What is ideology? To begin with: why this term?
As is well known, the term ‘ideology’ was coined by Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis, and their circle. Following a classic tradition in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, in which the notion of genesis holds a central place, they meant by it the theory (-logy) of the genesis of ideas (ideo-). Hence ‘ideology’. When Napoleon uttered his famous phrase: ‘the Ideologues are no use’, he had them and only them in mind – not, obviously, himself, the number-one ideologue (ideologue in the Marxist sense) of the bourgeois social formation that had been ‘saved’ from the Terror, who knew (or did not know: no matter, because he practiced it) that one cannot do without ideology and ideologues. This held first and foremost for him.
Fifty years after the expressions ‘ideology’ and ‘ideologues’ were first used publicly, Marx took them up again, but gave them a completely different meaning. He took these expressions up very early, in his early works, and had to give them a completely different meaning. The reason was simple: from his articles in the Rheinische Zeitung on, he was waging an ideological struggle, conducting himself like a radical left ideologue, and then a utopian communist ideologue, in combating other ideologues, his adversaries.
Thus it was the practice of the ideological, and later political, struggle that compelled Marx to acknowledge very early on, beginning in his early works, the existence and reality of ideology, as well as the necessity of its role in ideological and, ultimately, political struggle: class struggle. It is well known that Marx was not the first to acknowledge the existence or even invent the concept of class struggle, since, on his own witness, it figures in the works of the bourgeois historians of the Restoration.1
It was most certainly for this reason, at once autobiographical and historical (a situation of opposition to the Rhineland bourgeoisie that propelled its young ideologues from radicalism to utopian communism), that Marx, once he started to become aware of his own class position, paid so much attention to the concept of ideology, in The Holy Family, the 1844 Manuscripts and, above all, The German Ideology. In this regard, there is a very big theoretical difference between The Holy Family and the 1844 Manuscripts on the one hand and The German Ideology on the other. Although The German Ideology contains a positivist-mechanistic conception of ideology, which is to say a not-yet-Mrxist conception of ideology, we find a handful of phenomenal formulas in this text; they are material evidence of the tremendous power with which Marx’s political experience irrupted in the midst of a general conception that was still false. We find these two simple formulas, for instance: ‘the ruling ideology is the ideology of the ruling class’,2 and the definition of ideology as ‘cognition’ and ‘miscognition’.3
Unfortunately, believing, first, that he had ‘settled accounts with his former philosophical consciousness’ in The German Ideology, the text of which he had abandoned to the ‘gnawing criticism of the mice’;4 and believing, second, during the positivist transition represented by The German Ideology, that all philosophy should be purely and simply ‘abolished’, because philosophy was nothing but ideology, Marx set out on a study of ‘positive matters’, that is, after the failure of the 1848 revolutions, a study of political economy. Aware that he had so far acquired only hearsay knowledge of the subject, he undertook a serious examination of it, deciding in 1850 ‘to begin everything at the beginning’. On the basis of this examination, as is well known, he produced, seventeen years later, the first volume of Capital (1867).
Unfortunately, if Capital contains a number of elements for a theory of ideologies, especially the ideology of the vulgar economists, it does not contain that theory itself, which depends to a large extent (we shall see to what extent when the time comes) on a theory of ideology in general that is still lacking in Marxist theory as such.
I would like to take the considerable risk of proposing a preliminary, very schematic sketch of such a theory. The theses I am about to put forward are of course not improvisations, but they can be sustained and tested, that is, confirmed or invalidated, only by very long studies and analyses, to which the formulation of these theses will, perhaps, lead. I therefore ask the reader to be extremely vigilant and, at the same time, extremely indulgent towards the propositions that I am about to hazard.5
Let me first say a word about the reason of principle that seems to me at least to authorize, if not to found, the project of a theory of ideology in general, as opposed to a theory of particular ideologies, considered either with respect to their regional contents (religious, moral, legal, or political ideology, and so on) or class orientation (bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, proletarian ideology, and so on).
In the second volume of the present work, I shall attempt to sketch a theory of ideologies in the two respects just indicated. It will then appear that a theory of ideologies depends, in the last resort, on the history of social formations, hence of modes of production combined in social formations and the class struggles that develop in them. In that sense, there can plainly be no question of a theory of ideologies in general, since ideologies (defined in the two ways indicated above, with respect to region and class) do have a history, whose determination in the last instance obviously lies outside them, although it concerns them.
On the other hand, if I can put forward the project of a theory of ideology in general, and if this theory is indeed one of the elements on which theories of ideologies depend, this entails an apparently paradoxical proposition. Laying my cards on the table, I shall state it in the following terms: ideology has no history.
That phrase may be found verbatim in a passage of The German Ideology. Marx utters it with respect to metaphysics, which, he says, no more has a history than does morality (or, by implication, any other form of ideology).6
In The German Ideology, this phrase figures in a frankly positivist context. Ideology is sheer illusion, sheer dream, in other words, nothingness. All its reality lies outside it. Ideology is thus conceived of as an imaginary construct whose status exactly resembles the theoretical status of the dream in authors before Freud. For these authors, dreams were purely imaginary – that is, nugatory – results of the ‘day’s residues’, presented in an arbitrary and sometimes even ‘inverted’ arrangement and order: in short, ‘in disorder’. Dreams were the empty, nugatory imaginary, ‘patched together’ arbitrarily, eyes closed, from residues of the only full, positive reality, that of open-eyed day. That is exactly philosophy’s and also ideology’s status in The German Ideology (since philosophy is ideology par excellence here).
Ideology is an imaginary assemblage, a pure dream, empty and vain, constituted by the ‘diurnal residues’ of the only full, positive reality, that of the concrete history of concrete, material individuals materially producing their existence. Ideology in The German Ideology has no history on these grounds, since its history lies outside it, where the only existing history, that of concrete individuals … and so forth. In The German Ideology, the thesis that ideology has no history is therefore a purely negative thesis, since it means both that:
1) ideology is nothing, being pure dream, (fabricated by none can say what power – unless it is the alienation of the division of labour, but that, too, is a negative determination); and
2) ideology has no history, which does not at all mean that it has no history (quite the opposite, since it is but a pale reflection, empty and inverted, of real history), but, rather, that it has no history of its own.
My thesis, although it repeats, formally speaking, The German Ideology’s terms (ideology has no history), differs radically from The German Ideology’s positivist-historicist thesis. For, first, I think I can affirm that ideologies have a history of their own (although it is determined in the last instance by the class struggle in the apparatuses that reproduce the relations of production). Second, I think I can simultaneously affirm that ideology in general has no history, not in a negative sense (its history lies outside it), but in an absolutely positive sense.
A positive sense, if it is true that a peculiar feature of ideology is that it is endowed with a structure and functioning such as to make it a non-historical – that is, an omni-historical – reality, in the sense that this structure and functioning are, in one and the same form, immutable, present throughout what is called history, in the sense in which the Manifesto defines history as the history of class struggle, that is, the history of class societies.
So that readers are not unsettled by this proposition, which will doubtless bring them up short, I would say, returning to my example of the dream one more time, this time in its Freudian conception, that our proposition that ideology has no history can and must (in a way that has absolutely nothing arbitrary about it, but, quite the opposite, is theoretically necessary, since there is an organic link between the two propositions) be directly correlated with Freud’s proposition that the unconscious is eternal, in other words, has no history.
If eternal means, not transcendent to all (temporal) history, but omnipresent and therefore immutable in form throughout all of history, I will go so far as to adopt Freud’s formulation word for word and write: ideology is eternal, just like the unconscious. I will add, anticipating the results of research that must be carried out and now can be, that this parallel is theoretically justified by the fact that the eternity of the unconscious is based, in the last instance, on the eternity of ideology in general.7 That is why I believe I am, let us say, authorized, at least presumptively, to propose a theory of ideology in general, in the sense in which Freud presented a theory of the unconscious in general.
To simplify our terminology, let us agree, taking into account what has been said about ideologies, to use the word ideology, without further qualification, to designate ideology in general, which, I just said, has no history, or (it comes to the same thing) is eternal, that is, omnipresent in its immutable form throughout history (meaning the history of the social formations comprising social classes). I am happy to restrict myself, as can be seen, to ‘class societies’ and their history. Elsewhere, however, I shall show that the thesis I am defending can and must be extended to what are known as ‘classless societies’.
That said, let me make one more remark before entering into my analysis.
The advantage of this theory of ideology (and that is also a reason I am elaborating it at this point in our discussion) is that it concretely shows how ideology ‘functions’ at its most concrete level, the level of individual ‘subjects’: that is, people as they exist in their concrete individuality, in their work, daily lives, acts, commitments, hesitations, doubts, and sense of what is most immediately self-evident. It is here that all those who demand, vociferously: ‘Give us something concrete! Something concrete!’ will, if I say so myself, be ‘well-served’.
We touched on this concrete level when we showed the role played by legal-moral ideology. We did not, however, discuss it, but only pointed it out. And we did not know at the time that the ‘legal system’ was an Ideological State Apparatus. Since then, we have brought the concept of Ideological State Apparatus into play and demonstrated that there are several such apparatuses, while also showing the function they have and the fact that they realize different regions and forms of ideology, unified under the State Ideology. We have also clearly shown the general function of these Ideological State Apparatuses as well as the effects of the class struggle of which they are both the object and the theatre.
We have not, however, shown how the State Ideology, and the various ideological forms realized in these apparatuses and their practices, whether class forms or regional forms, reach concrete individuals themselves at the level of their ideas and acts: Pierre, Paul, Jean, Jacques, a metallurgist, a white-collar worker, an engineer, a working-class militant, a capitalist, a bourgeois statesman, a policeman, a bishop, a judge, a civil servant, and so on, in their concrete, day-to-day existence. We have not shown the general mechanism by means of which ideology makes concrete individuals ‘act by themselves’ in the technical-social division of labour, that is, in the various posts held by agents of production, exploitation, repression and ideologization (and also of scientific practice). In a word, we have not shown by what mechanism ideology makes individuals ‘act all by themselves’, without there being any need to post a policeman behind each and every one of them.
