6

The article begins with a discussion of the times and places of the marginal reception of Althusser’s work in Iran since the 1979 revolution. It goes on to draw on Althusser’s programmatic proposals on ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses in order to analyze the mutation of dominant ideologies, which studies exclusively focused on the singularities of official Shiite Islam have underestimated. Since the end of the war against Iraq and the opening to the world market in the 1990s, these new ideological interpellations have materialized the production of an Iranian “neo-liberal subject” and a new “humanist” discourse, where religious ideology has been fused with a psychological positivism, but also with a paradigm of “cultural development” reactivating presuppositions inherited from colonial history.