Abstract

Looking at today’s academization of everyday life – academic knowledge having become central in mediating the presence of the human being with himself, the others and the world – it seems that academia has become the home-base of post-modern man. Academia is however no viable habitat, the modern subject is pushed to the search to rejoin real life and be a real human being. In this paper it is argued that this is centrally related to the topic of ideology. The dispute between Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek on populism is re-read in this light as it ultimately boils down to a dispute on what real man is. Laclau’s theory, missing the dimension of the uncanny and the truth shall thus be contrasted with Žižek’s recourse to the idea of hauntology as the latter is the basis for Žižek’s reasserting of what we could call the rock of class struggle. Class struggle furthermore turns out to be also the issue at stake in that other debate of Žižek with Yannis Stavrakakis. In the concluding part the viability of Žižekian hauntology is questioned given the impossible politization of psychoanalysis and its skandalons