Slavoj Zizek

The Sublime Object of Ideology

· First big question: How did Marx invent the symptom?

· Homology (same logic) in the interpretive procedure used by both Marx and Freud

· Form over content, outside over inside

· Logic of the exception (see Derrida)

· Ideology is symptomatic (think of it in terms of the “center” described by Derrida)

· Levi-Strauss – difference between games and ritual, very end of the piece

· Background: freud & Marx

o Freud: Civilization and its Discontents. Increased standard of living hasn’t made us happier. To be civilized, that is to say., to live in a society, requires us to repress our basic self, our id. When we repress in healthy ways, we sublimate, that is to say turn the energies of our basic drives or instincts into socially acceptable forms. The two basic drives eros and thanatos, sex and destruction. When they aren’t healthy they express themselves in symptoms

o Marx – surplus value

· Def of ideology ( 21)

· The Social Symptom (21) is his term for marx’s def of ideology, because of the last thing before this section – the logic of exception

· Commodity fetishism (23) MULTIPLE DEFS:

o A definite social relation between men that takes the form of a relation between things

o Misrecognition (24) talking about reification here

o Then read the marx quote from 24

o Talk about how this resembles sociological theories of identity formation as well as the lacanian mirror stage, identity and alienation go hand in hand, and this again echoes the logic of exception “identity and alienation are strictly correlative

o King example

o Two forms of fetishism are incompatible 25

· “Commodity Fetishism” (23) – quote on the top of 24, read whole thing, then explain it

o An effect of a social network is perceived as a inherent property of an object.

o Because commodities can only express value by refereeing to each other…MARX TURNS TO FETISHISM to make sense of the apparently magical quality of the commodity…Fetishism in anthropology refers to the primitive belief that godly powers can inhere in inanimate things (e.g., in totems). Marx borrows this concept to make sense of what he terms "commodity fetishism." As Marx explains, the commodity remains simple as long as it is tied to its use-value. When a piece of wood is turned into a table through human labor, its use-value is clear and, as product, the table remains tied to its material use. However, as soon as the table "emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness" (163). The connection to the actual hands of the laborer is severed as soon as the table is connected to money as the universal equivalent for exchange. People in a capitalist society thus begin to treat commodities as if value inhered in the objects themselves, rather than in the amount of real labor expended to produce the object. As Marx explains, "The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things" (164-65).

· Side note, “identity and alienation are correlative” lacanian mirror stage, “looking glass self” mead, symbolic interactionists, etc

· In it is commodity fetishism that predominates instead. “the two forms of fetishism are thus incompatible. **25

· So the transition from feudalism to capitalism is like a repression, where a symptom repressed in one spot simply pops up in another.

· Next big question: Do we live in a post-ideological society?

o “they do not know it, but they are doing it” bottom 28**

o Cynicism suggests we do, **29, talk about the current war and the ideology of democracy, talk about North Korean dictators

o BUT, Zizek argues that this is not true, because no matter how cynical we become, cynical reason does not penetrate “the fundamental level of ideological fantasy, the level on which ideology structures reality itself” (30)

· “Ideological Fantasy” (30)

o They do not know it, but they are doing it – knowing and doing are the two categories here.

o Fetishists in practice, not in theory, long ish quote, 31

o Ideological fantasy, cynical distance is just a new way to blind ourselves to the constitutive power of ideology **31