Mapping Ideology assembles a contested field in which ideology can no longer be reduced to false belief imposed upon an otherwise transparent reality. Žižek’s introduction defines ideology as a generative matrix regulating the relation between the visible and invisible, the imaginable and unimaginable, while the volume traces competing accounts through Marxism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, feminism and theories of hegemony. Its methodological strength lies in staging conceptual antagonisms rather than resolving them into a single doctrine: ideology appears as material apparatus, misrecognition, reification, discourse, fantasy and practical attachment. The collection demonstrates that subjects may know very well how a system operates and nevertheless continue to reproduce it, displacing critique from error correction to the organisation of enjoyment, habit and social reality. It bridges political theory, cultural criticism and psychoanalysis by treating ideology not as an external veil but as the structure through which facts acquire coherence and alternatives become thinkable or impossible.
