Maps and Mirrors: Topologies of Art and Politics explores the links and gaps between the aesthetic and the political at the intersection of philosophy and literature. Testing the major voices of aesthetic and literary theory, it raises important questions about the implicit political contexts and commitments of thinkers from Kant to de Man. "Political," as it is used here, points not to positions on the political spectrum but to the ways that a critic or thinker, explicitly or implicitly, says something about the good and the just.
Guiding the contributors is the wish to negotiate the problematic and questionable space between the aesthetic and the political that has fissured Western thought since Plato. Their essays offer a number of interesting and accessible examples of what is entailed in the post-structuralist critique of language. Addressing the work of figures from Adorno and Lukacs to Heidegger and Gadamer, the essayists adopt different perspectives on the ideological structures that inform the language of the texts.
Maps and Mirrors delves into the social and ideological implications of form and its relation to a text's conceptual and imagistic content. The essays complement one another to provide a tour of the complexities and richness of contemporary modes of critique.
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