This is no gratuitous paradox I am formulating here, for there exist, in the anti-socialist class struggle, ‘anticipatory’ works8 depicting ‘totalitarian’ socialist society as a society in which every individual will be doubled by his personal ‘monitor’ (whether a cop or the Big Boss, who is at the same time a Grand Inquisitor), who is present in every bedroom, no matter how secluded, and, using the refined means of avant-garde science fiction – such as microphones in the walls, electronic eyes, or closed-circuit television – observes-monitors-prohibits-commands each individual’s every act and gesture.
When we leave this ‘political science fiction’ behind, the anti-socialist role of which is obvious but crude, in order to turn to the very contemporary forms that are also very widespread in the very narrow circles that are trying to take over the leadership of the ‘Movement’ that May has spawned among high-school-students-college-students-intellectuals (they think they are leading it; however, since it is a mass movement, it eludes their grasp), we find exactly the same incredible myth. When the weekly Action recently wrote, as part of a huge drawing on its cover: ‘Get rid of the cop in your head!’, it took up the same mythology unawares, without suspecting that it is, even in its anarchist guise, profoundly reactionary.
For the ‘totalitarian’ myth of the ubiquitous Grand Inquisitor, like the anarchist myth of the ubiquitous cop ‘in your head’, is based on the same anti-Marxist conception of the way ‘society’ works.
We have already had a word to say about this conception. We have shown that it stands the real order of things on its head, putting the superstructure in place of the base, and, very precisely, whisks exploitation ‘under the carpet’ in order to focus on repression alone. In another, more elaborate form of the same mistake, it declares that, in the ‘stage of state monopoly capitalism’, which it presents as imperialism’s final stage, exploitation has been reduced to its ‘essence’: repression – or, if one wants to put the dots on the ‘i’s, that exploitation has practically become repression.
We can now, going a step further, point out that assimilating exploitation to repression simultaneously entails a second theoretical and political reduction: introduces the action of ideology to the action of repression pure and simple.
This explains why Action could come out with the slogan: ‘Get rid of the cop in your head!’ That is a proposition that can be thought and uttered only if one whisks ideology ‘under the carpet’ or confounds it, purely and simply, with repression. From that standpoint, Action’s slogan is a little theoretical gem. For, instead of saying: ‘Fight false ideas, destroy the false ideas you have in your heads – the false ideas with which the ideology of the dominant class pulls the wool over your eyes,9 and replace them with accurate ideas that will enable you to join the revolutionary class’s struggle to end exploitation and the repression that sustains it!’, Action declares: ‘Get rid of the cop in your head!’ This slogan, which deserves a place in the Museum of the History of Masterpieces of Theoretical and Political Error, quite simply replaces ideas, as is obvious enough, with the cop. That is, it replaces the role of subjection played by bourgeois ideology with the repressive role played by the police.
In this anarchist conception, then, we can see that 1) exploitation is replaced by repression or is thought of as a form of repression; and 2) ideology is replaced by repression or is thought of as a form of repression. Repression thus becomes the centre of centres, the essence of the society based on capitalist class exploitation. Repression simultaneously stands in for exploitation, ideology and, ultimately, the state as well, inasmuch as the state apparatuses, which comprise, as we have seen, both a repressive apparatus and ideological apparatuses, are reduced to the abstract notion of ‘repression’.
The general ‘synthesis’ (for there is an admirable hidden logic at work in the whole post-May ‘development’ of this ‘conception’, including even its historical ‘development’) – the general synthesis of this conception, that is, the resolution of the contradiction provided by the statement that one has a ‘cop’ in one’s head, in which, as everyone knows, after all, one can have only ‘ideas’, is furnished by the same ‘theorists’. It comes in the form of a ‘discovery’ made by the leaders of the ‘German student movement’. They have ‘discovered’ that ‘knowledge’ is, by nature, directly repressive.
Hence the necessity of ‘revolting’ against the ‘authority of knowledge’; hence the ‘anti-authoritarian’ revolt against the repression exercised by knowledge; hence the retrospective interpretation of the May Events and their sequel as having been naturally and necessarily centred on the university and schools, where repression, the essence of capitalist society, is exercised directly, in the original, nascent state, in the form of the (bourgeois) authority of ‘knowledge’. That is why your daughter is mute; in other words, that is why May took place in the university and among intellectuals, first and foremost. And that is why the revolutionary movement, which the proletarians are invited to join, can (if not must) be led by the aforementioned intellectuals.10 Publications of all sorts are currently providing the empirical demonstration of these ‘theses’ and, above all, of the extraordinary labours of the ‘old mole’11 of the ‘logic’ of the anarchist conception, which produces such pristine theoretical effects.
This, then, is another reason why – after recognizing that exploitation is not reducible to repression; that the state apparatuses are not reducible to the repressive apparatus alone; and that individuals do not have their own personal ‘cop’ behind them or ‘in their heads’ – we have to show how the ideology realized in the Ideological State Apparatuses works. It produces the following class result, which is astonishing but quite ‘natural’: namely, that the individuals in question ‘go’, and that it is ideology which makes them ‘go’.
Plato already knew this. He foresaw that cops (‘Guardians’) would be needed to monitor and repress slaves and ‘craftsmen’. He knew, however, that there is no putting a ‘cop’ in the head of each slave or craftsman, and that it is not even possible to put, behind each and every individual, his own personal cop (otherwise, a second cop would be needed to monitor the first, and so on … and there would ultimately be nothing but cops in society, with no one to produce; and then what would the cops themselves live on?). Plato knew that the ‘people’ had to be taught, from childhood, the ‘Beautiful Lies’ that would ‘make it go’ all by itself, and that those Beautiful Lies had to be taught to the ‘people’ in such a way that the people would believe in them, so that it would ‘go’.
Plato was, to be sure, no ‘revolutionary’, even though he was an intellectual; he was a reactionary and no mistake. He had enough political experience, however, not to tell himself stories to the effect that, in a class society, mere repression could by itself guarantee the reproduction of the relations of production. He already knew (although he did not have the concept for this) that it is the Beautiful Lies, that is, ideology, which ensure the reproduction of the relations of production better than anything else. Our modern ‘revolutionary’ anarchist leaders do not know this. This proves that they would do well to read Plato, without letting themselves be intimidated by the ‘authority of the knowledge’ they will find in him; for they can find in Plato, let us say, elementary ‘lessons’, albeit purely ideological,12 about the way a class society works. This proves that ‘knowledge’ altogether different from repressive-authoritarian knowledge is possible – precisely the scientific knowledge that, since Marx and Lenin, has become emancipatory, because revolutionary, scientific knowledge.
That is why – I hope that things have become clear and that I can rest my case – it is absolutely necessary to show, theoretically and politically, the mechanisms by means of which ideology makes people, that is, concrete individuals, ‘march’ [fait marcher]: whether they ‘march’ in the service of class exploitation, or ‘march’ in the Long March that will culminate, sooner than one might think, in the revolution in the Western countries, and thus even in France. For revolutionary organizations, too, ‘go’ on ideology; however, when it is a question of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary organizations, they go on the proletarian ideology (above all political, but also moral) that has been transformed by the persevering educational activity13 of the Marxist-Leninist science of the capitalist mode of production, and thus of capitalist social formations, and thus of the revolutionary class struggle and socialist revolution.
To broach my central thesis on the structure and functioning of ideology, I shall first present two theses, one negative, the other positive. The first concerns the object ‘represented’ in the imaginary form of ideology. The second concerns the materiality of ideology.
THESIS I: Ideology represents individuals’ imaginary relation to their real conditions of existence.
We often call religious, moral, legal, political, and other ideologies so many ‘world outlooks’. Of course, unless we experience one of these ideologies as the truth (unless, say, we profess or ‘believe’ in God, Duty, Justice, the Revolution, and so forth), we admit that these ‘world outlooks’ are largely imaginary and do not ‘correspond to reality’. We take a critical standpoint on the ideology we are discussing, examining it as an ethnologist examines the myths of his ‘little’ ‘primitive society’. However, while admitting that these ideologies do not correspond to reality and, accordingly, constitute an illusion, we also admit that they do make allusion to reality and that we need only ‘interpret’ them to discover the reality of this world beneath the surface of their imaginary representation of it (ideology = illusion/allusion).
There are different types of interpretation. The best known are the mechanistic type common in the eighteenth century (God is an imaginary representation of the real King) and the ‘hermeneutic’ interpretation introduced by the first Church Fathers and revived by Feuerbach and the theological-philosophical school which descends from him, such as the theologian Barth and the philosopher Ricoeur. (For Feuerbach, for example, God is the essence of real Man.) The essential point is that, provided we interpret the imaginary transposition (and inversion) of ideology, we arrive at the conclusion that, in ideology, ‘people represent (in imaginary form) their real conditions of existence’.
This interpretation leaves one ‘small’ problem in abeyance: why do people ‘need’ this imaginary transposition of their real conditions of existence in order to ‘represent’ their real conditions of existence?
The first interpretation (the eighteenth century’s) has a simple solution to hand: priests or despots are to blame. They ‘forged’ Beautiful Lies so that people would, in the belief that they were obeying God, in fact obey the priests or despots, generally allied in their imposture, with the priests working in the despots’ service or, depending on the aforementioned theorists’ political positions, the other way around. There is therefore a cause for the imaginary transposition of real conditions of existence: that cause is a small handful of cynics who base their domination and exploitation of the ‘people’ on a skewed representation of the world, which they have imagined in order to enslave minds by dominating imaginations. Thank God, the imagination is a faculty common to one and all!
