Liberating the Imaginary Layer

I’m pleased to share an essay on the Althusserian theory of ideology that will be published in a forthcoming issue of "Logos" a leading Russian philosophy journal. This paper was first offered as a talk for the READING ALTHUSSER conference organized by Lacan Link. In this essay, I examine the role that Lacan’s concept of the imaginary plays in the development of the wider theory of ideological interpellation for Althusser. What remains ambiguous in this legacy of ideology critique, for all of its descriptive richness, is a practical problem for collective politics: how do subjects “talk back” to interpellations such that they avoid getting entangled in further ideological misrecognition? This introduces us to an entirely new level of ideology critique, what Engels theorizes as ideology as “counter power”, or the means by which subjects organize “disidentifications” to “counter identifications” that can rival bourgeois power.

This theory of counter power introduces us to a dialectical dimension of ideology critique. It requires the appropriation of both scientific concepts and identifications with political organization of a new type. Without this institutional dimension and attention to political organization, ideology critique will tend to remain ensnared in an individualist pessimist perspective in which political activity is theorized as caught in inevitable, if not eternal, phantasmatic capture. To unravel the dialectical core to this constructive domain of ideology critique, I turn to the work of the lesser-known philosopher and linguist Michel Pêcheux—a student of Althusser—who maintained that the task of socialist organization requires the creation of a “counter identification” to overcome the capture of dominant ideological interpellations of the working class.

It is this move from primary “disidentification” to “counter identification” that I find missing in the work of ideology critique in Slavoj Žižek and many post-Althusserians. For Žižek, the wider process of counter-identification is thrown into question as inevitably entailing a further imaginary subjection, and this pessimist move leads him to abandon the politics of identification entirely. My argument is that without a constructive theory of counter power and counter-identification, ideology critique will inevitably fall sway to pessimistic idealism and this results in a passive theory of ideology that cannot effectively theorize how collective liberation from ideology is overcome.

Althusser has been a constant source of philosophical reflection and an important point of reference for my work lately. I have hosted study groups on For Marx Althusser’s important study of the early ...