the spectral Other. Here, therefore, Lacan is on the side of Marx against Derrida: in the act we 'leave the dead to bury their dead', as Marx put it in the 'Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte'.

The problematic of ideology, its very elusive status as attested to by its 'postmodern' vicissitudes, has thus brought us back to Marx, to the centrality of the social antagonism ('class struggle'). As we have seen, however, this 'return to Marx' entails a radical displacement of the Marxian theoretical edifice: a gap emerges in the very heart of historical materialism -- that is, the problematic of ideology has led us to the inherently incomplete, 'non-all' character of historical materialism -- something must be excluded, foreclosed, if social reality is to constitute itself. To those to whom this result of ours appears far-fetched, speculative, alien to the concrete social concerns of the Marxist theory of ideology, the best answer is provided by a recent work of Étienne Balibar, who arrived at exactly the same conclusion via a concrete analysis of the vicissitudes of the notion of ideology in Marx and the history of Marxism:

the idea of a theory of ideology was only ever a way ideally to complete historical materialism, to 'fill a hole' in its representation of the social totality, and thus a way ideally to constitute historical materialism as a system of explanation complete in its kind, at least 'in principle'. ³⁵

Balibar also provides the location of this hole to be filled by the theory of ideology: it concerns social antagonism ('class struggle') as the inherent limit that traverses society and prevents it from constituting itself as a positive, complete, self-enclosed entity. It is at this precise place that psychoanalysis has to intervene ( Balibar somewhat enigmatically evokes the concept of the unconscious ³⁶ ) -- not, of course, in the old Freudo--Marxist manner, as the element destined to fill up the hole of historical materialism and thus to render possible its completion, but, on the contrary, as the theory that enables us to conceptualize this hole of historical materialism as irreducible, because it is constitutive:

The 'Marxist theory of ideology' would then be symptomatic of the permanent discomfort Marxism maintains with its own critical recognition of the class struggle.

. . . the concept of ideology denotes no other object than that of the nontotalizable (or nonrepresentable within a unique given order) complexity of the historical process; . . . historical materialism is incomplete and incompletable in principle, not only in the temporal dimension (since it postulates the relative un predictability of the effects of determinate causes),

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