The second interpretation (Feuerbach’s, which Marx repeats word for word in his early works) is more ‘profound’, that is, just as false. It, too, seeks and finds a cause for the transposition and imaginary distortion of people’s real conditions of existence – in short, for the alienation in the imaginary of the representation of people’s conditions of existence. This cause is no longer priests or despots or their active imaginations and the passive imaginations of their victims. It is the material alienation reigning in people’s very conditions of existence. This is how Marx defends, in The Jewish Question and elsewhere, the 100 per cent Feuerbachian idea (enhanced with economic pseudo-considerations in the 1844 Manuscripts) that people devise an alienated (that is, imaginary) representation of their conditions of existence because those conditions of existence are themselves alienating (in the 1844 Manuscripts: because those conditions are dominated [by] the essence of alienated society: ‘alienated labour’).
All these interpretations thus take literally the thesis which they presuppose and on which they are based: that what is reflected in the imaginary representation of the world found in an ideology is people’s conditions of existence, hence their real world.
Here, however, I return to a thesis that I advanced a few years ago, and reaffirm that ‘people’ do not ‘represent’ their real conditions of existence in ideology (religious ideology or some other kind), but, above all, their relation to those real conditions of existence. That relation is at the centre of every ideological, hence imaginary, representation of the real world. It is that relation which contains the ‘cause’ that must account for the imaginary distortion of the ideological representation of the real world. Or, rather, to suspend the language of causality, we have to advance the thesis that the imaginary nature of this relation sustains all the imaginary distortion that we can observe in all ideology (unless we live in its truth).
To put this in Marxist terms, if it is true that the representation of the real conditions of existence of individuals holding posts of agents of production, exploitation, repression, ideologization and scientific practice arises, in the last instance, from the relations of production and relations deriving from them, we may say the following: every ideology represents, in its necessarily imaginary distortion, not the existing relations of production (and the other relations deriving from them), but, above all, individuals’ (imaginary) relation to the relations of production and the relations deriving from them. What is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of real relations governing individuals’ existence, but those individuals’ imaginary relation to the real relations in which they live.
If this is so, the question of the ‘cause’ of the imaginary distortion of real relations in ideology disappears. It must be replaced by another: Why is the representation that individuals make of their (individual) relation to the social relations governing their conditions of existence and their individual and collective lives necessarily imaginary? And what kind of imaginary is involved? Posed in this way, the question rules out the solution that turns on a ‘clique’14 of individuals (priests or despots) identified as the authors of the great ideological mystification, as well as the solution that turns on the alienated character of the real world. We shall see why later in our discussion. For now, we shall go no further.
THESIS II: Ideology has a material existence.
We touched on this thesis when we said that ‘ideas’, or representations and the like, which seem to make up ideology, have, not an ideal, idea-dependent [idéale, idéelle] or spiritual existence, but a material one. We even suggested that the ideal, idea-dependent, spiritual existence of ‘ideas’ is a notion that belongs exclusively to an ideology of the ‘idea’ and of ideology, and, let us add, to the ideology of what seems to have ‘founded’ this conception since the appearance of the sciences: namely, what the practitioners of the sciences represent as ‘ideas’, whether true or false, in their spontaneous ideology. Of course, presented in the form of a claim, this thesis is unproven. We ask only that the reader entertain a favourable prejudice towards it – say, in the name of materialism. We shall prove it elsewhere than in the present Volume 1.
We need this hypothesis that ‘ideas’ or other representations have, not a spiritual, but a material existence in order to progress in our analysis of the nature of ideology. Or, rather, we simply find it useful the better to bring out what every even slightly serious analysis of any ideology at all will immediately and empirically show any even minimally critical observer.
In our discussion of Ideological State Apparatuses and their practices, we said that each apparatus was the realization of an ideology (the unity of these different regional ideologies – religious, moral, legal, political, aesthetic, and so on – being ensured by their subsumption under the State Ideology). We now return to this thesis: an ideology always exists in an apparatus and in the practice or practices of that apparatus. This existence is material.
Of course, the material existence of ideology in an apparatus and its practices does not have the same modality as the material existence of a paving stone or rifle. However, at the risk of being called a neo-Aristotelian (let us note in passing that Marx held Aristotle in very high esteem), we shall say that ‘matter is expressed in several senses’ or, rather, that it exists in different modalities, all rooted, in the last instance, in ‘physical’ matter.
That said, let us take the shortest way and see what goes on in the ‘individuals’ who live in ideology, that is, in a determinate representation of the world (religious, moral, and so on) whose imaginary distortion depends on their imaginary relation to their conditions of existence, in other words, in the last instance, to the relations of production (ideology = an imaginary relation to real relations). We shall say that this imaginary relation is itself endowed with material existence. No one can accuse us of dodging the difficulty or of being ‘inconsistent’.
We observe the following. An individual believes in God, Duty, Justice, or the like. This belief has its source (for everyone, that is, for everyone who lives in an ideological representation of ideology that reduces it to ideas endowed by definition with spiritual existence) in that individual’s ideas, and thus in her as a subject possessed of a consciousness containing the ideas of her belief. On this condition – that is, given the perfectly ideological ‘conceptual’ dispositive thus established (a subject endowed with consciousness in which she freely forms or freely recognizes ideas in which she believes) – the (material) comportment of the subject follows naturally from her ideas.
The individual in question behaves in such-and-such a way, adopts such-and-such a practical line of conduct and, what is more, participates in certain regulated practices, those of the ideological apparatus on which the ideas that she has as subject, depend freely and in all ‘good’ conscience chosen. If she believes in God, she goes to church to attend mass, kneels, prays, confesses, does penance (penance was once material in the ordinary sense) and, naturally, repents, and so on and so forth. If she believes in Duty, she will act in the corresponding ways (inscribed in ritual practices), ‘observing proper rules of behaviour’. If she believes in Justice, she will unquestioningly submit to the rules of law and, when they are violated, may well protest in the profound indignation of her heart, or even sign petitions, take part in a demonstration, and so on. If she believes in Maréchal Pétain’s ‘National Revolution’, she will do the same. If she believes in the socialist revolution, she will do the same – that is, obviously, something altogether different. I have deliberately chosen the last examples, which are almost provocations, so as not to ‘duck the difficulty’.
From first to last in this schema, we observe that the ideological representation of ideology is itself forced to recognize that every subject endowed with consciousness/a conscience and believing in the ideas that it inspires in her or freely accepts should ‘act in accordance with her ideas’ and therefore inscribe her own ideas as free subject in the acts of her material practice. If she fails to, ‘that is not good’.
Indeed, if she does not do what she ought to do according to what she believes, then she does something else, and that implies – still according to the same idealist scheme – that she has in her head ideas other than those she proclaims, and acts on them, as someone who is either ‘inconsistent’ (‘no one is deliberately evil’) or cynical or perverse.
At all events, the ideology of ideology thus recognizes, despite its imaginary distortion, that a human subject’s ‘ideas’ exist in her acts or ought to; and, if they do not, it ascribes to her other ideas corresponding to the acts (even perverse) that she does perform. This ideology of ideology talks about acts; we shall talk about acts inserted into practices. And we shall point out that these practices are regulated by rituals in which they are inscribed, within the material existence of an ideological apparatus, even if it is just a small part of that apparatus: a small mass in a small church, a funeral, a minor match at a sport club, a school day or a day of classes at university, a meeting or rally of a political party, or of the Rationalist Union, or whatever one likes.
We are, moreover, indebted to Pascal’s defensive ‘dialectic’ for the marvellous formula which will enable us to invert the order of the notional schema of the ideology of ideology. Pascal says, more or less, ‘Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.’15 He thus scandalously inverts the order of things, bringing, like Christ, not peace, but strife, and, what is more, in a way that is hardly Christian (for woe to him who brings scandal into the world!) – scandal itself. A fortunate scandal which makes him speak, with Jansenist defiance, a language designating reality as it is, with nothing imaginary about it.
We may perhaps be allowed to leave Pascal to the arguments of his ideological struggle with the religious Ideological State Apparatus of his day, in which he waged a little class struggle in his Jansenist party, constantly on the brink of being banned, that is, of excommunication. And we shall try to use, with the reader’s permission, a more directly Marxist terminology, if possible, for we are advancing in domains still poorly explored by Marxist theorists.
We shall therefore say, considering only a single subject (such and such an individual), that the existence of the ideas in which he believes is material in that his ideas are his material acts inserted into material practices regulated by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which (hardly by accident!) his ideas derive. Naturally, the four inscriptions of the adjective ‘material’ in our proposition have to be endowed with different modalities: the materiality of a walk to church to attend mass, of kneeling, of making the sign of the cross or beating one’s breast, of a sentence, a prayer, an act of contrition, an act of penance, a gaze, a handshake, an outer verbal discourse or ‘inner’ verbal discourse (consciousness) is not one and the same materiality. I do not think that anyone will seek a quarrel with us here if we leave the theory of the difference between the modalities of materiality in abeyance.
The fact remains that, in this inverted presentation of things, we are not dealing with an inversion at all (that magic formula of Hegelian or Feuerbachian Marxists!), because we can see that certain notions have purely and simply disappeared from our new presentation, that others, in contrast, survive, and that new terms appear.
Disappeared: the term ideas.
Survive: the terms subject, consciousness, belief, acts.
Appear: the terms practices, rituals, ideological apparatus.
It is therefore not an inversion [renversement] (except in the sense in which we say that a government or a glass has been overturned [renversé], but a rather strange reshuffle (of a non-ministerial type), since we obtain the following result.
