Die blauen Flecken der Ideologiekritik

Abstract The following essay examines the centrality of Cervantes’ Don Quixote for the emergence of ideology as a concept as well as in traditional formations of ideology critique. Despite their vastly different readings of the Spanish novel, Marx, Lukács, Adorno, and Benjamin converge in their ambivalence towards the novel’s humor, the comic collision of illusion, and quotidian reality so painful for the delusional knight. If the novel’s comedy operates, on the one hand, with the power to dissolve phantasmagoric ideas, its epistemological potential would seem, on the other hand, to be particularly limited by reified relations of power and their critique. This potential of comedy stands to be reanimated against the backdrop of both contemporary cancel culture’s rebukes and current disputes around identity.