difficult to discern: the chain of 'ordinary' signifiers registers some positive knowledge about homelessness, whereas the Master-Signifier stands for 'the truly essential dimension' about which we need not make any positive claim (for that reason, Lacan designates the Master-Signifier the 'signifier without signified'). This formal matrix bears witness in an exemplary way to the self-defeating power of a formal discourse analysis of ideology: its weakness resides in its very strength, since it is ultimately compelled to locate ideology in the gap between the 'ordinary' signifying chain and the excessive MasterSignifier that is part of the symbolic order as such.

Here, however, one should be careful to avoid the last trap that makes us slide into ideology under the guise of stepping out of it. That is to say, when we denounce as ideological the very attempt to draw a clear line of demarcation between ideology and actual reality, this inevitably seems to impose the conclusion that the only non-ideological position is to renounce the very notion of extra-ideological reality and accept that all we are dealing with are symbolic fictions, the plurality of discursive universes, never 'reality' -- such a quick, slick 'postmodern' solution, however, is ideology par excellence. It all hinges on our persisting in this impossible position: although no clear line of demarcation separates ideology from reality, although ideology is already at work in everything we experience as 'reality', we must none the less maintain the tension that keeps the critique of ideology alive. Perhaps, following Kant, we could designate this impasse the 'antinomy of criticoideological reason': ideology is not all; it is possible to assume a place that enables us to maintain a distance from it, but this place from which one can denounce ideology must remain empty, it cannot be occupied by any positively determined reality -- the moment we yield to this temptation, we are back in ideology.

How are we to specify this empty place? Perhaps we should take as a starting point the thread that runs through our entire logico-narrative reconstruction of the notion of ideology: it is as if, at every stage, the same opposition, the same undecidable alternative Inside/Outside, repeats itself under a different exponent. First, there is the split within ideology 'in-itself': on the one hand, ideology stands for the distortion of rational argumentation and insight due to the weight of the 'pathological' external interests of power, exploitation, and so on; on the other, ideology resides in the very notion of a thought not permeated by some non-transparent power strategy, of an argument that does not rely upon some non-transparent rhetorical devices. . . . Next, this very externality splits into an 'inner externality' (the symbolic order, i.e. the decentred discursive mechanisms that generate Meaning) and an 'external externality' (the ISA and social rituals and

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