In the field of World Cup studies, it is axiomatic that the competition itself and its manifold ancillary cultural products (songs especially) display what Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse called repressive desublimation. By that term, Marcuse meant, of course, the diversion of libidinal energies into timewasting guff such as football, rather than the pressing business of social critique and, ideally, revolution.

The official 2014 Fifa World Cup song, Pitbull, Jennifer Lopez and Cláudia Leitte's We Are One (Ole Ola), represents a departure. It is a brilliant immanent critique of the ideology on which the World Cup, and indeed any purportedly unifying global sporting event, rests. Consider the opening stanza:

"Put your flags up in the sky

And then wave 'em side to side

Show the world where you're from

Show the world we are one."

Clearly this functions dialectically to expose the contradictions inherent in the ideological construction of globalised sporting competitions as capable of uniting divided nations at the precise moment when those nations are divisively expressing their national identities in the most reified manner. Art, suggested Marcuse, was once a way to distinguish "that which is" from "that which is not". Today art (including official Fifa football anthems) has become a way to present that which is not as what is.

The writers' genius here is that while this song exposes the dialectical truth that the World Cup's ethos proselytises for that which is not under the guise of that which is, it simultaneously discloses that that which is not is not what is. Some say the song sucks, but they don't know their critical theory.

Even more brilliantly, the lie-dream invocation in the trope of flagwaving global unity emerging from feuding multiplicity sunders the ideologically freighted hyperreal construction of a sporting simulacrum that will be familiar to readers of philosopher Jean Baudrillard. Clearly, this hyperreal simulation juxtaposes piquantly with the all-too real world in which Uruguayan football fans send death threats to the Newcastle United defender Paul Dummett for clattering their compatriot, striker Luis Suarez.

Consider, too, the song's rap (itself a purportedly transgressive, musical subgenre which, through its very ubiquity in western culture has come to connote precisely its opposite, namely the repressive desublimation of libidinal flows) performed by Jennifer Lopez:

"Tonight watch the world unite, world unite, world unite

For the fight, fight, fight, one night

Watch the world unite,

Two sides, one fight and a million eyes."

For Marxists such as Marcuse that symbolic "fight" is the war of all against all that is the necessary condition of capitalistic competition in a socially Darwinian globalised economy, but it is here disavowed by Lopez. In four lines she flattens the contradictions of capitalism and, with bravura perversity, invokes "fight" as a condition of the transcendent unity she and Pitbull problematically invoke. Naturally, this non-fight masquerading as fight is chimerical, antithetical to the fight, both intellectual and physical, necessary in true revolutionary struggle.

What's going on here is what Slavoj Žižek calls fetishistic disavowal, which he defined thus: "I know it, but I refuse to fully assume the consequences of this knowledge, so that I can continue acting as if I don't know it." Consider:

"It's your world, my world, our world today,

And we invite the whole world, whole world to play."

There are two relevant disavowals here. First, Pitbull posits "our world", drolly suggesting that the ownership structures of late capitalism have been erased in favour of a communist society. Second, he issues an invitation that can only be made ironically, which is to say by simultaneously withdrawing what is offered.

In fact, not only have the teams that failed to qualify not been invited to play, for if they were that would contradict the elitist terms of the qualification that are disavowed so cunningly here by Pitbull, but also in reality, only Fifa functionaries, Brazilian bureaucrats and half the BBC will get into Brazil's stadiums gratis this summer.

The rest of us, victims of globalised social exclusion, will – in the manner envisaged by French situationist Guy Debord in his classic 1967 text Society of the Spectacle – be couch-prone voyeurs.