Ideology Critique or Discourse Analysis?
| Author | Fabio Vighi,Heiko Feldner |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885107074347 |
| Published date | 01 April 2007 |
| Date | 01 April 2007 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Ideology Critique or Discourse
EJPT
Analysis?
European Journal
v
Zizvek against Foucault
of Political Theory
© SAGE Publications Ltd,
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi
Fabio Vighi University of Cardiff
issn 1474-8851, 6(2) 141–159
[DOI: 10.1177/1474885107074347]
Heiko Feldner University of Cardiff
a b s t r a c t : The following article examines the theoretical foundations and practical
consequences of Slavoj Zizek’s critique of Foucauldian discourse analysis. It does so
by uncovering Zizek’s idiosyncratic approach to the question of ideology critique.
The aim of our investigation is twofold. First, we attempt to demonstrate the
implications of Foucault’s failure to theorize the generative principle of sociosymbolic
formations; second, we argue that by conceiving the Real of class antagonism as the
disavowed core of ideological fantasy, Zizek rectifies Foucault’s inconsistency while
simultaneously opening up a vital political space for the reconceptualization of the
paradigm of ideology critique. Our article does not attempt to bring into dialogue
Foucault’s theory of discourse with Zizek’s theory of ideology; rather, it stages an
encounter between the two. The encounter involves a contrastive comparison, the
tertium comparationis of which is the problematic of how Foucault’s and Zizek’s
respective frameworks may help us conceptualize political change. Against this
background and criterion it is possible to establish where and why their social theories
differ, and to assess the extent to which Zizek’s theoretical choices are preferable to
Foucault’s.
k e y w o r d s : class, discourse, enjoyment, Foucault, ideology, Lacan, power, psychoanalysis,
Real, Zizek
The concept of discourse is arguably Michel Foucault’s best-received contribu-
tion to the humanities and social sciences. Only six years after his death in 1984,
the anthropologists Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine Lutz observed that
‘(d)iscourse has become . . . one of the most popular . . . terms in the vocabulary
of Anglo-American academics’.1 Fifteen years on, Foucauldian discourse analyses
are at home in practically all fields of critical inquiry. Their ubiquity coincides
with the belief, fostered by Foucault himself, that they provide compelling alter-
natives to the Marxist paradigm of ideology critique as well as to psychoanalytic
accounts of subjectivation. It is precisely here that Zizek begs to differ.
Contact address: Fabio Vighi and Heiko Feldner, University of Cardiff, School of
European Studies, 65–68 Park Place, Cardiff, CF10 3YQ, UK.
Email: vighif@cardiff.ac.uk; Feldnerhm@cardiff.ac.uk
141
European Journal of Political Theory 6(2)
Taking the customary degree of leftist Foucault-critique to new heights, Zizek
brands Foucault ‘a perverse philosopher’, or an ‘anti-dialectician par excellence’
who ‘liked to present himself as a detached positivist’ and lacked ‘the appropriate
notion of the subject’.2 Zizek identifies as the ‘fatal weakness of Foucault’s
theory’ his ‘abandoning of the problematic of ideology’.3 This is compounded by
the fact that the now pandemic repudiation of ideology critique has lent legiti-
macy to an intellectual attitude which ‘translates antagonism into difference’ and
extols the ‘horizontal logic [of] mutual recognition among different identities’
without due attention to the antagonistic nature of existing power relations and
the ‘peculiar logic of class struggle’.4 Against this overwhelming trend towards the
depoliticization of social life in the name of identity politics and a number of
theories of globalization, Zizek emphasizes the undiminished importance of
‘keep[ing] the critique of ideology alive’.5
This article examines the validity and usefulness of Zizek’s critique of
Foucauldian discourse analysis by exploring Zizek’s distinctive approach to the
complex question of ideology. The aim of our investigation is twofold. First, we
expose the theoretical and political implications of Foucault’s failure to theorize
the generative principle of sociosymbolic formations; second, we demonstrate
how by conceiving the Real of class antagonism as the disavowed core of ideologi-
cal fantasy, Zizek effectively rectifies Foucault’s fundamental inconsistency and,
simultaneously, opens up a vital political space for the reconceptualization of a
given ideological context.
