Of course Marx's youth did lead to Marxism, but only at the price of a prodigious break with his origins, a heroic struggle against the illusions he had inherited from the Germany in which he was born, and an acute attention to the realities concealed by these illusions. If “Marx's path” is an example to us, it is not because of his origins and circumstances but because of his ferocious insistence on freeing himself from the myths which presented themselves to him as the truth, and because of the role of the experience of real history which elbowed these myths aside.

It is the same with the ideological dream, with the determination of ideology as the dreamlike construction hindering us from seeing the real state of things, reality as such. In vain do we try to break out of the ideological dream by “opening our eyes and trying to see reality as it is,” by throwing away the ideological spectacles: as the subjects of such a post-ideological, objective, sober look, free of so-called ideological prejudices, as the subject of a look which views the facts as they are, we remain throughout “the consciousness of our ideological dream.” The only way to break the power of our ideological dream is to confront the Real of our desire which announces itself in this dream.

When you compare the history of the French Revolution with the history of German philosophy, you might be tempted to suppose that the French had so many actual affairs to attend to, for which they needed to remain awake, and so they sought the Germans and requested that we sleep and dream for them. Thus our German philosophy might seem nothing more than the dream of the French Revolution.