Ideas have disappeared as such (insofar as they are endowed with an ideal or spiritual existence), precisely insofar as it has appeared that their existence is material – is inscribed in the acts of practices regulated by rituals defined in the last instance by an ideological apparatus. It accordingly appears that the subject acts insofar as he is acted by the following system (set out in the order of its real determination): ideology existing in a material ideological apparatus, prescribing material practices regulated by a material ritual, which practices exist in the material acts of a subject acting in all good conscience in accordance with his belief. It may be objected that the subject in question could act differently; but let us recall that we said that the ritual practices in which a ‘primary’ ideology is realized can ‘produce’ (in the form of by-products)16 a ‘secondary’ ideology – thank God, since, otherwise, neither revolt nor the acquisition of revolutionary consciousness nor revolution would be possible.
But our presentation reveals that we have retained the following notions: subject, consciousness, belief, acts. From this sequence, we shall immediately extract the decisive central term on which everything depends: the notion of the subject.
And we shall immediately state two conjoint theses:
1) There is no practice whatsoever except by and under an ideology.
2) There is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects.
We can now come to our central thesis.
This thesis simply comes down to making our last proposition explicit: there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects. In other words, there is no ideology except for concrete subjects (such as you and me), and this destination for ideology is only made possible by the subject: in other words, by the category of the subject and its functioning.
We mean by this that, even if it appears under this name (the subject) only with the advent of bourgeois ideology, legal ideology in particular,18 the category of the subject (which may function under other names: for example, the soul in Plato, God, and so on) is the category constitutive of all ideology, whatever its (regional or class) determination and whatever its historical date – since ideology has no history.
We say that the category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology, but we also immediately add that the category of the subject is constitutive of every ideology only insofar as every ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting’ concrete subjects (such as you and me). The functioning of all ideology exists in the play of this twofold constitution, since ideology is nothing but its functioning in the material forms of existence of that functioning.
Clearly to grasp what follows, we must bear firmly in mind that both he who is writing these lines and the reader who is reading them are themselves subjects, and therefore ideological subjects (the proposition is itself tautological). That is, we have to be aware that both author and reader of these lines live ‘spontaneously’ or ‘naturally’ in ideology, in the sense in which we have said that ‘man is by nature an ideological animal’.19
The fact that an author, insofar as he writes the lines of a discourse which claims to be scientific, is completely absent as a ‘subject’ from ‘his’ scientific discourse (for all scientific discourse is by definition a discourse without a subject; there is no ‘Subject of Science’ except in an ideology of science) is a different matter. We shall leave it aside for the moment.
As St Paul admirably puts it, it is in the ‘Logos’, in other words, in ideology, that we ‘live and move and have our being’.20 It follows that the category of the subject is a primary ‘self-evident fact’ for you and me (self-evident facts are always primary): it is clear that you are a (free, moral, responsible, and so on) subject, and that I am, too. Like all self-evident facts, including those that make a word ‘name a thing’ or ‘have a meaning’ (including, therefore, the self-evident facts of the ‘transparency’ of language), the ‘self-evident fact’ that you and I are subjects – and that that is not a problem – is an ideological effect, the elementary ideological effect.21 For it is characteristic of ideology to impose self-evident facts as self-evident facts (without in the least seeming to, since they are ‘self-evident’) which we cannot not recognize and before which we have the inevitable and eminently natural reaction of exclaiming (aloud or in ‘the silence of consciousness’):22 ‘That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true!’
At work in this reaction is the function of ideological recognition, one of the two basic functions of ideology (the other is the function of miscognition).
To take a highly ‘concrete’ example, we all have friends who, when they knock on our door and we ask ‘who’s there?’ through the closed door, answer (since ‘it’s self-evident’) ‘it’s me!’ And we do indeed recognize that ‘it’s him’ or ‘it’s her’. The purpose is achieved: we open the door, and ‘it’s always really true that it really was she who was there’. To take another example, when, in the street, we recognize someone we already know [quand nous (re)connaissons quelqu’un de notre connaissance], we show him that we have recognized him (and have recognized that he has recognized us) by saying ‘Hello, my friend!’ and shaking his hand (a material ritual practice of ideological recognition in everyday life, at least in France; elsewhere, there are other rituals).
With this preliminary remark and these concrete illustrations, I wish to point out only that you and I are always already subjects and, as such, constantly practice the rituals of ideological recognition, which guarantee for us that we are indeed concrete, individual, unmistakable and, naturally, irreplaceable subjects. The writing I am currently doing and the reading you are currently engaged in23 are likewise, in this respect, rituals of ideological recognition, including the ‘self-evidence’ with which the ‘truth’ of my reflections may impose itself on you (and may make you say ‘that’s true!’).
To recognize that we are subjects, however, and that we function in the practical rituals of the most elementary daily life (hand-shakes, the fact of calling you by your name, the fact of knowing that you ‘have’ a name of your own thanks to which you are recognized as a unique subject, even if I do not know what your name is) – this recognition gives us only the ‘consciousness’ of our incessant (eternal) practice of ideological recognition: its consciousness, that is, its recognition. It by no means gives us the (scientific) knowledge of the mechanism of this recognition, or the recognition of this recognition. Yet it is that knowledge that we have to attain if we want, while speaking in ideology and from within ideology, to outline a discourse which tries to break with ideology, and to risk inaugurating a scientific discourse (a discourse without a subject) on ideology.
Thus, as a way of representing why the category of the subject is constitutive of ideology, which exists only by constituting concrete subjects (you and me), I shall employ a special mode of exposition: ‘concrete’ enough to be recognized, yet abstract enough to be thinkable and thought, giving rise to a knowledge.
As a first formulation, I would suggest: all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, through the functioning of the category of the subject.
This proposition implies that we should distinguish, for the moment, between concrete individuals on the one hand and concrete subjects on the other, although, at this level, there is no concrete subject that does not have a concrete individual as its support.
We shall go on to suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way as to ‘recruit’ subjects among individuals (it recruits them all) or ‘transforms’ individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) through the very precise operation that we call interpellation or hailing. It can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace, everyday hailing, by (or not by) the police: ‘Hey, you there!’24
If, to offer readers the most concrete sort of concreteness, we suppose that the theoretical scene we are imagining happens in the street, the hailed individual turns around. With this simple 180-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail ‘really’ was addressed to him and that ‘it really was he who was hailed’ (not someone else). Experience shows that the practical telecommunications of hailing are such that hailing hardly ever misses its mark: verbal call or whistle, the one hailed always recognizes that he really was the one hailed. This is a strange phenomenon, after all, one that cannot be explained by ‘guilt feelings’ alone, despite the large numbers of people with ‘something on their consciences’. Or is it that everyone always has something on his conscience and that everyone confusedly feels, at least, that he always has accounts to render or obligations to respect – if only the obligation to respond to every hailing? Strange.
Naturally, for the convenience and clarity of exposition of our little theoretical theatre, we have had to present things in the form of a sequence with a before and an after, that is, in the form of a temporal succession. There are individuals walking along. Somewhere (usually behind them) the hail rings out, ‘Hey, you there!’ An individual (nine times out of ten, it is the one who is meant) turns around, believing-suspecting-knowing that he’s the one – recognizing, in other words, that he ‘really is the person’ the interpellation is aimed at. In reality, however, things happen without succession. The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing.
We may add that what thus seems to happen outside ideology (to be very precise, in the street) really happens in ideology. What really happens in ideology thus seems to happen outside it. That is why those who are in ideology, you and I, believe that they are by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology. Ideology never says ‘I am ideological’. One has to be outside ideology, in other words, in scientific knowledge, to be able to say ‘I am in ideology’ (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case) ‘I was in ideology’. As is very well known, the accusation of being in ideology applies only to others, never to oneself (unless one is truly a Spinozist or Marxist, which, as far as this point goes, is to take exactly the same position). This amounts to saying that ideology has no outside (for itself), but, at the same time, that it is nothing but outside (for science and reality).
Spinoza explained this perfectly well 200 years before Marx, who practiced it without explaining it in detail. But let us leave this point there, although it is fraught with consequences which are not just theoretical, but also directly political, since, for example, the whole theory of criticism and self-criticism, the golden rule of the Marxist-Leninist practice of the class struggle, depends on it. Just one word: how are we to ensure that criticism is followed by self-criticism leading to a rectification, in line with Mao’s Leninist formula? This is possible only on the basis of Marxist-Leninist science applied to the practice of the class struggle.
Thus ideology hails or interpellates individuals as subjects. Since ideology is eternal, we must now suppress the temporal form in which we have represented the functioning of ideology and say: ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as subjects, which amounts to making it clear that individuals are always-already interpellated by ideology as subjects. This ineluctably leads us to one last proposition: individuals are always-already subjects. Hence individuals are ‘abstract’ with respect to the subjects they always-already are. This proposition may seem to be paradoxical or to be intellectual acrobatics. One moment, please.
That an individual is always-already a subject, even before she is born, is nevertheless the plain fact of the matter, accessible to everyone and not a paradox at all. Freud shows that individuals are always ‘abstract’ with respect to the subjects they always-already are, simply by noting the ideological ritual that surrounds the expectation of a ‘birth’, that ‘happy event’. Everyone knows how much, and how (a good deal could be said about that ‘how’), an unborn child is expected. This comes down to saying, very prosaically, if we agree to leave aside ‘sentiments’, in other words, the forms of familial ideology25 (paternal/maternal/conjugal/fraternal) in which the unborn child is expected, that it is certain in advance that it will bear its father’s name and so have an identity and be irreplaceable.26 Before its birth, then, a child is always-already a subject, marked out [assigné] as a subject in and by the particular familial ideological configuration in which it is ‘expected’ once it has been conceived (‘deliberately’ or ‘by accident’). There is no need to add that this familial ideological configuration is, in its singularity, terribly structured, and that it is in this implacable, more or less ‘pathological’ (if any meaning can be assigned to that word) structure that the quondam subject-to-be has to ‘find’ ‘its’ place, that is, ‘become’ the sexual subject (boy or girl) it already is in advance. It needs no genius to suggest that this ideological constraint and marking out, and all the rituals of family child-rearing-and-training and family education, bear some relation to what Freud studied in the forms of the pre-genital and genital ‘stages’ of sexuality, and thus to the ‘take’ [prise] of what he identified, by its effects, as the unconscious. But let us also leave this point there.
