From film theory to post-theory -- Sublime objects of cinema -- Class struggle in film studies -- Interlude: the pervert and the analyst -- Cinema, ideology, and form -- Enjoyment in the cinema -- Conclusion: theory as realism set in drive.

This article examines Slavoj Žižek’s overall approach to the critique of ideology. His Hegelian-Lacanian approach to ideology criticism is addressed by looking at the historical shift from the problem of post-ideology to that of post-Truth. In the process, this article explains simply Žižek’s brand of ideology criticism.

Communism as our new common sense master code arises in Jameson and Žižek’s recent projects, from Žižek’s volumes on The Idea of Communism, to Jameson’s essay “An American Utopia”. What they both continue to demonstrate is that in the face of the absolute foreclosure of the signifier, the deadlocks of capitalist exploitation, as well as its own inherent internal contradictions, can only go on and transform into absolute excess. As Žižek has put it, “when people tell me that nothing can (...) be changed [my response is] – no it can, because things are already changing like crazy. And what we should say is just this: if we let things change the way they are changing automatically we are approaching a kind of new perverse, permissively authoritarian society, which will be authoritarian but in a new way”. (shrink)

This article investigates the work of Žižek and Ernesto Laclau on the topic of Emancipatory politics. Although the positions of each on this topic has recently been criticized by the other, the aim here is to locate the elements that can allow both positions to converge for the purpose of conducting ideological critique of the logic of emancipation and the necessity of utopia. In focusing on this debate, the opposition between populism and class struggle is considered, as well as notions (...) of the universal and the particular as they relate to emancipatory politics and the critique of ideology and hegemony. Finally, the use of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory is assessed in the work of both Laclau and Žižek as a way of positioning historical-political understandings of emancipation and utopia. (shrink)