ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how Žižek expands the notion of ideology. As Žižek expands in The Sublime Object of Ideology, social reproduction in the ex-second world importantly seemed to undermine even the grounding presupposition of the classical notion of 'ideology in itself'. The chapter argues that, as Peter Dews remarks, Žižek's experience of the 'cynical reason' evinced in the former second world informed his choice of a certain type of theory. This experience, which is also registered in Castoriadis' later theorisations of the Soviet world, demands a theory that calls into question the strength of argumentation as a factor motivating individual and collective action. It suggests that Žižek's Lacanian account of the subject of psychoanalysis stands as an important challenge to the quasi-naturalistic notion of 'needs' that neo-liberalism shares with certain 'vulgar' streaks of Marxism. The second key dimension of Žižek's debt to Althusser concerns what is arguably the central operational notion of his socio-political theory.
