Louis Althusser is remembered today as the scourge of humanist Marxism, but that was his later incarnation, an identity formed by years grappling with the intellectual inheritance of Hegel and Catholicism. The Spectre of Hegel collects the writings of the young Althusser, before his final epistemological break with the philosopher’s work in 1953. Including his famed essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, The Spectre of Hegel gives a unique insight into Althusser’s engagement with a philosophy he would later renounce.

The current rise in new religions and the growing popularity of New Ageism is concomitant with an increasingly anti-philosophical sentiment marking our contemporary situation. More specifically, it is philosophical and psychoanalytic reason that has lost standing faced with the triumph of post-secular "spirituality". Combatting this trend, this treatise develops a theoretical apparatus based on Hegelian speculative reason and Lacanian psychoanalysis. With the aid of this theoretical apparatus, the book argues how certain conceptual pairs appear opposed through an operation of misrecognition christened, following Hegel, as "diremption". The failure to reckon with identities-in-difference relegates the subject to more vicious contradictions that define central aspects of our contemporary predicament. The repeated thesis of the treatise is that the deadlocks marking our contemporary situation require renewed engagement with dialectical thinking beyond the impasses of common understanding. Only by embarking on this philosophical-psychoanalytic "path of despair" (Hegel) will we stand a chance of achieving "joyful wisdom" (Nietzsche). Developing a unique dialectical theory based on readings of Hegel, Lacan and Žižek, in order to address various philosophical and psychoanalytic questions, this book will be of great interest to anyone interested in German idealism and/or psychoanalytic theory.

An expanded and updated version of the fullest account in English of the philosophico-political career of Louis Althusser and the fate of his controversial reconstruction of Marxism, containing a substantial new postscript and a comprehensive bibliography.

Prodigiously influential, Jacques Derrida gave rise to a comprehensive rethinking of the basic concepts and categories of Western philosophy in the latter part of the twentieth century, with writings central to our understanding of language, meaning, identity, ethics and values. In 1993, a conference was organized around the question, 'Whither Marxism?’, and Derrida was invited to open the proceedings. His plenary address, 'Specters of Marx', delivered in two parts, forms the basis of this book. Hotly debated when it was first published, a rapidly changing world and world politics have scarcely dented the relevance of this book.

Henri Lefebvre has been celebrated as one of the most influential social theorists of the twentieth century. Understanding Henri Lefebvre places Lefebvre in his historical and intellectual context and analyzes the extraordinary range of his work, across politics, philosophy, history, literature and culture. Particular emphasis is given to Lefebvre's trilogy of inspirational thinkers—Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche; his links to contemporaries such as Heidegger, Axelos and the Situationalists; and his critiques of existentialism and structuralism. Analysis of his writings on cities are balanced with those on rural communities, the production of space connected to ideas of time and history, and everyday life linked to the festival and cultural revolution. Understanding Henri Lefebvre offers the most wide-ranging and reliable account of this central theorist available.

What should Christian discourse look like after philosophical modernity? In one manner or another the essays in this volume seek to confront and intellectually exorcise the prevailing elements of philosophical modernity, which are inherently transgressive disfigurations and refigurations of the Christian story of creation, sin, and redemption. To enact these various forms and styles of Christian intellectual exorcism the essays in this volume make appeal to, and converse with, the magisterial corpus of Cyril O’Regan. The themes of the essays center around the gnostic return in modernity, apocalyptic theology, and the question of the bounds and borders of Christian orthodoxy. Along the way diverse figures are treated such as: Hegel, Shakespeare, von Balthasar, Przywara, Ricouer, Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, and Kristeva. Exorcising Philosophical Modernity: Cyril O’Regan and Christian Discourse after Modernity is a veritable feast of post-modern Christian thought.

GWF Hegel has long been considered one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the nineteenth century, and his work continues to provoke debate in contemporary philosophy. This new book provides readers with an accessible introduction to Hegel’s thought, offering a lucid and highly readable account of his Phenomenology of Spirit, Science of Logic, Philosophy of Nature, Philosophy of History, and Philosophy of Right. It provides a cogent and careful analysis of Hegel’s main arguments, considers critical responses, evaluates competing interpretations, and assesses the legacy of Hegel’s work for philosophy in the present day. In a comprehensive discussion of the major works, J.M Fritzman considers crucial questions of authorial intent raised by the Phenomenology of Spirit, and discusses Hegel’s conceptions of necessity and of philosophical method. In his presentation of Hegel’s Logic, Fritzman evaluates the claim that logic has no presuppositions and examines whether this endorses a foundationalist or coherentist epistemology. Fritzman goes on to scrutinize Hegel’s claims that history represents the progressive realization of human freedom, and details how Hegel believes that this is also expressed in art and religion. This book serves as both an excellent introduction to Hegel’s wide-ranging philosophy for students, as well as an innovative critique which will contribute to ongoing debates in the field.