Zizek Quote on Ideology: They Know, Yet They Do It

Quote

"They know very well what they are doing, but still they are doing it. ... Cynical distance is by no means the only way to be aware of the falsity of ideology. ... We are able to perceive the illusion which is structuring our everyday life, and still continue to act as if we did not perceive it." — Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Author

Slavoj Zizek (born 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, one of the most prolific and widely known public intellectuals of his generation. Trained in philosophy and in the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, he has written dozens of books applying Lacanian categories to politics, culture, film, religion, and ideology. His characteristic style — combining rigorous theory, pop-culture examples, and provocation — has made him a fixture of public debate, while his commitment to a radical left politics has kept him controversial on all sides.

Source

The quotation comes from the opening chapter of The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), titled "How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?" The book, written in English, was Zizek's first major statement of his project: to use Lacanian psychoanalysis to renew the theory of ideology. The quoted passage reworks the famous passage in Marx's Capital in which the commodity form is analyzed: the participants in commodity exchange "do not know it, but they are doing it." Zizek's version inverts the formula for the contemporary condition: we know very well that our beliefs are illusory — but we still act on them.

Context

Zizek's target is the complacent assumption, common in the late 1980s, that ideology critique had become impossible or unnecessary — that we had reached the "end of ideology" and everyone could see things as they are. Zizek argues that this very stance of knowing detachment is the contemporary form of ideology. The classical notion of ideology was false consciousness: the subject is deceived about reality, and critique removes the deception. Zizek's Lacanian reformulation is that ideology is not in the head but in the act: what sustains ideology is not what we believe but what we do. The cynical subject says "I know very well it is an illusion, but still..." — still I recycle, still I vote, still I buy, still I work. The belief that has been abandoned at the level of consciousness is preserved at the level of practice. Ideology is not the opposite of critical knowledge; it is what survives critical knowledge.

Meaning

The quotation states Zizek's central thesis: contemporary ideology functions through cynical distance, not through naïve belief. The formula "they know very well what they are doing, but still they are doing it" describes a subject who is fully aware that the emperor has no clothes and continues to act as if he were dressed. This is what Zizek calls fetishistic disavowal: the structure "I know very well, but nevertheless..." — a structure he traces to Freud's account of the fetishist, who knows that the mother has no penis but acts as if she did. Applied to ideology, it means that awareness of illusion is not enough; the illusion is sustained by practice. This is why, for Zizek, ideology critique cannot be a matter of enlightenment — telling people the truth they already know — but of changing the practices and fantasies that sustain the system. The "sublime object" of the title names the thing — the object-cause of desire — that is both the stain in the picture and what the picture is organized around.

Related Wisdom

Zizek's account of ideology belongs to the tradition of critical theory, extending the analyses of Marx on commodity fetishism and of Foucault on power-knowledge. His claim that belief is carried by practice rather than consciousness connects to the philosophical exploration of power — the ways institutions and routines shape what we take for granted — and to the question of truth in the age of post-truth, where the problem is not that people are deceived but that they no longer expect truth to matter. Zizek's insistence that awareness of illusion coexists with acting on it offers a diagnosis of contemporary cynicism that the classical theories of false consciousness could not provide.