dankness as always, this content slaps fam

I keep coming back to this video. It is like an excellent lecture or class I’ve slipped in to and am stealing knowledge for free. Thank you for these video essays.

Found Todd’s great content through RevLeft radio’s podcast on Hegel. Todd has his own podcast named Why Theory which can be found on Apple’s podcast app. Great content, one of my favorite podcasts.

This is all so awesome! I was just done with The Real Gaze, after which I ran on your video on the Gaze which sums the Introduction part of the book quite nicely, so I'll make sure to share all of these with people as some kind of introduction. I really hate it when some people in academia act as if they have to hide everything, as if making everything publicly available somehow devalues their work (at least where I'm from, even though they're warming up to it more and more), which is why I really do appreciate what you're doing here. Keep up the good work!

These uploads are fantastic.

this was amazing! it was so clear and approachable

A nice way of putting it Todd. Interesting stuff.

Really enjoyed this video! Keel up this content.

Hi Todd, great summary video on the history of Ideology. Thank you! .. I didn't know the pre-Lacan era parts.. so I took good notes! .. That said, I am curious about what you described as your own theory of Ideology because what you describe seems to me to be exactly how Hegel responded to Kant (the antinomies of logic are not a bug but a feature ) .. and how Lacan applies that to what he teaches about human sexuality and Love as summarized by his most well-known aphorism on love: ‘loving is to give what one does not have’.. So I get how what you describe is a deviation from Zizek, but I would love to hear more about how it's not a return to pure Lacan. Thank you!

Had a fun bit of parapraxis listening to the end of the vid as well, where I heard “every ideology works to comb over contradiction”, a la toupee as male castration

Ideology is a specific theory stemming from Locke. It's a sort of materialism of sense data. So, the different versions are all founded on the Locke version of the idea plus a doctrine concerning the why, eg, progress through material labour rather than social orginazational principles.

Thank you very much, I really appreciated it. I my self still struggle to understand Lacan, Laclau, and Zizek

Awesome video!!

I looked for the zizek quote from the sublime object, but could not find it, can anyone tell me on which page it is ?

Great stuff! Could anyone recommend some texts or videos where theories of ideology after Marx have been explored in conjunction with critiques of political economy? Thanks

beautifully explained

This is great.

Hey Todd, Would you say that the fundamental contradiction that ideology attempts to ameliorate is collective action itself? Is it reasonable to identify properly political problems that can only be solved through collective action as the structural breeding ground of ideology? I'm thinking that to engage in the negotiations, disagreements, and compromises that subjects make with one another in public is to engage with the contradiction between ones desire and the desire of others, and that that contradiction is something like the object a of ideology. If that's a viable idea, then how would the ethics of psychoanalysis suggest that we sustain a collective orientation in our politics? Are we limited only to the critique of ideology because any positive political desire depends on ideology in some form, or must we nonetheless embrace some positive political desire in order to engage in collective action at all? It seems to me that the later is actually an embrace of a contradictory engagement with politics while the former is a kind of intellectual scapegoating of ideology that perpetually defers our engagement with politics. Like, the privatization of capital cannot be defeated from the armchair, right? I realize this is kind of a spin-off of my previous questions about your disagreement with Slavoj over what one must do after traversing the fantasy of the master signifier, but I'm curious about your take in a political context. Thanks for your time.

Can you turn on automatic subtitles of this video ?

21:10 Im not so sure that the subjectivity is the point where ideology breaks down, since this reading seems to reduce Ideology to its symbolic determinations, with the Real being the breaking of Ideology. What I got from Zizeks argument is that this Real is the neccesary supplement to Ideology since its the reason that the fundamental fantasy is constructed, as an awnser to the anxiety provoking void of "Che Vou?". Even if the fantasy is an imaginary scenario filling the Real void, this void works as being complicit of Ideology because it creates the conditions of posibility for the construction of the fundamental fantasy. The Facist fantasy of the harmonious order of society is incomplete if we dont acknowledge the Real of objet a in the figure of the Jew that posibilitates the enjoyment of the subject in his ideology. So even if the Real offers of a space to challenge its symbolic determinations, it is also the space that posibilitates the proliferation of ideology through the construction of fantasy and enjoyment in its subjects. The neccesary step of traversing the fantasy is required in order to unlock the emancipatory potential of the Real. So the ultimate paradox of the Real in the formation of Ideology is that the Symbolic needs to leave something out so that desire can articulate itself through the formation of the fundamental fantasy, its not so clear cut as an opposition between symbolic Ideology and the Real of freedom, the Real is also a neccesary component of Ideology.

Luv it

Is there a difference between ideolgy and langugage game as defined by Wittgenstein?

👏👏👏👏👏👏

Hey Todd, could one say that atheism is the ideology of religion or that religion is atheism put into practice?

But a young Richard Gere is so fine! ❤

oftentimes i conflate-and confuse i suppose-‘ideology’ and ‘fantasy’. though they’re related concepts, and to my ears sound curiously similar enough as to be confused with each other, i guess there’s a good reason as to why they should not be conflated. maybe you can save me some homework and disentangle these two for me please?

I also wanna add on top of ‘opposition’ the alternative option of ‘deviation’, which we see frequently with American liberal ideology, where contradiction is disguised as not as the crack within the logic of a system but a failure to meet that logic. A classic example of this is trump’s incompetence: ‘if America could only get a competent president again, whatever his policies, things would go back to normal’ - in other words, if some president could only administer the logic of capital competently, the deviation from capitalism (and thus the antagonism between people living under it) would vanish

W

The theory of Ideology is alway already a recapitulation of the story of the fall. When Adam (Adam in Hebrew means Humanity) and Eve (Eve in Hebrew means Life) ate from the forbidden fruit (instantiates Mimetic Desire), tempted by the serpent offering access to the knowledge of good and evil (Ideology), humanity was thrust into the false world (Symbolic Order). The lack, the void, the absence- at the core of subjectivity that grounds human identity (the Phallus)- is the felt presence of this false world; this strange attractor that keeps humanity under the sway of Ideology. The escape from Ideology is always already found in the story from which it originates. How to escape? Here's a hint: It has nothing to do with the afterlife. I speculate we must find the things hidden since the foundation of the world to overcome Ideology. Here's a cool quote from Rene Girard on Desire: "In effect, desire is responsible for its own evolution. Desire tends to become a caricature of itself, or, to put it another way, to cause all the symptoms to become more and more aggravated. In contrast to what Freud thinks in his constant preoccupation with the 'unconscious', desire knows itself better than any form of psychiatry does. What is more, it gets better and better informed because it observes, at every stage, what is happening to it. This knowledge governs the aggravation of symptoms. Desire is always using for its own ends the knowledge it has acquired of itself; it places the truth and the service of its own untruth, so to speak, and it is always becoming better equipped to reject everything that surrenders to its embrace. It always does its best, at both the individual and the collective levels, to generate the double binds in which it gets caught, seeking always to entrap itself in the cul-de-sac that is it's very raison d'etre. The idea of the demon who bears light is more far-reaching than any notion in psychoanalysis. Desire bears light, but puts that light in the service of its own darkness. The role played by desire in all the great creations of modern culture--in art and literature--is explained by this feature, which it shares with Lucifer."

r/criticaltheory brought me here. Great talk 😗👌

Isn't science against always against ideology?