The Critique of Ideology Revisited: A Zizekian Appraisal of Habermas's Communicative Rationality (Contemporary Political Theory, 2008, 7, 53–71)

Since the advent of a post-structuralist ethos, the assertion of a notion of truth, conceived as an infallible point d'appui from which a given social order could be evaluated as ideological or non-ideological, seems no longer possible. As Rorty has pointed out '[we can now] see ourselves as never encountering reality except under a chosen description as...making worlds rather than finding them'. However, we could still legitimately ask whether or not an inevitable condition of the 'post-modern world', that is, a world deprived of a manifest intrinsic meaning, is the renouncement of the assumption of a certain notion of an objective truth for a critique of ideology. I will suggest in this essay that a way to respond to this question is by revisiting Habermas's theory of communicative action, viewed through the lens of the theory of ideology formulated by Slavok Zizek. Furthermore, the main thesis of this work is that by using the notion of the Real or 'primordial repressed' taken from a Zizekian reading of Lacan, it would allow the production of a critique of ideology in which the truth — the unmasking of the extra-ideological place — becomes possible as a hypothetical objective category.

El carácter traumático del consenso en torno al “Modelo Chileno”: una investigación sobre la elite política democrática post-Pinochet

This article proposes a revising of the consensus on the post-Pinochet "Chilean model" (democratic stability and neoliberal economy), reached by the political elite that took office in March 1990. Following a "symptomatic" interpretation -such as that offered by Althusser y Balibar (1970)- of a series of semi-structured interviews, it is argued that the consensus, far from being exclusively an exercise of political rationality, is primordially based on a traumatic process of reconstitution of a political generational discursive identity, which took place after the coup d’Etat of 1973. Furthermore, the 'traumatic consensus', as an expression of a political generation that rejects the conflict, would be one of the explicative keys of the specificity of the Chilean model. This, in turn, raises questions about the perdurability and convenience of such a consensus, in a neoliberal context in which social conflicts are not only not disappearing but also seem to be sentenced to increase. Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, Coloquios, 2008, [En línea], Puesto en línea el 14 janvier 2008. URL : http://nuevomundo.revues.org//index11502.html. Consultado el 05 juin 2008.

The Social from the Concept of Illusion in Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli and Bacon (Cinta de Moebio 28: 29-38, 2007)

The epistemological tradition set up by Plato has been permanently reading as a ‘way of doing philosophy’ in which the dualisms: reality versus illusion, on the one hand, and individual versus the social, on the other, would present not only in an explicit and incommensurable opposition to modern conceptions that assert the overcoming of such distinctions, but also as a monolithic bloc within which every new thing added seems to be no more than a “footnote” to that already said by the Greek philosopher. This work, offering a rereading of the notion of illusion in some authors of such a tradition (Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Francis Bacon), far from reaffirming the “mainstream” suggests that it is within the own Plato’s aegis in which the Platonic dualism begins to crack as a consequence of the permanent presence of the ‘social’.

Notas acerca de la determinación de lo ideológico y verdadero en Teoría de la Ideología (Revista Ciencia Política, v.25, n.2, 2005)

The requirement of assuming a given category of the true for the determination of the ideological -the condition of true knowledge- has always been a basic premise of the classic theory of ideology. The emergence of a "poststructuralist ethos", however, has meant the explicit denying of such condition, becoming the main theoretical challenge to those authors who insist in using the notion of ideology in "post modern" times. This work assesses the classic answers given to the determination of the ideological as well as the contemporary theories elaborated in response to the challenge posed by post-structuralism, within the descriptive and negative research program on ideology distinguished by Geuss (1981). The paper finally proposes a re-conceptualisation of the notion of ideology which, acknowledging the permanence of the `necessity' of the true, places the praxis of the individuals as the main "locus" for both the ideological delusion and the critical emancipation.