This business of the infant that is always-already a subject in advance, and, accordingly, not a veteran but a future fighter, is no joke, since we can see that it is one entryway into the Freudian domain. It interests us, however, on other grounds. What do we mean when we say that ideology in general has always-already interpellated as subjects individuals who are always-already subjects? Apart from the limit case of the ‘prenatal child’, this means, concretely, the following.
When religious ideology begins to function directly by interpellating the little child Louis as a subject, little Louis is already-subject – not yet religious-subject, but familial-subject. When legal ideology (later, let us suppose) begins to interpellate little Louis by talking to him about, not Mama and Papa now, or God and the Little Lord Jesus, but Justice, he was already a subject, familial, religious, scholastic, and so on. I shall skip the moral stage, aesthetic stage, and others. Finally, when, later, thanks to auto-heterobiographical circumstances of the type Popular Front, Spanish Civil War, Hitler, 1940 Defeat, captivity, encounter with a communist, and so on, political ideology (in its differential forms) begins to interpellate the now adult Louis as a subject, he has already long been, always-already been, a familial, religious, moral, scholastic and legal subject … and is now, lo and behold, a political subject! This political subject begins, once back from captivity, to make the transition from traditional Catholic activism to advanced – semi-heretical – Catholic activism, then begins reading Marx, then joins the Communist Party, and so on. So life goes. Ideologies never stop interpellating subjects as subjects, never stop ‘recruiting’ individuals who are always-already subjects. The play of ideologies is superposed, criss-crossed, contradicts itself on the same subject: the same individual always-already (several times) subject. Let him figure things out, if he can …
What will now occupy our attention is the way the ‘actors’ in this mise-en-scène of interpellation, as well as their respective roles, are reflected in the very structure of all ideology.
Since the formal structure of all ideology is always the same, we shall content ourselves with analyzing a single example familiar to everyone, that of religious ideology, with the proviso that it is extremely easy to produce the same demonstration for moral, legal, political, aesthetic and philosophical ideologies. We shall, moreover, expressly return to this demonstration once we are in a position to speak of philosophy again.
Let us therefore consider religious ideology, using an example everyone can grasp: Christian religious ideology. We shall use a rhetorical figure and ‘make this ideology speak’; in other words, we shall condense in a fictional discourse what it ‘says’, not only in its two Testaments, its theologians, and its sermons, but also in its practices and rituals, its ceremonies and sacraments. Christian religious ideology says this, more or less:
It says: I address myself to you, a human individual called Peter (every individual is called by his name, in the passive sense, it is never the individual who gives himself his own name), in order to tell you that God exists and that you are answerable to Him. It adds: it is God who is addressing you through my voice (since Scripture has collected the Word of God, tradition has transmitted it, and papal infallibility has fixed it for ever on ‘ticklish’ points, such as Mary’s virginity or … papal infallibility itself). It says: This is who you are; you are Peter! This is your origin: you were created by God from all eternity, although you were born in 1928 Anno Domini! This is your place in the world! This is what you must do! In exchange, if you observe the ‘law of love’, you will be saved, you, Peter, and will become part of the Glorious Body of Christ! And so on …
Now this is a very well-known, commonplace discourse, but, at the same time, a very surprising one. Surprising, because if we consider that religious ideology is indeed addressed to individuals27 in order to ‘transform them into subjects’, interpellating the individual, Peter, in order to make him a subject free to obey or disobey the call, that is, God’s commands; if it calls these individuals by their names, thus recognizing that they are always-already interpellated as subjects with a personal identity (so much so that Pascal’s Christ says (my word, this Pascal!): ‘It is for you that I have shed this drop of my blood!’; if it interpellates them in such a way that the subject answers, ‘Yes, it really is me!’; if it obtains from them the recognition that they really do hold the place it marks out for them in the world, a fixed abode – ‘It really is me, I am here, a worker, boss, or soldier!’ – in this vale of tears; if it obtains from them the recognition of a destination (eternal life or eternal damnation) according to the respect or contempt they show for ‘God’s Commandments’, Law become Love; – if everything really does happen this way (in the familiar practices and rituals of baptism, confirmation, communion, confession, extreme unction, and so on), we should note that this whole ‘procedure’, which stages [met en scène] Christian religious subjects, is dominated by a strange phenomenon: there can only be such a multitude of possible religious subjects on the absolute condition that there is a Unique, Absolute, Other Subject, namely, God.
Let us agree to designate this new, singular Subject by writing subject with a capital S, in what follows, to distinguish the Subject from subjects such as you and me.
It then emerges that the interpellation of individuals as subjects presupposes the ‘existence’ of a unique and central other Subject, in whose name religious ideology interpellates all individuals as subjects. All this is clearly written28 in what is called, precisely, Scripture. ‘And it came to pass at that time that the Lord God (Yahweh) spoke to Moses in the cloud. And the Lord called out to [appela] Moses, “Moses!” “It (really) is me!”, said Moses; “I am your servant Moses. Speak, and I shall listen and obey!” And the Lord spoke unto Moses and said to him, “I am That I am”.’
God thus defines Himself as the Subject par excellence, He who is through Himself and for Himself (‘I am That I am’), and He who interpellates His subject, the individual subjected to Him by His very interpellation, that is, the individual named Moses. And Moses, interpellated-called by [appelé] his name, having recognized that it ‘really’ was he who was called by God, recognizes – yes indeed! – recognizes that he is a subject, a subject of God’s, a subject subjected to God, a subject by the Subject and subjected to the Subject. The proof is that he obeys Him and makes his people obey God’s commands. And we are on the way, Ladies and Gentlemen, to the Promised Land! For God interpellates and commands, but, at the same time, promises a reward if one recognizes His existence as Big Subject and recognizes His commands, and if one obeys Him in all things. If one disobeys, He becomes the Terrible God: Beware His Holy Wrath!29
God is thus the Subject, and Moses and the countless subjects of God’s people are the Subject’s interlocutors, those He has hailed: His mirrors, His reflections. Was man not created in God’s image so that God might, with the accomplishment of his grand strategic plan of Creation-Fall-Redemption, contemplate Himself, that is, recognize Himself in him as in His Own Glory?
As all theological reflection proves, although He ‘could’ perfectly well have done without men, God needs them: the Subject needs the subjects, just as men need God, by all that’s holy, just as the subjects need the Subject. Better: God needs men, the Big Subject needs subjects, even in the frightful inversion of His image in them (when the subjects wallow in debauchery, that is, in sin).
Better: God duplicates Himself and sends His Son into the world as a simple subject ‘forsaken’ by Him (the long complaint of the Garden of Olives which ends on the Cross), subject but Subject, man but God, to accomplish that which prepares the final Redemption the Resurrection of Christ. God himself thus needs to ‘make Himself’ man, the Subject needs to become a subject, as if to show the subjects empirically, in a way the eye can see and the hand feel (see St Thomas), that, if they are subjects, subjected to the Subject, it is solely so that they may finally re-enter, on Judgement Day, the Bosom of the Lord, like Christ – that is, re-enter the Subject.30
Let us decipher this admirable necessity for the duplication of the Subject into subjects and of the Subject itself into a Subject-subject, and translate it into theoretical language.
We observe that the structure of all ideology, interpellating individuals as subjects in the name of a Unique and Absolute Subject, is speculary, in other words, a mirror-structure, and doubly speculary; and that this speculary duplication is constitutive of ideology and ensures its functioning. This means that all ideology is centred, that the Absolute Subject occupies the unique place of the Centre and interpellates around it the infinity of individuals as subjects in a double speculary relation such that it subjects the subjects to the Subject, while giving them in the Subject in which each subject can contemplate its own (present and future) image the guarantee that this really is about them and really is about Him, and that since everything takes place in the family (the Holy Family: the Family is in essence Holy), ‘God will recognize His own in it’, that is, those who have recognized God and have recognized themselves in Him, and they will be saved and sit on the right hand of God (the place of the dead in our countries, where the driver sits on the left), incorporated in the Mystical Body of Christ.
Thus the duplicate mirror-structure of ideology simultaneously ensures:
1) the interpellation of individuals as subjects;
2) the mutual recognition between subjects and Subject and among the subjects themselves, as well as the recognition of the subject by himself;31 and
3) the absolute guarantee that everything really is so: God really is God, Peter really is Peter, and, if the subjection of the subjects to the Subject is well respected, everything will go well for the subjects: they will ‘receive their reward’.
Result: caught in this triple system of subjection, universal recognition, and absolute guarantee, the subjects, unsurprisingly, ‘go’. They ‘go all by themselves’, without a cop behind them, and, as need sorts’, when it is truly impossible to deal otherwise with the ‘bad sorts’, thanks to the intermittent, carefully deliberated assistance, the intervention of the detachments specialized in repression, namely, the magistrates of the Inquisition or, when it is a question of ideologies other than religious ideology, of other specialized magistrates and police officials.32 The subjects ‘go’: they recognize that ‘it’s really true’, that ‘this is the way it is’, not some other way, that they have to obey God, the priest, De Gaulle, the boss, the engineer, and love their neighbour, and so on. The subjects go, since they have recognized that ‘all is well’ (the way it is), and they say, for good measure: So be it!
