which, as we shall see, is characterized grammatically by the fact that the term is neither subject nor object but an attribute of the object) is strictly contemporaneous with the use of the term 'Ideology' in the singular, in the sense of 'every ideology'.

Naturally, this makes me distinguish carefully between ideological formation, dominant ideology and Ideology.

Ideology in general, which, as we have seen, is not realized in the ideological state apparatuses -- so it cannot coincide with a historically concrete ideological formation -- is also not the same thing as the dominant ideology, as, the overall result, the historically concrete form resulting from the relationships of unevenness-contradiction-subordination characterizing in a historically given social formation the 'complex whole in dominance' of the ideological formations operating in it. In other. words, whereas 'ideologies have a history of their own' because they have a concrete historical existence, 'Ideology in general has no history' in so far as it is 'endowed with a structure and an operation such as to make it a non-historical reality, i.e. an omni-historical reality, in the sense in which that structure and operation are immutable, present in the same form throughout what we can call history, in the sense in which the Communist Manifesto defines history as the history of class struggles, i.e. the history of class societies'. ⁷ The concept of Ideology in general thus appears very specifically as the way to designate, within Marxism-Leninism, the fact that the relations of production are relationships between 'men', in the sense that they are not relationships between things, machines, non-human animals or angels; in this sense and in this sense only: i.e. without introducing at the same time, and surreptitiously, a certain notion of 'man' as anti-nature, transcendence, subject of history, negation of the negation, etc. As is well known, this is the central point of the 'Reply to John Lewis'. ⁸

Quite the contrary, the concept of Ideology in general makes it possible to think 'man' as an 'ideological animal', i.e. to think his specificity as part of nature in the Spinozist sense of the term: 'History is an immense "natural-human" system in movement, and the motor of history is class struggle'. ⁹ Hence history once again, that is the history of the class struggle, i.e. the reproduction/transformation of class relationships, with their corresponding infrastructural (economic) and superstructural (legal-political and ideological) characteristics: it is within this 'natural-human' process of history that 'Ideology is eternal' (omni-historical) -- a statement which recalls Freud's expression 'the

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