Ideology

idéologie

Worked through in 47 videos · 66 passages.

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Summary

Dominique Pagani starts from the only definition Marx gives: ideology covers the legal, political, religious, artistic and philosophical forms in which men become conscious of the conflict between productive forces and relations of production and fight it out1. For him, the term is neither simply pejorative nor a mechanical reflection of the base: ideology is the form of the real, not its content2 3. He links it to Freudian repression and the unconscious: an alienated, fantasised thinking that mystifies above all through the way it poses problems4 5. He detects ideology in value judgements, adjectives and semantic shifts, such as "resilience" in place of "resistance". With Clouscard, he analyses the dominant ideology, which also takes hold of the dominated. In his view, it is no longer idealism but neopositivism, and he places ecologism and libertarian liberalism under this term6 7.

Summary produced automatically from 66 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.

Cycle 15 · 28 Aug 2026From Copernicus to Lenin: revolution!

24:19The dominant ideology is no longer idealism, which used to support religion.
1:11:15The dominant ideology in knowledge is neopositivism, which limits knowledge to the hard sciences and to external objects.

Cycle 14 · 21 Oct 2025The silences of the media uproar: the Atlanticist re-Nazification

18:11Marx and Freud are the two targets of dominant ideology.

Cycle 13 · 9 Aug 2025The repression of the subject in bourgeois civil society

23:49The dominant ideology is not idealism; it depends on the era: religion, the cult of the pharaoh, today neopositivism.
57:39The ideas of philosophers do not rule the world, but the battle is also fought on the ideological front.

Cycle 13 · 6 Feb 2025On the anti-Sovietism of the Khmer Rouge-Greens

47:45The far-right colonial discourse on peoples happier without civilization has become the common discourse of ecology; he attacks the discourse, not the real problems.

Cycle 12 · 14 Aug 2024Too late?

38:58Racism is class contempt on an imperialist scale: the wealthy emir is well received.

Cycle 12 · 28 Feb 2024Clouscard by you: answers to your questions

55:25Ideology is not the discourse of the other: it is produced by the economic base, but not mechanically; superstructures sometimes reflect it, sometimes oppose it.

Cycle 12 · 22 Dec 2023Birth and carnage: the Massacre of the Innocents

2:01:56Infrastructure and superstructure are not separate; superstructures are the forms under which men become conscious of conflicts. One-sidedness is condemned by Hegel.

Cycle 11 · 3 Sept 2023Worldliness in Clouscard: desiring what? Through whom?

7:22Forms under which men become aware of the conflict between productive forces and relations of production; the superstructures change more slowly than the infrastructure.

Cycle 11 · 29 Jun 2023Worldliness in Clouscard: Aragon and the positivity of the negative

27:43The dominant ideology is not idealism; fighting idealism today is an outdated battle.
1:06:30An ideology is dominant because it is also in the heads of the dominated; attacking progress reserves its fruits for the dominant.

Cycle 11 · 26 Apr 2023Worldliness in Clouscard, or “the dominant ideology”

49:35The dominated adopt dominant ideology against their own interest because they do not want to think the unthinkable alone.
1:30:14The prestige of the world creates the belief that the fate of the dominated is bound up with the interest of the world of the dominant alone.

Cycle 11 · 3 Mar 2023War, neo-fascism: libertarian liberalism

18:43Ideology always begins with false divides, such as private versus public; Pagani dismisses both terms together.

Cycle 11 · 14 Jan 2023Beware of misreadings! Clouscard and the ideology of desire, in homage to Le Précepteur

8:50The suffix -logy comes from logos and means "discourse on"; the ideology of desire is a discourse on desire.
17:52The dominant ideology can be expressed through a culture, here the dominant culture of Protestant origin.

Cycle 11 · 14 Oct 2022Clouscard and the problem of Socrates

25:53Pejorative among Marxists but not reductive: language is at the service of an idea, an aim.
1:44:17It is in qualifying adjectives, which measure nothing, that one detects the ideology of a discourse.

