In between Reality and the Real: ？i？ek's Political Ambiguity

Abstract

My essay aims at considering Slavoj iek's politics by analyzing his theoretical intervention into Louis Althusser's formulation of the relationship between the subject and ideology. iek is a well-known Lacanian Marxist thinker, who is vehemently elaborating Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts for current political issues. He criticizes Althusser's concept of ideology with respect to the late Lacanian doctrine of sinthome. His argument is that the Other is not homogeneous, but rather inconsistent, because it always already contains sinthome, the repetition of the real. In this way, the Subject, the Master-Signifier of ideology, necessarily includes the holes in which the real resists the symbolization of symptom. iek's criticism of Althusser seems acceptable insofar as he reveals the weak point of Althusserian Marxism and restores the possibility of practice against the structuralist abolishment of the subject category. Returning to the problem of the subject, iek's political intervention into Althusserian Marxism raises the ethic of the subject in political philosophy. However, there seems to be undeniable questions on his politics derived from his theoretical presupposition. This is where my essay raises the question of the paradoxical similarity between iek and Althusser, even though iek thrives to achieve his own formulation of the connection between the subject and ideology by effectively criticizing Althusser. My argument is that iek's theoretical position makes him hesitate to choose the actual choice in political situations. For this reason, his political discourse seems to illuminate the ambiguous space in which high theories attempt to find the way out of the high reification of late capitalism.