The Sublime Object of Ideology is a 1989 book by the Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj à ½ià ¾ek. The work is widely considered his masterpiece.
à ½ià ¾ek thematizes the Kantian notion of the sublime in order to liken ideology to the experience of something that is absolutely vast and powerful beyond all perception and objective intelligibility. à ½ià ¾ek provides an analysis of "How did Marx Invent the Symptom?", in which he compares the ways in which the notion of symptom runs through the work of the philosopher Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. à ½ià ¾ek opposes any simplistic reading of the two thinkers, who are shown to have discovered the "" of meaning concealed within the apparently unconnected "forms" of commodities (Marx) and dreams (Freud). à ½ià ¾ek thinks it is more important to ask why latent content takes a particular form. à ½ià ¾ek therefore argues that according to both Freud and Marx the dream-work and commodity-form itself require analysis.
à ½ià ¾ek believes The Sublime Object of Ideology to be one of his best books, while the psychologist Ian Parker writes that it is "widely considered his masterpiece". Anthony Elliott writes that the work is "a provocative reconstruction of critical theory from Marx to Althusser, reinterpreted through the frame of Lacanian psychoanalysis".