The constitution of the subjectivity and the finalism’s illusion: elements of a theory of ideology

Abstract

This text proposes to establish a correlation between Spinoza’s conception of imagination and Althusserian ideology theory. Understood in its mode of functioning and in its effects over men’s perception about their body, their ideas and the things that affect it, imagination would constitute, to Spinoza, the characteristic form of subjective conscience by operating in political world. Marked by the regularity and predictability of causal processes and by the reproduction of relations, political order would be present to imagination as a theological order, whose repetition would represent as universal truths the ideas of images of things in the form under which they would be present more recurrently to men perception. The stability of relations and images under which they represent it would correspond to stability of modes of thinking under which men represent themselves in political order. The contents of conscience – of politically structured imagination – would always be, from this point of view, ideological contents.