Critical Theory

In Entre Nous Grant Farred examines the careers of international football stars Lionel Messi and Luis Suarez, along with his own experience playing for an amateur township team in apartheid South Africa, to theorize the relationship between sports and...

Axel Honneth is best known for his critique of modern society centered on a concept of recognition. Jacques Ranciere has advanced an influential theory of modern politics based on disagreement. Underpinning their thought is a concern for the logics of...

We are living in an age of crisis-or an age in which everything is labeled a crisis. Financial, debt, and refugee "crises" have erupted. The word has also been applied to the Arab Spring and its aftermath, Brexit, the 2016 U.S. election, and many other...

The Anthropocene marks the age of significant human impact on the Earth's ecosystems, dramatically underscoring the reality that human life is not separate from nature but an integral part of it. Culturally, ecologically, and socially destructive...

Notes to Literature is a collection of the great social theorist Theodor W. Adorno's essays on such writers as Mann, Bloch, Hoelderlin, Siegfried Kracauer, Goethe, Benjamin, and Stefan George. It also includes his reflections on a variety of subjects,...

While post- and decolonial theorists have thoroughly debunked the idea of historical progress as a Eurocentric, imperialist, and neocolonialist fallacy, many of the most prominent contemporary thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School-Jurgen...

In this significant new work in African philosophy, Christopher Wise explores deconstruction's historical indebtedness to Egypto-African civilization and its relevance in Islamicate Africa today. He does so by comparing deconstructive and African thought...

Democracy in the twenty-first century faces a number of major challenges, populism, neoliberalism and globalisation being three of the most prominent. This book examines such challenges by investigating how the conditions of democratic statehood have...

This volume in the Critical Theory and Contemporary Society series explores the arguments between critical theory and epistemology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Focusing on the first and second generations of critical theorists and...

Catastrophic climate change overshadows the present and the future. Wrenching economic transformations have devastated workers and hollowed out communities. However, those fighting for jobs and those fighting for the planet have often been at odds. Does...

Critique-a program of thought as well as a disposition toward the world-is a crucial resource for politics and thought today, yet it is again and again instrumentalized by institutional frames and captured by market logics. Technologies of Critique...

Across the West, hard-right leaders are surging to power on platforms of ethno-economic nationalism, Christianity, and traditional family values. Is this phenomenon the end of neoliberalism or its monstrous offspring? In the Ruins of Neoliberalism casts...

In The Experience of Injustice, the French philosopher Emmanuel Renault opens an important new chapter in critical theory. He brings together political theory, critical social science, and a keen sense of the power of popular movements to offer a...

The figure of the 'other' is fundamental to the concept of communication. Online or offline, communication, which is commonly defined as the act of sending or imparting information to others, is only possible in the face of others. In fact, the reason we...

This book offers a unique and timely reading of the early Frankfurt School in response to the recent 'affective turn' within the arts and humanities. Resisting the overly rationalist tendencies of political philosophy, it argues that critical theory...

Critically and comprehensively examining the works of Habermas and Foucault, two giants of 20th century continental philosophy, this book illuminates the effects of scientific reason as it migrates from its specialized institutions into society. It...

Written by members of the Social Imaginaries Editorial Collective, these programmatic essays showcase new critical interventions in understandings of social imaginaries and the human condition. They include a new comparative approach to theorizing...

Investigating the origins and development of Herbert Marcuse's dialectical approach vis-a-vis Hegel, Marx, and Freud as well as the central figures of the Frankfurt School, Sethness Castro chronicles the radical philosopher's lifelong activism. Beyond...

What can psychoanalysis, a psychological approach developed more than a century ago, offer us in an age of rapidly evolving, hard-to-categorize ideas of sexuality and the self? Should we abandon Freud's theories completely or adapt them to new findings...

Caroline Alphin presents an original exploration of biopolitics by examining it through the lens of cyberpunk science fiction.Comprised of five chapters, Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction is guided by four central themes: biopolitics,...

This book examines the long-standing belief in infinite scientific and technological progress and links it to the Enlightenment ideal of man as a universal being and subject of the universal world history, destined to become a 'master and possessor of...

What happens when the world around us feels fragmented? How can a person continue to respond positively to their environment when it seems to have lost its internal coherence? These questions lie at the heart of this innovative interpretation of some of...

This book brings into conversation geographically diverse theorists to question the meaning, purpose, and place of conceptual borders in philosophy. It shows how contemporary theory is constituted by a dynamic practice in which the boundaries created to...

This book explores intersections between contemporary critical theory and the disabled people’s Independent Living movement. The book helps strengthen critiques of the state, the market, and the family by grounding them in the struggles of disabled...

When Socrates was standing before the Athenian tribunal in 399 BC, he said in his defence that the opponents he feared most were the invisible ones, those who had been spreading rumors against him for years but none of whom were being brought to court –...

When Socrates was standing before the Athenian tribunal in 399 BC, he said in his defence that the opponents he feared most were the invisible ones, those who had been spreading rumors against him for years but none of whom were being brought to court –...

Deeply informed by jazz, Billie's Bent Elbow explores the nonsensical and nonsensuous in black radical thought and expression. Extending the encounter between black study, Frankfurt School critical theory, and sound studies staged in her first book Jazz...

A landmark work of critical theory about the Western university from the Southern Cone Renowned Chilean philosopher Willy Thayer’s La crisis no moderna de la universidad moderna, first published in 1996 and in an updated edition in 2019, is a landmark...

Deeply informed by jazz, Billie's Bent Elbow explores the nonsensical and nonsensuous in black radical thought and expression. Extending the encounter between black study, Frankfurt School critical theory, and sound studies staged in her first book Jazz...

This book reconstructs the concept and practice of dialectics as a means of grounding a critical theory of society. At the center of this project is the thesis of phronetic criticism or a form of reason that is able to synthesize human value with...

This book offers a conceptual interrogation of how capital navigates its cybernetic environment. Taking an immanent perspective, the book develops a unique synthesis between Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory and the critical theory tradition. Overwijk...

This book offers a conceptual interrogation of how capital navigates its cybernetic environment. Taking an immanent perspective, the book develops a unique synthesis between Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory and the critical theory tradition. Overwijk...

A vital response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this volume connects the neoliberal underpinnings of the pandemic to the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. By positioning the worst outcomes of the COVID-19 crisis in terms of neoliberal normativity,...