Abstract
The concept of ideology plays a significant role in social and political thinking.
There has been a shift in the critique of ideology today. For Karl Marx, the principal focus was commodity fetishism, the tendency to misrecognize the actual status of exchange value and to identify it as an objective feature rather than a subjective one. Since Marx, various scholars have been grappling with the concept of ideology, with Francis Fukuyama proclaiming the end of ideology in his 1989 essay entitled “End of History?”. In his essay, Fukuyama argued that the emergence of liberal democracy marked the end of ideology, where humans attain the highest stage of governance. However, other Marxist scholars such as Louis Althusser and Slavoj Žižek hold a different view. Especially Žižek, who challenges Fukuyama’s claim, submits that Fukuyama’s assertion is misleading.
That said, my thesis interrogates whether we live in a post-ideological era. And like Althusser and Žižek, I hold that we do not live in a post-ideological era. Instead, the critique of ideology today has shifted towards the subject, i.e., it is the critique of the subject. In other words, the critique of ideology has shifted its focus from the structures of production to the constitution of the subject itself. I contend that modern subjects have adopted an ironic attitude towards the system of capitalism, and this advanced stage of capitalism, in return, commends the subject for seeing through its illusions, i.e., its ideology.