so on. ²⁶ And perhaps it is here that we should look for the last resort of ideology, for the pre-ideological kernel, the formal matrix, on which are grafted various ideological formations: in the fact that there is no reality without the spectre, that the circle of reality can be closed only by means of an uncanny spectral supplement. Why, then, is there no reality without the spectre? Lacan provides a precise answer to this question: (what we experience as) reality is not the 'thing itself, it is always-already symbolized, constituted, structured by symbolic mechanisms -- and the problem resides in the fact that symbolization ultimately always fails, that it never succeeds in fully 'covering' the real, that it always involves some unsettled, unredeemed symbolic debt. This real (the part of reality that remains non-symbolized) returns in the guise of spectral apparitions. Consequently, 'spectre' is not to be confused with 'symbolic fiction', with the fact that reality itself has the structure of a fiction in that it is symbolically (or, as some sociologists put it, 'socially') constructed; the notions of spectre and (symbolic) fiction are codependent in their very incompatibility (they are 'complementary' in the quantum-mechanical sense). To put it simply, reality is never directly 'itself, it presents itself only via its incomplete-failed symbolization, and spectral apparitions emerge in this very gap that forever separates reality from the real, and on account of which reality has the character of a (symbolic) fiction: the spectre gives body to that which escapes (the symbolically structured) reality. ²⁷

The pre-ideological 'kernel' of ideology thus consists of the spectral apparition that fills up the hole of the real. This is what all the attempts to draw a clear line of separation between 'true' reality and illusion (or to ground illusion in reality) fail to take into account: if (what we experience as) 'reality' is to emerge, something has to be foreclosed from it -- that is to say, 'reality', like truth, is, by definition, never 'whole'. What the spectre conceals is not reality but its 'primordially repressed', the irrepresentable X on whose 'repression' reality itself is founded. It may seem that we have thereby lost our way in speculative murky waters that have nothing whatsoever to do with concrete social struggles -- is not the supreme example of such 'reality', however, provided by the Marxist concept of class struggle? The consequent thinking-out of this concept compels us to admit that there is no class struggle 'in reality': 'class struggle' designates the very antagonism that prevents the objective (social) reality from constituting itself as a self-enclosed whole. ²⁸

True, according to the Marxist tradition, class struggle is the 'totalizing' principle of society; this, however, does not mean that it is a kind of ultimate guarantee authorizing us to grasp society as a rational totality ('the ultimate meaning of every social phenomenon is determined by its position within the class struggle'): the ultimate paradox of

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