and judges us, even though no such entity exists. In fact, it only exists insofar as we act as if it does.

This insight resonates today in our digital lives. Think of social media avatars: often they reveal more “truth” about our desires than who we supposedly “really” are. The performance is the point. The Big Other is invoked whenever we stage our existence against an imagined gaze. And the enjoyment we derive from this performance - liking, sharing, posting, displaying - is part of ideology’s grip.

The Real as Rupture

If ideology is not a mask but the very structure of reality, then how can it ever be challenged? Žižek insists that critique cannot consist in simply unmasking illusions. The Real shows up not behind the ideological surface but through its distortions, gaps, absurdities. A commodity, for instance, does not hide social relations beneath its shiny surface. Its fetishized form - its absurd pricing, its status symbolism - is itself the point where the Real emerges. The “truth” is not hidden but revealed in the excess, in the very irrationality of the system.

This is why Žižek’s politics is not about consensus, compromise, or procedural reform. It is about rupture, the act that transgresses the coordinates of the possible. Just as Lacan’s ethics insists on fidelity to the Real, Žižek insists that genuine politics must remain faithful to the traumatic kernel ideology tries to cover over. True transformation requires not merely tinkering with laws or policies, but reconfiguring the horizon of what counts as reality.

Ideology and Fantasy

Classical Marxism emphasized that “they do not know it, but they are doing it”: ideology works by concealing the true relations of production. Žižek radicalizes this by suggesting that the distortion is not just in our heads but in our practices. Even when we know, we still do. We act “as if” money embodies wealth. We are fetishists in practice, not in theory.

Fantasy plays a crucial role here. It is not a distortion of reality but its very support. Fantasy provides the unconscious scripts through which social practices are organized. Even cynical distance - “I know very well this is nonsense, but still…” - does not free us. As Peter Sloterdijk observed, we are cynical subjects who see through ideology yet continue to enact it. But for Žižek this is not post-ideological irony; it is ideology at its purest. Knowing does not release us. The fantasy continues to structure our actions.

Living With and Against Ideology

So where does this leave us? Can we overcome ideology, or must we admit that we cannot live without it? Perhaps both. Ideology is unavoidable - it is the very medium in which our social reality is staged. But its contradictions, its failures, its absurdities also open spaces for critique and transformation. To live without ideology would be to live outside language, law, and desire itself. Impossible. Yet to live without questioning ideology would be to accept its limits as natural and unchangeable.

The task, then, is not to imagine a life beyond ideology, but to remain attentive to the cracks where the Real appears. To notice the moments when enjoyment falters, when fantasy breaks down, when the sublime object reveals its emptiness. These are the sites where new possibilities can emerge. The act of politics, for Žižek, is precisely to intervene at these points, to force a rupture that reconfigures the symbolic order itself.

Think, for instance, of the sudden silence that followed the 2008 financial crash. The slogans of “the free market” and “rational choice” that had organized global life for decades collapsed overnight. Banks that preached austerity demanded rescue; the invisible hand froze. For a moment, the sublime object of capitalism - the market as the guarantor of order and meaning - revealed its emptiness. What followed was not just economic crisis, but a symbolic one: the fantasy that the system runs itself cracked open. In that rupture, new political imaginaries briefly emerged - Occupy movements, experiments in solidarity and anti austerity sentiment.

We cannot escape ideology. But we can refuse to take its sublime objects at face value. We can treat their very excess, their absurdity, their contradictions as openings. In this sense, ideology is both unavoidable and contestable. It is the air we breathe, but also the storm that can be disrupted. To live without illusions is not to live without ideology, but to recognize the truth in its failures, and to act - courageously, disruptively - at precisely those points where the system reveals its cracks.