Paraphrasing Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, our argument can be summarized
as follows: although Foucault conceives of social reality as ‘sensuous human activ-
ity, practice’, he does not conceive it ‘subjectively’, for in construing reality ‘in the
form of the object of contemplation’ he shares the ‘chief defect of all hitherto
existing [metaphysical] materialism’.6 Put another way, by unmasking reality as a
historically contingent symbolic fiction, Foucauldian criticism has only decon-
structed the world in various ways; the point, however, is ‘to recognize the Real in
what appears to be mere symbolic fiction’, and to change it.7
Foucault’s Alternative to Ideology Critique
It is worth recalling how the current Foucault euphoria among critical intel-
lectuals originated. As summed up by Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, two of the
most prominent Foucauldians today:
Foucault ‘rendered visible’ certain aspects of our experience in profoundly new ways for a
whole generation of thinkers. Prisons, schools, and asylums now appeared as less than
obvious responses to the need of crime control, the treatment of mental illness, or the
requirements of mass education . . . The belief that our psyche and our desires lie at the
very heart of our existence as experiencing human creatures now turned out to be, not a
foundational point that can ground and justify our demands for emancipation, but the
fulcrum of a more profound subjectification.8
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Vighi & Feldner: Ideology Critique or Discourse Analysis?
While historians like Roy Porter were sceptical about the empirical validity of
Foucauldian thought, a number of critical theorists were immediately fascinated
by Foucault.9 The beguiling force of his ventures did not emanate primarily from
their empirical outcome but from the particular way in which he approached and
developed his themes. From archaeology and genealogy through to his studies of
governmentality and ethics, what proved most compelling was the way in which
he rearranged traditional lines of reasoning and turned blind alleys of research
into intriguing problématiques. The following excerpts from volume 1 of The
History of Sexuality illustrate this attitude perfectly:
[M]y aim is to examine the case of a society which has been loudly castigating itself for its
hypocrisy for more than a century, which speaks verbosely of its own silence, takes great
pains to relate in detail the things it does not say, denounces the powers it exercises, and
promises to liberate itself from the very laws that have made it function.10
The departure from the methodical pursuit of common sense could hardly have
been more radical:
The central issue, then . . . is . . . to account for the fact that it [sex] is spoken about, to
discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the
institutions which prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the
things that are said.11
Methodological instructions like these from the often-quoted passage on Victorian
repressed sex have long since been adapted and put to good use in a wide range of
fields. It was, of course, not only the discourses of commonsensical empiricism and
Whiggish progressivism which were meant to be disrupted by Foucauldian dis-
course analyses; nor were humanist accounts of the history of the sciences in them-
selves, or the hermeneutic project of uncovering authentic meanings of texts as
such, the strategic targets of Foucault’s critique. His criticism was levelled above all
at Marxism and, increasingly, psychoanalysis insofar as they (1) championed reduc-
tionist and juridical conceptions of power (economism, repression); (2) seemed to
adhere to humanist precepts, thus not sharing Foucault’s prophecy that, soon, the
modern subject (‘man’) ‘would be erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge
of the sea’;12 and (3) appeared to identify power effects with the distortion of truth
(false-consciousness and privileged-viewpoint theories).13 The term that was
meant to (and did most effectively) function as both a conceptual roadblock and an
analytical catalyst was ‘discourse’. In the course of the 1980s two of the key con-
cepts of critical theory, ideology and culture, were indeed superseded by this rather
indistinct term, which implicitly reflected intellectual/political needs that reached
far beyond the compounds of academia. What, though, did the concept of dis-
course offer that transformed it into a kind of ‘master signifier’, whilst also elevat-
ing Foucauldian discourse analysis into a privileged paradigm? There was a whole
range of circumstances which, from the early 1970s, lent the Foucauldian paradigm
of discourse analysis a competitive edge over ‘ideology’ and ‘culture’.14 The
following aspects are of particular relevance to our investigation.
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European Journal of Political Theory 6(2)
To begin with, Althusserian Marxism and structuralist anthropology, both
highly influential in the 1960s and 1970s, were understood to employ concepts of
ideology and culture that were universalist, synchronist and ahistorical. In con-
trast, Foucault’s brand of discourse analysis – ‘genealogical in its design and
...
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