If the term “ideology” has any meaning at all, ideological positions are always what people impute to Others (for today’s left, for example, the political right are the dupes of one or another noble lie about natural community; for the right, the left are the dupes of well meaning but utopian egalitarianism bound to lead to economic and moral collapse, etc.). For subjects to believe in an ideology, it must have been presented to them, and been accepted, as nonideological indeed, as True and Right, and what anyone sensible would believe. [...] Zizek is alert to the realist insight that there is no more effective political gesture than to declare some contestable matter above political contestation. Just as the third way is said to be postideological or national security is claimed to be extrapolitical, so Zizek argues that ideologies are always presented by their proponents as being discourses about Things too sacred to profane by politics. Hence, Zizek’s bold opening in The Sublime Object of Ideology is to claim that today ideology has not so much disappeared from the political landscape as come into its own. It is exactly because of this success, Zizek argues, that ideology has also been able to be dismissed in accepted political and theoretical opinion.
Today’s typical first world subjects, according to Zizek, are the dupes of what he calls “ideological cynicism”. Drawing on the German political theorist Sloterditj [sic], Zizek contends that the formula describing the operation of ideology today is not “they do not know it, but they are doing it”, as it was for Marx. It is “they know it, but they are doing it anyway”. If this looks like nonsense from the classical Marxist perspective, Zizek’s position is that nevertheless this cynicism indicates the deeper efficacy of political ideology per se. Ideologies, as political discourses, are there to secure the voluntary consent – or what La Boetie called servitude voluntaire of people about contestable political policies or arrangements. Yet, Zizek argues, subjects will only voluntarily agree to follow one or other such arrangement if they believe that, in doing so, they are expressing their free subjectivity, and might have done otherwise.
