Critical Theory

This collection brings together contributions from social theorists in sociology, philosophy, and cultural studies to dissect and critique capitalist crises, left-liberalism, left-Thatcherism, resistance to risk-pooling, idealist philosophy, undemocratic...

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...

What is recognition and why is it so important? This book develops a synoptic conception of the significance of recognition in its many forms for human persons by means of a rational reconstruction and internal critique of classical and contemporary...

The unlivable is the most extreme point of human suffering and injustice. But what is it exactly? How do we define the unlivable? And what can we do to prevent and repair it? These are the intriguing questions Judith Butler and Frederic Worms discuss in...

This book critically analyzes the current historical conjuncture of neoliberal capitalism with an eye to its emergent alternatives. Can democracy and capitalism thrive together? Is socialism a viable and a desirable alternative? What are the forms of...

In capitalism human beings act as if they are mere animals. So we hear repeatedly in the history of modern philosophy. Indifference and Repetition examines how modern philosophy, largely coextensive with a particular boost in capitalism's development,...

This book provides a study of Walter Benjamin’s first philosophy in two senses: it focuses on his early philosophy as a source of insight into his later works, and it explores his thinking about the nature of truth, method, experience, the relation of...

Populism is a powerful force today, but its full scope has eluded the analytical tools of both orthodox and heterodox 'populism studies'. This book provides a valuable alternative perspective. It reconstructs in detail for the first time the sociological...

Untying Things Together helps to clarify the stakes of the last fifty years of literary and cultural theory by proposing the idea of a sexuality of theory. In 1905, Freud published his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the book that established...

Siegfried Kracauer stands out as one of the most significant theorists and critics of the twentieth century, acclaimed for his analyses of film and popular culture. However, his writing on propaganda and politics has been overshadowed by the works of his...

In the 1950s, long before his ascent to international renown, Michel Foucault published a scant few works. His early writings on psychology, psychopathology, and anthropology have been dismissed as immature. However, recently discovered manuscripts from...

In Althusser, The Infinite Farewell-originally published in Spanish and appearing here in English for the first time-Emilio de Ipola contends that Althusser's oeuvre is divided between two fundamentally different and at times contradictory projects. The...

The great ideological cliche of our time, Cesar Rendueles argues in Sociophobia, is the idea that communication technologies can support positive social dynamics and improve economic and political conditions. We would like to believe that the Internet...

Moral relativism is deeply troubling for those who believe that, without a set of moral absolutes, democratic societies will devolve into tyranny or totalitarianism. Engaging directly with this claim, Carlo Invernizzi Accetti traces the roots of...

It is often argued that contemporary media homogenize our thoughts and actions, without us being fully aware of the restrictions they impose. But what if the problem is not that we are all synchronized to the same motions or moments, but rather...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Taking an analytic and historical approach, this work develops and defends Althusserian critical theory. This theory, it is argued, produces knowledge of how a particular class of people, in a particular time, in a particular place, is dominated,...

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,...

Sorry no description is available for this book at this time.

Introducing his original theory of ‘minimal humanism’, Tom Whyman proposes a defence of humanist thinking for the Anthropocene and the age of AI.

Framed by brilliant readings of Gilles Deleuze and FElix Guattari, Gabriel Tarde, and Mikhail Bakhtin, Maurizio Lazzarato's Revolutions of Capitalism charts a new theory of contemporary capitalism and the politics against it. Originally published in...

Framed by brilliant readings of Gilles Deleuze and FElix Guattari, Gabriel Tarde, and Mikhail Bakhtin, Maurizio Lazzarato's Revolutions of Capitalism charts a new theory of contemporary capitalism and the politics against it. Originally published in...

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 argues that the received view of the distinction between freedom and power must be rejected because it rests on an untenable account of the discursive cognition that endows individuals with the capacity for autonomy and self-governed...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781478033851Author Laleh KhaliliFormat HardbackPage Count 128Imprint Duke University PressPublisher Duke University PressWeight(grams) 572g

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781478038696Author Laleh KhaliliFormat PaperbackPage Count 128Imprint Duke University PressPublisher Duke University PressWeight(grams) 445g

Exploring the critical potential of place in continental philosophy, Possibilities of Place in Continental Thought tests the political and ontological valences of this concept to go beyond the limits of existing geographical and phenomenological...

Singularities are isolated social bonds. They lack a common language with one another and express themselves with certainty. Strangeness is therefore no longer constitutive to the social bond. It has become elevated to the very principle of social order...

The COVID-19 pandemic and the measures introduced to purportedly contain its spread have wrought an unprecedented global social transformation.Authoritarian measures such as lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and the enforced wearing of facemasks, have led to...