That is the proof that this is not really the way it is, but that that is the way it has to be, so that things are what they should be, and – let us come out with it – so that the reproduction of the relations of production is ensured, every day, every second, in the ‘consciousness’, that is, the material behaviour of the individuals holding the posts that the social and technical division of labour assigns them in production, exploitation, repression, ideologization and scientific practice.
We know that, in capitalist social formations, religious ideology (which exists in the religious Ideological State Apparatus) no longer plays the same role that it did in social formations based on ‘serfdom’. Other ideological apparatuses play a more important role in them. Their convergent effect always has the same ‘objective’: the daily, uninterrupted reproduction of the relations of production in the ‘consciousness’, that is, the material comportment of the agents of the various functions of capitalist social production. But what we have said about the functioning and structure of religious ideology holds for all other ideologies as well. In morality, the speculary relation is that of the Subject (Duty) and the subjects (moral consciousnesses/consciences); in legal ideology, the speculary relation is that of the Subject (Justice) and the subjects (men who are free and equal); in political ideology, the speculary relation is that of the Subject (variable: the Fatherland, the National or General Interest, Progress, the Revolution) and the subjects (the members of the organization, the voters, the militants, and so on).
Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist political ideology is of course distinguished by the fact, without historical precedent, that it is an ideology which has been heavily ‘reworked’, and thus transformed, by a science, the Marxist science of history, social formations, the class struggle and revolution. This ‘distorts’ the speculary structure of ideology without doing away with it altogether (‘no saviour from on high … no prince or peer’, says the Internationale, and, consequently, no subjected subjects! …). In this way, the Internationale seeks to ‘de-centre’ political ideology itself. To what extent is that possible, or, rather, since it is relatively possible, within what limits has it proven possible so far? That is another question.33 Whatever the truth of the matter, and within the limits set by the resistance to attempts to de-centre, that is, to de-specularize Marxist-Leninist mass political ideology, we will find the same structure in all ideologies, and the same principles of functioning. It would be easy to show this.
Since we have, in passing, already let the phrase slip, let us turn back to the question that is surely on the tip of everyone’s tongue. What is really, concretely in question in this mechanism of the speculary recognition of the Subject and the subjects, and in the guarantee given to the subjects by the Subject on condition that they accept their subjection to the ‘commands’ of the Subject? The reality in question in this mechanism, the reality that is miscognized in the very forms of recognition, which is thus necessarily miscognition, is, in the final analysis, the reproduction of the relations of production and the other relations deriving from them.
It remains to show, using a few concrete examples, how this whole extraordinary (and simple) machinery functions in its actual, concrete complexity.
Why ‘simple’? Because the principle of the ideology effect is simple: recognition, subjection, guarantee – the whole centred on subjection. Ideology makes individuals who are always-already subjects (that is, you and me) ‘go’.
Why ‘complex’? Because each subject (you and I) is subjected to several ideologies that are relatively independent, albeit unified under the unity of the State Ideology. For there exist, as we have seen, several Ideological State Apparatuses. Hence each subject (you and I) lives in and under several ideologies at once. Their subjection-effects are ‘combined’ in each subject’s own acts, which are inscribed in practices, regulated by rituals, and so on.
This ‘combination’ does not go all by itself. Hence what is called a ‘conflict of duties’ in the marvellous terminology of our official philosophy. How are familial, moral, religious, political, or other duties to be reconciled when ‘certain’ circumstances present themselves? One has to make a choice and, even when one does not choose (consciously, after the ‘crisis of conscience’ that is one of the sacred rituals to be observed in such cases), the choice makes itself. Thus, in 1940, after France’s strange defeat in the ‘phoney war’, De Gaulle made a choice and Pétain did, too. Frenchmen who had neither an aristocratic surname like De Gaulle’s nor his means of transport also made a ‘choice’ – to remain in France and fight there as best they could, in the shadows, with makeshift weapons that they had wrested from the Germans, before proceeding to form armed resistance groups.
There exist other ‘conflicts of duties’ and other choices that, albeit less spectacular, are quite as dramatic. To take just one simple example, the Catholic Church (not God the Father) has for several years now been forcing Christian couples to bear the very heavy cross of a conflict between familial ideology and religious ideology. The object of the conflict is the ‘pill’. I leave it to the reader’s imagination and experience to reconstruct other ‘cases of conscience’, that is to say, other instances of objective grating and grinding between different ideological apparatuses: for example, cases of conscience involving jurists, magistrates, or other civil servants who find themselves torn between the orders they receive (or the objective functions they assume in the state apparatus) and their ideology, whether moral (Justice) or political (Progress and the Revolution). No one is invulnerable to such ‘cases of conscience’, not even certain police officials.
Let us leave this point there – it would be easy to expatiate on it – and return to our general thesis in order to show in what sense and why one can say that every social formation ‘functions on ideology’, in the sense in which one says that a gasoline engine ‘runs on gasoline’.
We noted in passing, in connection with ‘law’, that law’s basic function was less to ensure the reproduction of the relations of production than to regulate and control the very functioning of production (and of the apparatuses ensuring the reproduction of the relations of production). We can now grasp something else, for we have taken note of the fact that, because law can run only on legal-moral ideology, it helps ensure, while also regulating the functioning of the relations of production, the uninterrupted reproduction of the relations of production in the ‘consciousness’ of each subject (each agent of production, of exploitation, and so on) by means of its legal ideology.
We can now say the following. It is characteristic of the Ideological State Apparatuses that they form part of the superstructure and, as such, ensure the reproduction of the relations of production behind the protective shield of the Repressive State Apparatus and the possibility of resorting to it. However, since they ensure the reproduction of the relations of production in the ‘consciousness’ of subjects who are agents of production, agents of exploitation, and so on, we have to add that this reproduction of the relations of production by the Ideological State Apparatuses and their ideological effects on subjects (the agents of production and so on) is ensured in the functioning of the relations of production themselves.
In other words, the externality of the superstructure with respect to the base – a thesis that is justified in principle, a thesis without which nothing in the structure or functioning of a mode of production or social formation would be intelligible – is an externality exercised, in large measure, in the form of interiority. I mean by that, very precisely, that ideologies such as religious ideology, moral ideology, legal ideology, and even political ideology (aesthetic ideology, too: think of the craftsmen, artists, and all the others who need to consider themselves ‘creators’ in their work) ensure the reproduction of the relations of production (in their capacity as Ideological State Apparatuses forming part of the superstructure) at the heart of the functioning of the relations of production, which they help to ‘make go all by themselves’.
In contrast, the Repressive State Apparatus does not intervene in the same way in the very functioning of the relations of production. Except when there is a general strike in local transport and military vehicles ensure ‘public transport’ as best they can, at least in the greater Paris region, neither the army nor the police nor even the administration as a whole intervenes directly in the functioning of the relations of production, in production, or in the Ideological State Apparatuses. There exist well-known limit cases, in which the police, the riot police, and even the army are used to ‘quash’ the working class, but that happens when it is on strike and thus when production has ceased. Production, however, has its own agents of internal repression (factory directors and all their underlings, from supervisory personnel to foremen, as well as most ‘engineers’ and even upper-level technicians, whatever they may think and whatever others think), whose existence becomes comprehensible once we have understood that there is no purely technical division of labour, but a social-technical division – once we have understood, in other words, that what is determinant in the unity between productive forces/relations of production (which forms the base that determines, in the last instance, what happens in the superstructure) is not the productive forces, but, within limits set by the existing productive forces, the relations of production.34
However, this social-technical division of labour in production (and a fortiori in other spheres, including the division of labour in the state apparatuses) itself runs on ideology, legal-moral ideology above all, but also, secondarily, religious, political, aesthetic and philosophical ideology. This shows us – clearly, if I may say so – the extreme simplicity and, at the same time, extreme complexity of the way production and the other spheres of activity of a social formation function. This also shows us that it is imperative to rectify our old ‘topographical’ representation of the relations between superstructure and base once again.
The base is dominated by the relations of production. The relations of production function (on the basis, of course, of material labour processes that produce objects of social utility as commodities) simultaneously as relations of production (thus making possible the interplay of the labour processes) and relations of exploitation. This functioning of the relations of production is ensured
1) by agents of exploitation and of the repression internal to the productive process itself, not external to it: the functions of surveillance-control-repression in the process of production are performed by, not policemen or soldiers, but agents of the productive process themselves (factory directors and all those under their orders, from supervisory personnel down to foremen, as well as most ‘engineers’ and upper-level technicians). This personnel can deploy all the ‘tact’ imaginable in exercising its functions, and all the ‘avant-garde’ techniques of public relations or human relations,35 of, that is, psychology and social psychology, accompanied by all the scruples and ‘ethical’ considerations one likes, including their own crises of conscience and raised consciousness [crises et prises de conscience] which, in certain cases, can make it lean towards the proletarian camp, if not go over to it. This personnel nonetheless belongs, objectively, to the repressive personnel internal to the functioning of the relations of production;
2) by the interplay of the effects of the various ideologies, first and foremost legal-moral ideology. The result to which this leads is that, in the vast majority of cases, ‘everyone does his duty’ at his post, including proletarians at theirs, out of a conscientious sense of ‘professional pride’ in work well done, including proletarians when they do their (bourgeois) ‘political duty’ as proletarians, accepting the bourgeois legal-moral ideology that has it that their wages represent ‘the value of their labour’ and the bourgeois technological ideology that has it that ‘after all, there have to be directors, engineers, foremen, and so on to make things work’, and the whole song and dance.
In production, the functioning of the relations of production is ensured by a combination of repression and ideology in which ideology plays the dominant role.
