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.