Series · 20 May 2022Who is hiding beneath the surfaces? Aesthetics and politics

31:18Resistance, in the Freudian sense, taken collectively, is called, in Marxist terms, ideology.
1:11:13Ideology is for Marx an unconscious common to all, of which even psychoanalysis is unaware.

Cycle 10 · 24 Mar 2022#11 Ukraine: mathematics unites men, politics divides them (Aristotle)

1:18:52The Slavophile current seeks to refound a properly Russian identity; like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in the West, it is an irrationalist current opposed to progressivism.

Cycle 10 · 23 Dec 2021#10.7 “Postmodern” eco-petty-Nazism: Plato's Gorgias

1:35:31Ideology takes the place of repression: wrapping truth in a fantasized, fetishistic discourse.

Series · 17 Nov 2021Left-washing: are the woke the most asleep?

42:27Societal ideology pursues the opposite of emancipation: subjection to the true power, which is economic.

Series · 19 Jul 2021Being born human is not enough to be human

15:36What is negated is called repression in psychoanalysis, ideology in Marx: I think in an alienated and fantasized mode.

Series · 21 May 2021Heidegger, or panzer-philosophy

20:32He applies his Marxist convictions to himself: with the same background and class interest, he might have sympathized with the Reich.

Series · 30 Apr 2021My eco-cabin in the ZAD: autonomy or alienation?

5:51The dominant ideology of our time is conscious of itself as being of the left, but one does not judge an era by its self-consciousness.

Cycle 9.2 · 28 Apr 2021#9.20 From signal to sign: Einstein

27:41What Marx calls ideology, before Freud: believing one thinks objectively while being caught in Robinsonades and fantasy.

Series · 31 Mar 2021“Red-browns”, “decolonial”: should we use the dominant language?

42:11Liberal-libertarian ideology forges the confused notion of red-brown; lumping all anti-Atlanticists into the far right is a gift to it.

Series · 31 Mar 2021Wagner and his interpreters, approaching Clouscard, Marx = Theseus?

1:14:15The infrastructure of the productive forces determines the juridical, aesthetic, political, religious, philosophical superstructures, in short the ideological ones.
1:17:28The dominant ideology attributes love to pheromones rather than to class position.

Series · 31 Mar 2021A balance in nature?

22:28The mediatized vulgate, distinct from the scientific consensus, deifies nature and demonizes man.
35:17The balance in nature and the invisible hand of the market are the same ideology.

Cycle 9.2 · 5 Feb 2021#9.14 How can sciences of history be real?

1:08:46Ideological forms (juridical, religious, aesthetic, philosophical) are not an error but the form of the real, and not its content.

Series · 18 Jan 2021#10 The two Klemperers and Bruno Walter in Wagner

12:52The Marxian critique of ideology says the same thing as ambivalence: the philanthropic Quaker sincerely justifies child labor.

Cycle 9.1 · 24 Dec 2020#10 Benefits and harms of amnesia…

34:29There are ideological protective barriers, shells against a presumed threat, such as "Judeo-Bolshevism" in Nazi propaganda.

Cycle 9.1 · 13 Nov 2020#4 Benefits and harms of amnesia…

26:12According to Marx, ideology mystifies less through its answers than through the way it poses problems.
1:11:36The language of the tribe is an impure language, that of the dominant ideology, which poetry purifies.

Talks · 6 Oct 2020Calves and Things (3): the dictatorship of the bobotariat

29:28An ideology is gradually aggregated on material bases, through a kind of natural selection; those who carry it lack the words to name it.
36:02Ecology is a coloring of the dominant, liberal ideology, spread by the petty bourgeoisie to perpetuate the domination of the bourgeoisie.

Talks · 5 Oct 2020Calves and Things (2): ecologism, the highest stage of capitalism?