The whole superstructure is arrayed around the state. It includes the state apparatuses, which are at the service of the representatives of the class (or classes) in power: the repressive apparatus and the Ideological State Apparatuses. The basic role of the superstructure, hence of all the state apparatuses, is to ensure the perpetuation of the exploitation of proletarians and other wage-workers, that is, to ensure the perpetuation, hence the reproduction, of the relations of production, which are simultaneously relations of exploitation.
The Repressive State Apparatus fulfils several functions. One part of it (the detachment whose special task is to apply the sanctions decreed by the juridical state apparatus) is responsible for preventing infractions, apprehending offenders, and applying material sanctions after judgements that a legal offence has been committed. The general function of this part of the repressive apparatus plus the units specialized in violent class struggle (the riot police and so on) plus the army is to provide a material political guarantee of the conditions that the Ideological State Apparatuses require in order to function.
Thus it is the Ideological State Apparatuses which assume the basic function of reproducing the relations of production – and the relations deriving from them (including those obtaining among their own ‘personnel’, since it, too, must be reproduced). But we have just seen that this function, although it goes well beyond the one purely internal to the normal operation of the interplay of the relations of production, is also exercised there. We have seen that ‘law’ is an Ideological State Apparatus specialized, above all, in guaranteeing the functioning of the relations of production. Now it is apparent that we have to broaden this proposition and say that the other Ideological State Apparatuses ensure the reproduction of the relations of production only on condition that they simultaneously ensure, as one aspect of their own intervention, the interplay of the relations of production themselves.
From this it follows that the knotting together of superstructure and base, which is not general and vague but extremely precise, is accomplished above all by the Ideological State Apparatuses, which figure in the superstructure only to the extent that most of their ‘activity’ is accomplished in the interplay of the relations of production themselves in order to ensure the reproduction of the relations of production.
This new stipulation does not call anything of what the topography shows us into question: namely, the determination in the last instance of the superstructure by the base. Quite the contrary: this crucial principle is not merely preserved but even reinforced by our analyses. On the other hand, we gain something by moving from a theory that was still too descriptive to a more ‘theoretical’ theory. The latter brings out the precise complexity of the intrication of superstructure and base by means of the interplay of the Ideological State Apparatuses, as well as the fact that they ensure the reproduction of the relations of production largely by ensuring the interplay of the relations of production themselves.
Need we add – so as not to remain at the level of concepts which, albeit precise, remain abstract – that all this can be empirically confirmed in the daily lives of individual subjects, whatever their posts in the social-technical ‘division of labour’ (production), the social division of labour tout court (exploitation, repression, ideologization), or the scientific division of labour?
Concretely, this means, to give just a few examples that any reader can multiply at will, that:
1) Proletarians would not work if they were not forced to by ‘necessity’, but, as well, if they were not subjected to work by legal ideology (‘of course I have to work in exchange for my wage’); by a moral-economic ideology of work (consider René Clair’s veridical mockery: ‘work is obligatory because work is freedom’); or, in the case of ‘backward’ proletarians, by a religious ideology of work (we must suffer to merit salvation; Christ was a worker; the ‘community’ of labour prefigures the ‘community’ of spirit), and so on.
2) Capitalists would cease to be capitalists if their ‘needs’ and, above all, competition (in the final analysis, the competition between capitals confronting each other on the basis of the average rate of profit) did not force them to carry on, but, as well, if they were not sustained by their notion of themselves, shaped by a solid legal and moral ideology of property, profit and the benefits that they themselves bestow on their workers thanks to their capital (‘I invest my money, do I not? I risk it, do I not? Surely I must have something in return: profit. What’s more, there has to be a boss to tell workers what to do. And what would they live on if it weren’t for me?’).
3) A civil servant working for the Ministry of Finance, a primary schoolteacher, a secondary school or college teacher, a researcher, a psychologist, a priest, an army officer, a state minister, the head of state himself, a good family man, a mother, a student, and so on and so forth … (the reader may provide an illustration for each category.)
To take an example of a different kind and observe the way the effects of different ideologies combine, reinforce one another, coexist, or contradict one another, let us observe what goes on in a few practical rituals of a worker. (Be it recalled that ideology ultimately exists in these rituals as well as well as in the acts that they determine in the practices in which they figure.)
Let us consider only the rituals of hiring or, still more simply, the ritual of leaving a factory at the end of the day. (What follows is a faithful transcription of a conversation with a comrade who is a lathe operator in a Citroën factory.)
The proletarian, when his workday is over (the moment he has been waiting for since morning), drops everything, without further ado, when the whistle blows, and heads for the lavatories and lockers. He washes up, changes his clothes, combs his hair, and becomes another man: the one who is going to join the wife and children at home. Once he gets home, he is in a completely different world that has nothing to do with the hell of the factory and its production rhythms. At the same time, however, he finds himself caught up in another ritual, the ritual of the practices and acts (free and voluntary, of course) of familial ideology: his relations with his wife, the kids, neighbours, parents, friends – and on Sundays, still other rituals, those of his fantasies or favourite pastimes (likewise free and voluntary): the weekend in the forest of Fontainebleau or (in a few cases) his little garden in the suburbs, and sport, the telly, radio, God knows what; and then holidays, with still other rituals (fishing, camping, Tourism and Work, People and Culture,36 God knows what).
Caught up in these other ‘systems’, my comrade added, how could he be expected not to become someone other than the man he is at the factory – for example, someone altogether different from the union militant or CGT member37 he is? This other ‘system’ is, for example (this is very often the case), the ritual of the petty-bourgeois ideology of the family. Might that mean that this proletarian, ‘conscious and organized’ when he attends union meetings with his fellow workers, is caught up in another, petty-bourgeois ideological system once he gets back home? Why not? Such things happen. And that would explain a great deal. All the fuss with the kids, who have problems at school, naturally; and even some very odd political goings-on, of the sort that can culminate in certain ‘unexpected’ electoral results. For everyone knows how it is when you vote. You happen to hear De Gaulle on the TV or radio (the old fox sounded the nationalist theme and the reconciliation of the whole French people, the Greatness of France and all the accompanying tralala). You go to vote with the family on Sunday and stuff an anonymous ballot in the ballot-box when you come out of the voting booth. No one sees, no one knows how you vote. It takes only a moment of conformist vertigo to succumb to petty-bourgeois electoral political ideology, nationalist, above all – and so you vote for De Gaulle. Yet the union had declared that you should not vote for De Gaulle. The day after, it is a safe bet that there will be an article by Jacques Fauvet38 (this, too, is a ritual) in Le Monde about the law of the ‘pendulum’ that governs electoral results.
Obviously. The next day, however, the proletarian goes back to his factory and sees his buddies again. Thank God, they didn’t all react the way he did. But it’s hard to be a union militant and even harder to be a revolutionary militant all your life. Above all when ‘nothing is happening’.
When nothing is happening, the Ideological State Apparatuses have worked to perfection. When they no longer manage to function, to reproduce the relations of production in the ‘consciousness’ of all subjects, ‘events’ happen, as the phrase goes, more or less serious events, as in May, the commencement of a first dress rehearsal. With, at the end, some day or the other, after a long march, the revolution. By way of a provisional conclusion
I shall end here, at the close of volume 1, the analysis I have undertaken.
I shall pursue it in a second volume that will appear later.
In the second volume, I shall examine the following questions in the order indicated:
1) social classes
2) the class struggle
3) ideologies
4) ‘sciences’
5) philosophy
6) the proletarian class standpoint in philosophy
7) revolutionary philosophical intervention in scientific practice and in the practice of the proletarian class struggle.
In this way, we will come back to the ‘subject’ from which we set out – philosophy – and will be able to answer our initial question: What is Marxist-Leninist philosophy? By the time we do, however, our initial question will have been ‘slightly’ modified.
1 Mignet, Augustin Thierry, Guizot and Thiers themselves. During the Restoration, these ideologues/historians depicted the history of the class struggle of the French Revolution: the struggle of the ‘Third Estate’ against the two other Estates (the Nobility, the Church) of the ‘Ancien Régime’. Let us add that the notion of class struggle was present well before these historians and even well before the French Revolution. To restrict ourselves to the period of the French bourgeoisie’s pre-revolutionary ideological class struggle: class struggle was explicitly thought, from the sixteenth century on, by the ideologues of the feudality and bourgeoisie alike, in the form of a so-called struggle between races, in connection with the central ideological polemic over the ‘origins’ of absolute monarchy: a struggle between the race of the Germans and the race of the Romans. The Germanists defended ‘classic’ forms of feudality against the ‘Despotism’ of the absolute monarchy, which was allied with the bourgeois commoners [roturiers]. They cultivated the myth of a ‘democracy’ of the classic feudality, in which the King had been a simple lord elected by his peers in a democratic assembly, against the pernicious influence of the Roman conquerors, who imposed the model of a Prince ruling by despotic divine right. They then wrote the ‘history’ of the ‘Middle Ages’ in line with this schema. Montesquieu was the most illustrious representative of this thesis (see the last chapters of Spirit of Laws). For their part, the Romanists (such as the Abbé Dubois) defended the opposite thesis: against feudal anarchy, the absolute monarchy, supported by the Legists who invoked and commented on Roman Law, and relying on the devotion of bourgeois ‘commoners’ to the cause of the nation, had succeeded in bringing order, justice and reason to social relations. The Roman conquest of Gaul, a reactionary catastrophe for the Germanists, became, for the Romanists, an emancipatory enterprise. Let us note the singular destinies of these theses, which, albeit products of the exalted historical imagination, had, like all ideological theses, concrete objectives: when the balance of power began to tip for good, that is, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, it proved possible for certain ideologues, struggling, from the left this time, against the absolute monarchy’s despotism, to wrest the Germanists’ ‘democratic’ demands from their original advocates. Mably, for example, a left Germanist, used the very same arguments employed by Montesquieu, a right Germanist … Here we may discern a true recognition of class struggle as the motor of history, in the ideological disguise of race struggle (Germans versus Romans or the other way round); the explicit object of this ideological polemic (the absolute monarchy); the real object of this ideological struggle (the rise of the bourgeoisie and its struggle against the feudal aristocracy, on the basis of an alliance between bourgeoisie and absolute monarchy – but within the limits of the dominant feudal relations of production). We may also point out that this ideological struggle around the absolute monarchy, Roman Law, the struggle of the races, etc., is contemporaneous with the earliest existing theories of ideology: first among them, that of Hobbes, well known, and that of Spinoza, completely unknown, and then all the theories of ideology with which eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy teems, as one knows or, rather, does not care to know. We may also point out (we will come back to this when we discuss philosophy again) that the emergence of ‘modern’, that is, bourgeois philosophy, inaugurated by Descartes, is unthinkable without the prelude of the ‘Revival of Roman Law’ in its mercantile and political forms.
