Politics

Two Modes of Ideological Mystification

By Slavoj Žižek

 

There are two different modes of ideological mystification which should in no way be confused: the liberal-democratic one and the fascist one. The first concerns false
universality: the subject advocates freedom/equality, not aware of implicit qualifications which, in their very form, constrain its scope (privileging certain social strata: rich, male, belonging to a certain race or culture). The second concerns the false identification of the antagonism and the enemy: class struggle is displaced onto the struggle against the Jews, so that the popular rage at being exploited is redirected from capitalist relations as such to the “Jewish plot.” So, to put it in simple terms, in the first case, when the subject says “freedom and equality,” he really means “freedom of trade, equality in front of the law, etc.,” and in the second case, when the subject says “Jews are the cause of our misery,” he really means “big capital is the cause of our misery.” The asymmetry is clear—in the liberal-democratic case, the “good” explicit content (freedom/equality) covers up the “bad” implicit content (class and other privileges and exclusions); in the fascist case, the “bad” explicit content (anti-Semitism) covers the “good” implicit content (class struggle, hatred of exploitation).

For anyone versed in psychoanalytic theory, the inner structure of the two ideological mystifications is that of the couple symptom/fetish: the implicit limitations are the symptoms of liberal egalitarianism (singular returns of the repressed truth), while “Jew” is the fetish of anti-Semitic fascists (the “last thing the subject sees” before confronting class struggle). This asymmetry has crucial consequences for the critico-
ideological process of “demystification.” Apropos of liberal egalitarianism, it is not enough to make the old Marxist point about the gap between the ideological appearance of the universal legal form and the particular interests that effectively sustain it (as is so common among politically correct critics on the left). Rather, the counterargument (made by theoreticians such as Claude Lefort and Jacques Rancière) that the form is never a “mere” form, that it involves a dynamic of its own that leaves traces in the materiality of social life, is fully valid. After all, the “formal freedom” of the bourgeoisie sets in motion the process of altogether “material” political demands and practices, from trade unions to feminism. Rancière rightly emphasizes the radical ambiguity of the Marxist notion of the gap between formal democracy—with its discourse of the rights of man and political freedom—and the economic reality of exploitation and domination.

This gap between the “appearance” of equality/freedom and the social reality of economic and cultural differences can either be interpreted in the standard symptomatic way—that is, the form of universal rights, equality, freedom and democracy is just a necessary but illusory expression of its concrete social content, the universe of exploitation and class domination—or it can be interpreted in the much more subversive sense of a tension in which the “appearance” of egaliberté is precisely not a “mere appearance,” but has a power of its own. This power allows it to set in motion the process of rearticulating actual socio-economic relations by way of their progressive “politicization”: why shouldn’t women also vote? Why shouldn’t conditions at the workplace also be of public political concern? And so on. One is tempted here to use that old Levi-Straussian term “symbolic efficiency”: the appearance of egaliberté is a symbolic fiction which, as such, possesses an actual efficiency of its own. One should resist the cynical temptation of reducing it to a mere illusion that conceals a different actuality. That would be to fall into the trap of the old Stalinist hypocrisy that mocked “merely formal” bourgeois freedom. If it was so “merely formal” and didn’t disturb the true relations of power, why, then, didn’t the Stalinist regime allow it? Why was it so afraid of it?

The interpretive demystification is thus here relatively easy, since it mobilizes the tension between form and content: to be consistent, an “honest” liberal democrat will have to admit that the content of his ideological premises belies its form, and thus will radicalize the form (the egalitarian axiom) by way of impressing it more thoroughly onto the content. (The main alternative is the retreat into cynicism: “We know egalitarianism is an impossible dream, so let us pretend that we are egalitarians, while silently accepting necessary limitations…”)