unconscious is eternal'; the reader will realize that these two categories do not meet here by accident. But he will also realize that on this question, and despite important recent studies, the essential theoretical work remains to be done, and I want above all else to avoid giving the impression, rather widespread today, that we already have the answers. In fact, slogans will not fill the yawning absence of a worked-out conceptual articulation between ideology and the unconscious: we are still at the stage of theoretical 'glimmers' in a prevailing obscurity, and in the present study I shall restrict myself to calling attention to certain connections whose importance may have been underestimated, without really claiming to pose the true question that governs the relationship between these two categories. ¹⁰ Let me simply point out that the common feature of the two structures called respectively ideology and the unconscious is the fact that they conceal their own existence within their operation by producing a web of 'subjective' evident truths, 'subjective' here meaning not 'affecting the subject' but 'in which the subject is constituted':

For you and for me, the category of the subject is a primary 'obviousness' (obviousnesses are always primary): it is clear that you and I are subjects (free, ethical, etc.) ¹¹

Now -- and it is, I believe, at this precise point that the necessity for a materialist theory of discourse begins -- the evidentness of the spontaneous existence of the subject (as origin or cause in itself) is immediately compared by Althusser with another evidentness, allpervasive, as we have seen, in the idealist philosophy of language: the evidentness of meaning. Remember the terms of this comparison, which I evoked at the very beginning of this study:

Like all obviousnesses, including those that make a word 'name a thing' or 'have a meaning' (therefore including the obviousness of the 'transparency' of language), the obviousness that you and I are subjects -- and that that does not cause any problems -- is an ideological effect, the elementary ideological effect. ¹²

It is I who have stressed this reference to the evidentness of meaning taken from a commentary on the evidentness of the subject, and I should add that in the text at this point there is a note which directly touches on the question I am examining here:

Linguists and those who appeal to linguistics for various purposes often run up against difficulties which arise because they ignore the action of the ideological effects in all discourses -- including even scientific discourses. ¹³

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