[1] Žižek thematizes the Kantian notion of the sublime in order to liken ideology to the experience of something that is absolutely vast and powerful beyond all perception and objective intelligibility.

", in which he compares the ways in which the notion of symptom runs through the work of the philosopher Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis.

Žižek opposes any simplistic reading of the two thinkers, who are shown to have discovered the "kernel" of meaning concealed within the apparently unconnected "forms" of commodities (Marx) and dreams (Freud).

Žižek believes The Sublime Object of Ideology to be one of his best books,[2] while the psychologist Ian Parker writes that it is "widely considered his masterpiece".

[1] Anthony Elliott writes that the work is "a provocative reconstruction of critical theory from Marx to Althusser, reinterpreted through the frame of Lacanian psychoanalysis".