I will use Althusser’s- ideological State Apparatus to help me further argue the fact that the idea of islamophobia is a notion. It is systematically built in our culture, and muslims being terrorist or people to fear is not an inherent trait of Islam or muslims.
Some key points to argue are
How we perceive people is not given to us, rather it is structured by societal influences
The Ideological State Apparatus and how it relates to religion and how that relates to islamophobia, and this ‘war” of christians against muslims
and Misrecognition (méconnaissance). Basically how people in our society are taught to put muslims into a box even before they’re born. (to blame by media and rhetoric and lack of education in America
Althusser- ideology
-The United States is the repressive state apparatus because it functions massively and predominantly by repression. (Islam)
“Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their conditions of existence.” Page 23 althusser’s first thesis
“We admit that they do make allusion to reality, and that they need only be ‘interpreted’ to disocver the reality of the world behind their imaginary representation of that World (ideology-illusion/allusion.)
“Now I can return to a thesis which i have already advanced; it is not their real conditions of existence, their real world, that ‘men’ ‘represent to themselves’ in ideology, but above all it is their relation to those conditions of existence which is misrepresented to them there. It is this relation which is at the centre of every ideological, i.e. imaginary, representation of the real world. It is this relation that contains the ‘cause’ which has to explain the imaginary distortion of the ideological representation of the real world.” Page 24
“What is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live.” 24 West→ ISlam
“I now return to this thesis: An ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices. This existence is material.” 25
“ The individual in question behaves in such and such a way, adopts such and such a practical attitude, and, what is more, participates in certain regular practices which are those of the ideological apparatus on which ‘depend’ the ideas which he has in all consciousness freely chosen as a subject.” Page 26
“Individuals are always already subjects” Page 31, “ I have presented the functioning of ideology, and say: ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as subjects, which amount to making it clear that individuals are always- already interpellated by ideology as subjects, which necessarily leads us to one last proposition: individuals are always already subjects.” Page 31
“That an individual is always already a subject, even before he is born, is nevertheless the plain reality, accessible to everyone and not a paradox at all.” Page 31
Althusser, Louis. “On the Reproduction of the Conditions of Production.”Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses by Louis Althusser 1969-70, Monthly Review Press, www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm.