“The anti-Semitic figure of the Jew (to take THE example of this sublime object) bears witness to the fact that the ideological desire which sustains anti-Semitism is inconsistent, ‘self-contradictory’ (capitalist competition AND pre-modern organic solidarity, etc). In order to maintain this desire, a specific object must be invented which gives body to, externalizes, the cause of the non-satisfaction of this desire (the Jew who is responsible for social disintegration).
The lack of positive ontological consistency in this figure of the Jew is proved by the fact that the true relationship of causality is inverted with regard to the way things appear within the anti-Semitic ideological space: it is not the Jew who prevents Society from existing (from realizing itself as a full organic solidarity, etc); rather, it is social antagonism which is primordial, and the figure of the Jew comes second as a fetish which materializes this hindrance.
In this sense, one can also say that the Jew (not actual Jews, but the ‘conceptual Jew’ in anti-Semitism) is a Kantian ‘negative magnitude’: the positivization of the opposing force of ‘evil’ whose activity explains why the order of Good can never fully win. One of the most elementary definitions of ideology, therefore, is: a symbolic field which contains such a filler holding the place of some structural impossibility, while simultaneously disavowing this impossibility.”
Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (1997)