In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek cites Blaise Pascal’s advice that doubting subjects should get down on their knees and pray, and then they will believe.
Pascal’s position is not any kind of simple proto-behaviorism, according to Žižek. The deeper message of Pascal’s directive, he asserts, is to suggest that once subjects have come to believe through praying, they will also retrospectively see that they got down on their knees because they always believed, without knowing it.
In this way, in fact, Žižek can be read as a consistent critic not only of the importance of knowledge in the formation of political consensus, but also of the importance of “inwardness” in politics
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