The Sublime Object of Ideology

Blurb

The Sublime Object of Ideology is a book by Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek. The book, which Žižek believes to be one of his best, essentially thematizes the Kantian notion of the sublime in order to liken ideology to the experience of something that is absolutely vast and powerful beyond all perception and objective intelligibility.
The first chapter begins with an analysis of "How did Marx Invent the Symptom?", in which Žižek compares the notion of symptom runs through the work of both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Žižek opposes any simplistic reading of the two thinkers, who are shown to have discovered the "kernel" of meaning concealed within the apparently unconnected "forms" of commodities and dreams. The kernel of a commodity's content is labour and its latent meaning is the dream. Žižek thinks it more important to ask why latent content takes a particular form. Žižek therefore argues that according to both Freud and Marx the dream-work and commodity-form itself require analysis.