2 [TN: The word of Marx’s that Althusser here translates as ‘ideology’ is Gedanken, usually translated as ‘thoughts’ or ‘ideas’.]
3 If I may be allowed a personal confession, several years after I had laboriously produced a definition of the function of ideology as recognition/miscognition [reconnaissance, méconnaissance], a formula which takes up terms that Lacan, as a good Freudian, applies to the unconscious, I ‘discovered’ that the formula figures verbatim in The German Ideology. [TN: Marx’s words are Erkennung and Verkennung.]
4 This is the proof, be it noted in passing, that Marx was of the opinion that The German Ideology – which the vast majority of Marxists take for good coin, citing it copiously to prove their ‘theories’ – stood in need of a good critique, but that this critique was one within the capacity of … mice. Alas, how many Marxist men have done what mice could do?
5 [TN: Written above the word ‘hazard’ in the manuscript are the words ‘expose-confess’.]
6 [TN: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, trans. anon., New York, Prometheus Books, 1998, p. 42: ‘Morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology and all the forms of consciousness corresponding to these thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history …’.]
7 One day we shall have to find another, positive term to name the reality that Freud designates negatively as the unconscious. In that positive term, all connection, even negative, with ‘consciousness’ should disappear.
8 The anti-socialist theme of the ‘Grand Inquisitor’ goes back to Dostoyevsky. Since then: Koestler, The Twenty-Fifth Hour, and so on.
9 [TN: Fait marcher. See Chapter 2, n. 27.]
10 Provisionally, we are told … but this provisional situation is sure to last, because, inasmuch as the basic conception on which this whole interpretation rests is wrong, and inasmuch as the mass of the workers will not ‘fall for it’ [ne marcheront pas], since they know that the basis of bourgeois society is not repression but exploitation, the above-mentioned provisional ‘leaders’ will, if they do not wish to abandon their error, have to persist in it – to persist, that is, in their leadership.
11 [TN: ‘Old Mole’ (Vieille Taupe) was the name of a Paris bookshop popular with anarchists and gauchistes in the late 1960s and early 1970s.]
12 Ideological, not scientific: a distinction our ‘theorists’ deem outmoded. They prefer to talk about ‘knowledge’ as such, as if there were not true and false knowledge, ideology and science. The proletarians who are thirsting for true knowledge know that it is not repressive; they know that, when this true knowledge is that of Marxist-Leninist science, it is revolutionary and emancipatory.
13 This educational activity, which transforms spontaneous proletarian ideology into proletarian ideology with ever more distinctly scientific Marxist-Leninist contents, has historically been carried out in complex forms. It includes education in the current sense of the word, through books, brochures, schools and, in general, propaganda, but, above all, through education at the heart of the practice of the class struggle itself: through experience/experiment, criticism of it, rectification of it, and so on.
14 I purposely employ this very modern term. For, even in communist circles, it is unfortunately routine to explain this or that political deviation (left or right), [sectarianism]/ opportunism, as the result of the activity of a ‘clique’. [TN: The designation for left deviationism has been supplied by the editor. There is a blank space here in the manuscript.]
15 [TN: Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 250 (Brunschvig edition).]
16 Under what conditions? Essentially, they depend on the class struggle, as we shall see in Volume 2. [TN: In fact, the project to produce a second volume was never realized.]
17 [TN: The verb interpeller and the corresponding noun are common words in French. In addition to the senses Althusser mentions – hailing to get someone’s attention and, not infrequently, as a prelude to harassment such as disciplinary measures in school or police identity checks – interpeller is often used in conversation to mean ‘to shake up’, ‘to really get to’: ‘Her report on our army’s reliance on torture really got to me (m’a interpellé)’.]
18 Which borrows the legal category of the ‘subject of law’ and transforms it into an ideological notion: man is by nature a subject.
19 [TN: See Chapter 6, n. 26.]
20 [TN: Acts 17:28, King James Bible.]
21 ‘Linguists’ and those who, call poor suffering linguistics to the rescue to different ends run up against problems due to the fact that they ignore the play of ideological effects in all discourses – even scientific discourses.
22 [TN: Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations I, Paris, Gallimard, 1947, p. 235; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, 2nd edn., London, Routledge, 2002, p. xvii.
23 Note that this recurrent currently is further proof of the fact that ideology is ‘eternal’, since these two ‘currentlys’ are separated by an undefined interval: I am writing these lines on 6 April 1969, you may be reading them any time.
24 Hailing as an everyday practice governed by a precise ritual takes spectacular form in the police practice of hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ (It functions in very similar forms in interpellating or summoning at school.) Police hailing, however, unlike other kinds of hailing, is repressive: ‘Your papers!’ ‘Papers’ means above all identity papers, frontal photo of one’s face, first and middle names, last name, date of birth, home address, profession, citizenship, etc. Identity, concentrated in first and last names, and so on, makes it possible to identify the subject (presumed in police hailing to be more or less suspect; initially presumed, that is, to be a ‘bad sort’), thus to identify him without confusing him with another subject, and either ‘let him go’ (‘It’s all right’) or ‘take him in’ (‘Follow me!’), with consequences familiar to all who have been ‘taken in’ at a popular demonstration: a shift to casual forms of address or a casual beating, a night at the police station, and the whole terribly material ritual that ensues when a policeman recognizes a ‘bad sort’ [mauvais sujet]: ‘He’s the one who punched me!’ with the corresponding formal accusation for ‘attempted violence against a law enforcement official’ or other such descriptions. To be sure, there are also thieves and criminals, and policemen who ‘do not care for certain practices’.
25 We have already said that, in a certain regard [rapport], the family is an Ideological State Apparatus.
26 Think of the dramas that ensue when one child is substituted for another in a maternity ward, or the dramas of ‘recognition’ of paternity, or the dramas of children put in the custody of their mothers, wrested from their fathers, and so on, and of all the horrors they spawn.
27 Although we know that the individual is always already a subject (if only of familial ideology), we shall continue to use this term, convenient because of the contrasting effect it produces.
28 I am quoting in a combined way, not literally, but ‘in spirit and truth’.
29 [TN: ‘Thou art terrible, and who shall resist thee? from that time thy wrath’, Psalms 75:8, Douay-Rheims Bible.]
30 The dogma of the Trinity is precisely the theory of the duplication of the Subject (the Father) into a subject (the Son) and their speculary relation (the Holy Ghost).
31 As a ‘theorist’ of Universal Recognition, Hegel is an admirable, albeit partial, ‘theorist’ of ideology. The same holds for Feuerbach as a ‘theorist’ of the speculary relation. There is no theorist of the guarantee. We shall come back to this.
32 [Louis Hubert Gonzalves] Lyautey has stated the golden rule of repression: ‘show your strength so as not to have to use it’. The formulation can be improved: ‘do not show your strength so as to use it without having to use it …’, and so on.
33 Consider the ideology of the ‘personality cult’, established on, among other things, survivals of the Czarist ideology (with religious overtones) of the ‘Little Father of the Peoples’. The ideology that is currently being elaborated in the Western Communist Parties tends to maintain that these parties have not, for their part, practiced the ideology of the ‘personality cult’, not at all (PCI) or only in the case of one unfortunate expression, ‘the Party of Maurice Thorez’ (PCF). The ideology of the ‘critique of the personality cult’ is still an ideology and therefore has, notwithstanding its attempts at ‘de-centring’ or … denegation, a centre somewhere. Where? Since the ‘events’ in Czechoslovakia, this ‘centre’ is rather hard to identify: it is too military, something political ideology does not like. If, on the other hand, readers are prepared to examine Togliatti’s term of the ‘polycentrism’ of the international workers’ movement in the light of our analyses, or the phrase ‘there is no longer any leading socialist country’, or even the absence, since the dissolution of the Third International, of any International at all, or, finally, the current split in the international communist movement, they will discover in them varied examples of ‘decentralization’ at work, examples that are, to be honest, oddly heterogeneous and not always ‘reworked’ or ‘monitored’ by Marxist-Leninist science. Yet the day will come when the reunification of the international communist movement is ensured in forms ensuring as much ‘de-centring’ as possible. Pazienza.
34 This thesis will be demonstrated elsewhere. [TN: See Appendix 1.]
35 [TN: In English in the original.]
36 [TN: ‘Tourisme et travail’ and ‘Peuple et culture’ were created in the 1940s by communists and others active in the Resistance, the latter to provide workers and peasants access to knowledge and culture in their free time, the former to provide workers affordable holidays while promoting their ‘fraternity’ and access to culture. In the 1960s, ‘Peuple et culture’ concentrated on renting workers cheap holiday cottages in touristy areas.]
37 [TN: See Chapter 7, n. 2.]
38 [TN: In 1969, Jacques Fauvet was elected editor of the leading French newspaper Le Monde, which, under his lead, became more favourable to the Left represented by the PCF and the Socialist Party.]