illusion without substance) it was stricto sensu non-ideological: it did not 'reflect', in an inverted-ideological form, any actual relations of power.

The theoretical lesson to be drawn from this is that the concept of ideology must be disengaged from the 'representationalist' problematic: ideology has nothing to do with 'illusion', with a mistaken, distorted representation of its social content. To put it succinctly: a political standpoint can be quite accurate ('true') as to its objective content, yet thoroughly ideological; and, vice versa, the idea that a political standpoint gives of its social content can prove totally wrong, yet there is absolutely nothing 'ideological' about it. With regard to the 'factual truth', the position of Neues Forum -- taking the disintegration of the Communist regime as the opening-up of a way to invent some new form of social space that would reach beyond the confines of capitalism -- was doubtless illusory. Opposing Neues Forum were, forces who put all their bets on the quickest possible annexation to West Germany -- that is to say, of their country's inclusion in the world capitalist system; for them, the people around Neues Forum were nothing but a bunch of heroic daydreamers. This position proved accurate -- yet it was none the less thoroughly ideological. Why? The conformist adoption of the West German model implied an ideological belief in the unproblematic, non-antagonistic functioning of the late-capitalist 'social state', where's the first stance, although illusory as to its factual content (its 'enunciated'), attested, by means of its 'scandalous' and exorbitant position of enunciation, to an awareness of the antagonism that pertains to late capitalism. This is one way to conceive of the Lacanian thesis according to which truth has the structure of a fiction; in those confused months of the passage of 'really existing socialism' into capitalism, the fiction of a 'third way' was the only point at which social antagonism was not obliterated. Herein lies one of the tasks of the 'postmodern' critique of ideology: to designate the elements within an existing social order which -- in the guise of 'fiction', that is, of 'Utopian' narratives of possible but failed alternative histories -- point towards the system's antagonistic character, and thus 'estrange' us to the self-evidence of its established identity.

In all these ad hoc analyses, however, we have already practicized the critique of ideology, while our initial question concerned the concept of ideology presupposed in this practice. Up till now, we have been guided by a 'spontaneous' pre-comprehension which, although it led us to contradictory results, is not to be underestimated, but rather

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