I have here argued for a relative devaluation of consciousness in recognising the power and significance of the unconscious of thought, and tried to show how Leibniz, Spinoza, and Hume can offer us peculiar and powerful resources for carrying out this shift in focus. However, I suggest this not because I think that consciousness is absolutely unimportant, but based on my sense that consciousness remains relatively overvalued in philosophical modernity – even in spite of the many ‘decentrings of the subject’ that have been pursued throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, and which can be traced back to the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ elaborated in the latter half of the nineteenth century by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. I think that this overvaluation is most readily apparent in political discussions, where, for example, it is not uncommon to hear ‘ideology’ treated as a matter of ‘contents of consciousness’. If that were an adequate conception, the problem of ideology would be quite simple, indeed, scarcely a problem at all: a direct, rational demonstration of the falsity of the false contents of one's consciousness would be all that is necessary in order to counteract or undo an ideological formation. Yet this is not what we find in experience. First, as I repeatedly emphasised in my reading of Spinoza's metaphysics of ideas, nothing false, insofar as it is positive, is destroyed by the appearance of the true insofar as it is true; more importantly, it is the affective determining power of an ideal configuration that is at issue in combating ideological formations, not veracity. More fundamentally, what this conception fails to grasp is that nearly everything important about ideologies is in fact operative at the unconscious levels I have been exploring in the chapters above. Ideology is only rarely a matter of what one consciously thinks (or even what one thinks one thinks). Much more often, it is a matter of habits of thinking, manners of perception, and obscure structures of desire, none of which need be conscious at all. Indeed, as we have seen, for the most part these operate unconsciously, informing and shaping the conscious experiences, understandings, volitions, and desires of minds that remain unaware of them.