explicated. For example, we somehow implicitly seem to know what is 'no longer' ideology: as long as the Frankfurt School accepted the critique of political economy as its base, it remained within the co-ordinates of the critique of ideology, whereas the notion of 'instrumental reason' no longer appertains to the horizon of the critique of ideology -- 'instrumental reason' designates an attitude that is not simply functional with regard to social domination but, rather, serves as the very foundation of the relationship of domination. ⁶ An ideology is thus not necessarily 'false': as to its positive content, it can be 'true', quite accurate, since what really matters is not the asserted content as such but the way this content is related to the subjective position implied by its own process of enunciation. We are within ideological space proper the moment this content -- 'true' or 'false' (if true, so much the better for the ideological effect) -- is functional with regard to some relation of social domination ('power', 'exploitation') in an inherently non-transparent way: the very logic of legitimizing the relation of domination must remain concealed if it is to be effective. In other words, the starting point of the critique of ideology has to be full acknowledgement of the fact that it is easily possible to lie in the guise of truth. When, for example, some Western power intervenes in a Third World country on account of violations of human rights, it may well be 'true' that in this country the most elementary human rights were not respected, and that the Western intervention will effectively improve the human rights record, yet such a legitimization none the less remains 'ideological' in so far as it fails to mention the true motives of the intervention (economic interests, etc.). The outstanding mode of this 'lying in the guise of truth' today is cynicism: with a disarming frankness one 'admits everything', yet this full acknowledgement of our power interests does not in any way prevent us from pursuing these interests -- the formula of cynicism is no longer the classic Marxian 'they do not know it, but they are doing it'; it is 'they know very well what they are doing, yet they are doing it'.

How, then, are we to explicate this implicit pre-comprehension of ours? How are we to pass from doxa to truth? The first approach that offers itself is, of course, the Hegelian historical-dialectical transposition of the problem into its own solution: instead of directly evaluating the adequacy or 'truth' of different notions of ideology, one should read this very multitude of the determination of ideology as the index of different concrete historical situations -- that is, one should consider what Althusser, in his self-critical phase, referred to as the 'topicality of the thought', the way a thought is inscribed into its object; or, as Derrida would have put it, the way the frame itself is part of the framed content.

When, for example, Leninism--Stalinism suddenly adopted the term

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