Žižek on Fetishistic Disavowal and Cynical Ideology

Slavoj Žižek’s theory of ideology is built upon the paradoxical structure of modern belief. Against the older model in which ideology functioned as a veil of illusion that deceives subjects, Žižek insists that ideology today persists precisely when subjects know very well how things actually stand but act as if they do not. This paradox is captured in his appropriation of the formula of fetishistic disavowal: “I know very well, but nonetheless …”

The concept is borrowed from Freud’s account of fetishism, where the fetishist both knows that the mother does not possess a phallus and yet simultaneously acts as though she does. The fetish is the object that sustains this contradiction, allowing knowledge and belief to coexist without collapse. Žižek generalizes this structure: modern ideology does not depend on ignorance of reality but on a disavowal of what one already knows. Subjects “know very well” that consumer goods are produced through exploitation, that political systems are corrupt, that authority figures are ordinary human beings—yet they continue to behave as if this were not the case.

This is why Žižek describes contemporary ideology as “cynical.” Cynicism is not opposed to ideology but its very form in late modernity. The cynic sees through appearances, refuses to be duped, but still complies. What allows this compliance is the displacement of belief onto the Other: the subject tells themselves that they do not believe, but that others do, and therefore the ritual or structure must be maintained. The cynical subject participates in ideology not out of naiveté but out of the conviction that someone else, somewhere, still takes it seriously.

For Žižek, the persistence of ideology under conditions of widespread awareness is thus explained not by ignorance but by this peculiar logic of disavowal. Social reality is structured by the gap between knowledge and belief: one can know without believing, or rather, one can believe “through the Other.” Ideological practices are sustained not by private conviction but by the fantasy that they are necessary for the Other to function.

Ideological practices become necessary for the Other to function because many believe it or act as though they believe it. So the fantasy becomes real—it’s real in its effects. If everyone acts “as if” the ideology is necessary, then it becomes necessary in practice. The fantasy is retroactively validated by collective behavior. This is what Žižek might call the “material force of ideology”—it doesn’t need belief to function; it needs participation.

The critical implication is that unveiling knowledge is insufficient for liberation. Exposing corruption, exploitation, or contradiction does not dissolve ideology, because ideology has already anticipated and incorporated this exposure. It survives precisely through the gap between knowing and doing, through fetishistic disavowal. What must be confronted is not illusion but the libidinal investment in acting as if—the enjoyment that attaches to rituals, symbols, and repetitions regardless of what one knows.

In this sense, Žižek reframes ideology as the management of disavowed knowledge. The subject is never simply duped; the subject is caught in a structure where disbelief and belief coexist, where awareness is neutralized by the very form of its acknowledgment. To escape ideology, then, is not to know more but to break the disavowal that allows one to act against one’s own knowledge.

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Would you like me to push this further into Žižek’s Hegelian twist—where fetishistic disavowal doesn’t just preserve ideology but becomes the very ground of social reality itself? That’s where he sharpens the move from cynicism to a deeper ontological claim.

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Žižek’s Hegelian Twist: Fetishistic Disavowal as the Ground of Social Reality

Žižek situates fetishistic disavowal within a Hegelian framework to argue that ideology is not merely a set of false beliefs superimposed on reality, nor simply a misperception to be corrected. Rather, the very structure of social reality is shaped by the logic of disavowal itself. In Hegelian terms, reality is never a brute, self-evident “given”; it is mediated, constituted through practices, rituals, and symbolic forms. Fetishistic disavowal—“I know very well, but nonetheless …”—is the mechanism through which subjects negotiate the gap between knowledge and the symbolic order, and in doing so, it sustains the world they inhabit.

The paradoxical act of knowing and disavowing simultaneously is not a private psychological quirk but a structural necessity. Social reality depends on subjects performing acts as if they did not know what they know. Authority, tradition, and law are maintained not because people are naïve but because the acknowledgment of their contingency is embedded within the very enactment of obedience. In other words, the symbolic order—the “big Other” in Lacanian terms—requires subjects to participate in this dual attitude: to know, and yet to act as though they do not.

Cynical ideology, then, is the Hegelian twist made concrete: it is the self-conscious acknowledgment of contingency that paradoxically reinforces the necessity of the social order. The recognition that rules, norms, or structures are contingent does not dissolve them; instead, it renders them performatively effective. The subject’s very knowledge of the arbitrariness of reality becomes the engine through which reality sustains itself. The “big Other” is not naïve; it is enacted through the subject’s own disavowal.

Žižek emphasizes that this is why ideology is fundamentally enjoyable. It is not imposed from outside but sustained through the libidinal investment in acting as if the symbolic order is necessary. Fetishistic disavowal allows the subject to navigate the contradiction between knowledge and belief, truth and appearance, without collapsing the social structure. In Hegelian terms, the contradiction itself—knowledge coexisting with disavowal—is constitutive of reality, not a deviation from it. Social reality is thus never “given” independently of ideological mediation; it is produced, maintained, and experienced through the ritualized enactment of disavowed knowledge.

In this sense, Žižek radicalizes the notion of ideology: it is not a false lens that distorts a preexisting reality, but a constitutive structure through which reality emerges. Fetishistic disavowal is not a mechanism of illusion but the very mode through which the symbolic, social, and political order is reproduced. Ideology, far from being dispelled by knowledge or exposure, persists because it is embedded in the performative logic of subjects who know very well, but nonetheless continue to act.

LLM