Ideology as a Kantian logic of ideas

Abstract

One of the most original contemporary approaches to the critique of ideology is that offered by Slavoj Žižek, who has shown that ideology, far from being an exception to the »normal run of things«, is the precondition for social reality itself. Žižek’s approach to this question is based predominantly on psychoanalysis, in combination with various insights from German idealism. In this paper, I claim that it is possible to develop a strict logic of ideas by drawing more systematically on one of Žižek’s sources – Immanuel Kant. In Kant’s concept of the regulative idea, we find an approach very close to Žižek’s, alongside a purely philosophical argument for why ideas must govern our everyday apprehension of the world.