Originally published in 1965, Reading Capital is a landmark of French thought and radical theory, reconstructing Western Marxism from its foundations. Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosopher, maintained that Marx's project could only be revived if its scientific and revolutionary novelty was thoroughly divested of all traces of humanism, idealism, Hegelianism and historicism. In order to complete this critical rereading, Althusser and his students at the �cole normale sup�...

Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid– eighteenth to the mid–nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in that historical moment, the essays collected here reopen the question of how concepts of animal, vegetable, and human life, among other biological registers, had an impact on the Enlightenment project of thinking politics and economi...

With the publication of Specters of Marx in 1993, Jacques Derrida redeemed a longstanding pledge to confront Marx's texts directly and in detail. His characteristically bravura presentation provided a provocative re-reading of the classics in the Western tradition and posed a series of challenges to Marxism.In a timely intervention in one of today's most vital theoretical debates, the contributors to Ghostly Demarcations respond to the distinctive program projected...

Who is more important: the reader, or the writer? Originally published in French in 1966, Pierre Macherey‘s first and most famous work, A Theory of Literary Production dared to challenge perceived wisdom, and quickly established him as a pivotal figure in literary theory. The reissue of this work as a Routledge Classic brings some radical ideas to

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 developme...

A comprehensive overview of Slavoj Zizek's thought, including all of his published works to date.Provides a solid basis in the work of an engaging thinker and teacher whose ideas will continue to inform philosophical, psychological, political, and cultural discourses well into the futureIdentifies the major currents in Zizek's thought, discussing all of his works and providing a background in continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory necessar...

The essays collected in this volume develop the theoretical perspective initiated in Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's classic Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.Central to the argument of The Rhetorical Foundations of Society is the establishment of rhetorical tropes-such as metaphor, metonymy and catachresis-as the "non-foundational" grounds of society. From this basis, Laclau explores the state of social relations in today's heterogeneous society. Employing analytical p...

Marx's critique of political economy is vital for understanding the crisis of contemporary capitalism. Yet the nature of its relevance and some of its key tenets remain poorly understood. This bold intervention brings together the work of leading Marx scholars Slavoj iek, Frank Ruda and Agon Hamza, to offer a fresh, radical reinterpretation of Marxism that explains the failures of neoliberalism and lays the foundations for a new emancipatory politics.Avoiding trite comparisons be...

A Deep Plough:Unscrambling Major Post-Marxist Texts. From Adorno to Zizek

Tobin Siebers asserts that literary criticism is essentially a form of ethics. The Ethics of Criticism investigates the moral character of contemporary literary theory, assessing a wide range of theoretical approaches in terms of both the ethical presuppositions underlying the critical claims and the attitudes fostered by the approaches. Building on analyses of the moral legacies of Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, and Freud, Siebers identifies the various fronts on which ...

This collection of readings on the concept of ideology is brought together by the Marxist critic, Terry Eagleton. His introduction traces the historical evolution of ideology and examines in a more theoretical style the various meanings of the word and their significance. The readings begin with the first English translations of some of the writing of the French founder of the concept in the eighteenth century. They then move from the enlightenment to Hegel and Marxism, with particular emp...

A spirit is haunting contemporary thought – the spirit of Hegel. All the powers of academia have entered into a holy alliance to exorcize this spirit: Vitalists and Eschatologists, Transcendental Pragmatists and Speculative Realists, Historical Materialists and even ‘liberal Hegelians’.Which of these groups has not been denounced as metaphysically Hegelian by its opponents? And which has not hurled back the branding reproach of Hegelian metaphysics in its turn? Progressives, libera...