For a long time, the term 'ideology' was in disrepute, having become associated with such unfashionable notions as fundamental truth and the eternal verities. The tide has turned, and recent years have seen a revival of interest in the questions that ideology poses to social and cultural theory, and to political practice. Mapping Ideology is a comprehensive reader covering the most important contemporary writing on the subject. Including Slavoj Zizek's study of the development of the concept from Marx to the present, assessments of the contributions of Lukacs and the Frankfurt School by Terry Eagleton, Peter Dews and Seyla Benhabib, and essays by Adorno, Lacan and Althusser, Mapping Ideology is an invaluable guide to the most dynamic field in cultural theory.

Recent decades have seen a remarkable upsurge of interest in German Idealism in the English-speaking world. However, out of the three leading thinkers of the period directly after Kant-Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel-Schelling has received relatively little attention. In particular, the distinctive philosophical project of Schelling's late period, beginning in the 1820s, has been almost completely ignored. This omission has impaired the overall understanding of German Idealism. For it is during the late phase of his work that Schelling develops his influential critique of Hegel and his definitive response to the central problems post-Kantian thought as a whole. This book is the first in English to survey the whole of Schelling's late system, and to explore in detail the rationale for its division into a "negative philosophy" and a "positive philosophy." It begins by tracing Schelling's intellectual development from his early work of the 1790s up to the threshold of his final phase. It then examines Schelling's mature conception of the scope of pure thinking, the basis of negative philosophy, and the nature of the transition to positive philosophy. In this second, historically oriented enterprise Schelling explores the deep structure of mythological worldviews and seeks to explain the epochal shift to the modern universe of "revelation." Simultaneously, the book offers a sustained comparison of Hegel's and Schelling's treatment of a range of central topics in post-Kantian thought: the relation between a priori thinking and being; the role of religion in human existence; the inner dynamics of history; and the paradoxical structure of freedom.

In this book Peter Dews explores some of the most urgent problems confronting contemporary European thought: the status of the subject after postmodernism, the ethical and existential dimensions of critical theory, the encounter between psychoanalysis and philosophy, and the possibilities of a non-foundational metaphysical thinking. His approach cuts across the hostile boundaries which that usually separate different theoretical traditions. Lacan and the Frankfurt School are brought into dialogue, as are deconstruction and Ricoeur's hermeneutics. Current questions of language, communication and critique are located in a broader context, as the author ranges back over the history of modern philosophy, from poststructuralism-via Nietzsche-to German romanticism and idealism. A wide variety of issues is discussed in the book, including Habermas's views on the ethics of nature, Lacan's theory of Oedipal crisis, the relation between writing and the lifeworld in Derrida, and Schelling's philosophy of the "Ages of the World." The volume is also enlivened by forceful critiques of a range of currently influential thinkers, including Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, Rodolphe Gasche and Slavoj Zizek.