„They know it but they are nonetheless doing it”

Slavoj Žižek is one of the number one theorists of the radical left, and one of the most popular philosopher and culture-critical of our days. Th is study attempts to reconstruct Žižek’s oeuvre from a specific starting point. Accordingly, in the center of the oeuvre there is a Marxofreudian re-grounding of the traditional Marxist ideology-critical position. According to Žižek, the Hegelian-Marxian-Engelsian concept of the „cunning of reason” - can be summarized by the paraphrase „they do not know it, but they are doing it” - has a fundamental significance in the traditional Marxist theory. According to my opinion, Žižek proceeds in case of the concept of ideology similarly to other classic Marxist concepts (such as class, capital, fetishism, alienation, consumption, need): he attempts to re-position and re-construct it with the help of a Lacanian-Freudian theoretical framework. While doing this, he breaks with every kind of exclusive and universal Marxian theory about capitalism and claims that the members of the society understand and know the working of the system precisely. As a result, the meaning of ideology can be captured by the formula „they know it, but they are doing it anyway”. At the same time, he does not leave only those areas to psychoanalysis in connection to which Marxist theory seems to be unsufficient: he exchanges the concept of the „capitalist way of production” of Marxism to the concept of the „capitalist reality”; a concept rooted on Freudian and Lacanian thought. „Capitalist reality” includes the whole spectrum of social practices, therefore, the certain practices (economy, culture, family, free time etc.) can be described as a system actuated and kept together by ideology. In the rest of the study I demonstrate how Žižek describes the ideological logics of postmodern capitalism in connection with the analysis of the fetishistic, cynic, and post-traumatic reason. According to the conclusion of this study, Žižek identifies the fundamental political situation of our time as something stands on the relation of the „capitalist reality” of western societies and the „Real” of the global capitalism.