2:25Ecologism is a dominant class ideology, that of the middle strata, and a mediation of class struggle in the concrete conflict.
43:45Criticizing ecologism amounts to criticizing a dominant religion and philosophy.

Talks · 4 Oct 2020Calves and Things: the preface

23:06In Marx's sense, ecology is the ideology by which the bourgeoisie dominates the middle strata and tells them which interests to serve in the class struggle.

Cycle 8 · 30 May 2020#9 Return to the logics of the subject

5:05Analogous to the unconscious: necessary social relations independent of the will, which escape consciousness.
14:55Religion teaching what despotism wants: one believes one is doing metaphysics while perpetuating absolutism.

Cycle 7 · 17 May 2020#8 Harnessed to confinitude

28:27Marx's generic term for the juridical, aesthetic, religious, and philosophical forms, distinct from the measurable change of the base.
1:43:36Ideology is what is above, in the superstructures: the top that wants to know nothing of the bottom.

Series · 12 Mar 2019Pablo Servigne

10:28A scientifically referenced argument traps one in ideology; the finest minds are not immune to ideological blindness.
20:52The facts are correct; ideology lies in their arrangement, in the conclusions and value judgments, which are not judgments of existence.
2:00:32Ideology creeps in through semantic slippage, as with "resilience" replacing "resistance."

Cycle 5.1 · 13 Jan 2019#5.3 bis Questions (Facebook Live)

56:48Marx classes bourgeois political economy as ideology, which is not a reverie; presenting quanta as the revenge of chance is also ideological.

Cycle 5.1 · 24 Oct 2018#5.1 The philosopher's Odyssey: revolutionary thought

1:45:18The forms in which men become conscious of the conflict and carry it through to the end; it is not just anything.
1:51:35Religion is the symbolic order in Freudian terms, the ideological order in Marxian terms.

Talks · 20 May 2018Work and the right to work

1:47:23He does not attack realities but discourses; natural balance is an ideological notion that means nothing without man.

Cycle 4 · 16 May 2018#4.8 Angélique (by Nerval)

1:04:52Legal, political, religious, aesthetic, philosophical forms: ideology is always determinate and is opposed to the scientific.

Cycle 2 · 1 Aug 2017#2.8 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

53:14That which runs through legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophical forms; there is no Marxist ideology.
58:04Fantasized, hence inverted, forms of the real; consciousness is not the site of science.

Talks · 17 Jun 2017Adotevi: Negritude and negrologists (2)

38:26The question concerns the relation between today's identity ideology, said to be emancipatory, and the Marxist critique of the ideology of négritude.

Series · 2 Feb 2016Hegel on the Beach 5/5

32:30Ideology groups together all the juridical, political, religious, artistic and philosophical forms; it is not pejorative nor a mere reflection, it has an effect.

Series · 1 Feb 2016Marx on the Beach 1/2

17:35The only definition given by Marx: legal, political, religious, artistic, philosophical forms. Marx never presented himself as an ideologue but as a critic of ideology.
1:19:01Forms in which men become conscious of the conflict between productive forces and relations of production and fight it out.

Talks · 8 Aug 2015Mythology and truth

19:47Alongside concepts that represent, there are occluding concepts, like "the West," which serve not to show: here, the capitalist countries.

Series · 25 Dec 2014K for Karl

6:02After '68, capital takes back its marbles and needs other ideologies: Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida come onto the scene.

Series · 6 Jul 2012Radio Galère: Michel Clouscard (1)

38:47Althusserian Marxism and Deleuzo-Foucauldianism are left-wing ideologies imposed by the bourgeois university and the media.

Series · 29 Jan 2012Everything is allowed but nothing is possible: Michel Clouscard (2)

11:19For a participant, ecology revives the dynamic of capitalism and recreates consensus: "we are all responsible."

Series · 29 Jan 2012Everything is allowed but nothing is possible: Michel Clouscard (1)

35:46Capitalism gives ground materially but wages an ideological war by cultivating subjectivity and the individual against totality.