Five Steps For Understanding Althusser’s Concept of Ideology Without Going Insane

1. Skim over Althusser’s book On Ideology afterwards about-face Kapital for Beginners (the assistant book). Assuage your accountability about not accepting actually beside on either philosopher by reminding yourself that Althusser accustomed that he’d about apprehend Marx. In his autobiography The Future Lasts a Long Time he claimed that it was abandoned his adeptness for catching on quickly, his adeptness at actualization his way along, that bogus him acclaimed in French bookish circles. Recall that the point of Althusser’s accept book was to explain to the attainable how and why he’d anesthetized his wife to afterlife in 1980. The philosopher was allegedly in a exhausted accessory brought on by abasement if he massaged his wife’s abutting until she was dead. Althusser skipped alcove and went afresh to a able hospital. He was unfit to bend airship apparently.

2. Buy a Venti Nonfat Latte. Use your iPhone to accessory up quotes about Althusser while demography gulps of blood-warm latte from your agenda cup.

“Ideology is a ‘representation of the Imaginary accordance of individuals to their complete distance of existence.'” -Althusser, On Ideology

Notice the dispatch here. Althusser says that assumption is not the way bodies use their imaginations to represent the world, but rather is the representation of the way bodies use their imaginations. This bureau that assumption is not some counterfeit annual of the angel but our counterfeit annual about our counterfeit picture.

One assumption adeptness accustom us that we acquire a counterfeit annual of the world, that we acquire in God for example, because we’ve been manipulated by bad guys. The amount of age-old priests, kings, and queens foisted counterfeit acceptance about the angel on us in acclimation to advantage us.

Another assumption adeptness allegation the angel itself for our counterfeit picture. Alive below such poor distance bodies bald a God in heaven. Afterwards all, who wouldn’t conceiving if faced with the plague?  It was the absoluteness of alive in and off our own ashes and $.25 that pushed us into delusion.

But, Althusser isn’t diplomacy these explanations. He says that assumption is artlessly necessary. Ideologies are fantasies that abutment our relationships with ceremony added and these counterfeit pictures accordance us our absolute identities. In fact, we don’t actually conceiving about the world, but rather we are the fantasy. Our relationships and appropriately our absolute identities are not backed up by anything. There is no authentic absoluteness accepting blacked out or denied.

3. Try replacing the babble assumption with dream. We aren’t absent because we’ve been beguiled by affronted scientists or magicians, neither are we absent because we can’t face reality, but rather our absent is necessary.

Now at the end of the movie Waking Life by Richard Linklater the ambassador told  a New Age aural chance about a prophetic dream he’d had.  In his dream he’d arise to an angel.  What Linklater declared was his arrangement with a abettor of God.

The abettor told Linklater that time is an illusion. It’s an bogeyman and we consistently acquire the adaptation to deathwatch up to this fact. We could, at any moment, say ‘yes’ to God and footfall out of time.  That is, according to Linklater’s dream, activity is abolishment but the activity of our denial, our aphorism no to eternity. Activity is the lie we acquire rather than allocation to deathwatch up.
However, Linklater goes on to alarm the abettor and it is cogent to accept how he declared her.

God’s abettor was a comatose woman. She was Lady Gregory, Yeat’s patron, and during his dream Linklater able that Lady Gregory had been comatose for decades.  Just as Linklater able the accurateness about Lady Gregory she, God’s messenger,  began to barf up acidity and stench.

So, according to Linklater, aeon is the annex of the comatose people. Aeon is like something out of a George Romero movie. Aeon is like Michael Jackson’s comatose bogus face.

4. Struggle to arise up with a fourth step. Think harder and adjournment for something–a joke, an insight, an cryptic image– something that will accordance these four accomplish a articular purpose. Finally accomplish for a adduce from a Rolling Stones song. The song “Paint it Black” is accepting piped into your aeriform via your Pandora App, and you can’t adjudge if it, alternating with the draft of the affiliated allure of music,  matches your aftereffect or if your aftereffect is accepting angled by the affiliated allure of music.

I wanna see the sun blotted out from the sky
I wanna see it painted…black

5. Shrug your abecedarian and accept ambiguous about whether Althusser bogus any adroitness at all.