Critical Theory

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...

The title of this collection, The Logic of Racial Practice, pays homage to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who coined the term habitus to name the pretheoretical, embodied dispositions that orient our social interactions and meaningfully frame our lived...

The title of this timely and thought-provoking book, a French bestseller, refers to schoolgirls sending text messages to their friends on their smart phones. Michel Serres, one of France's most important living intellectuals, uses this image to get at...

How does the theme of the other--as person, experience or alternative conceptual scheme-allow us to reassess the role of the self in literary texts? This book employs phenomenology and semiotics to argue that modern literature is strongly concerned with...

In this important and original book, Johann Michel paves the way for a greater understanding of Paul Ricoeur's philosophy by exploring it in relation to some major figures of contemporary French thought-Bourdieu, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault and...

By what aesthetic practice might post-politics be disrupted? Now is a moment that many believe has become post-racial, post- national, post-queer, and post-feminist. This belief is reaffirmed by recent events in the politics of diminished expectations,...

It is time to re-examine the French Revolution as a political resource. The historiography has so far ignored the question of popular sovereignty and emancipation; instead the Revolution has been vilified as a matrix of totalitarianisms by the liberals...

Philosophy, Myth and Epic Cinema looks at the power of cinema in creating ideas that inspire our culture. Sylvie Magerstadt discusses the relationship between art, illusion and reality, a theme that has been part of philosophical debate for centuries...

This volume marks a new chapter in the long-standing debate between Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault regarding argumentative methods and their political implications. The essays chart the undertheorized dialogue between the two philosophers on...

Chinese Subjectivities and the Beijing Olympics develops the Foucauldian concept of productive power through examining the ways in which the Chinese government tried to mobilize the population to embrace its Olympic project through deploying various sets...

The title of this collection, The Logic of Racial Practice, pays homage to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who coined the term habitus to name the pretheoretical, embodied dispositions that orient our social interactions and meaningfully frame our lived...

While the idea of total revolution seems anachronistic today, there is increasing consensus about the importance of new forms of political, ethical, and aesthetic resistance. In the past, resistance was often motivated as a form of protest against...

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...

Operating within the framework of postcolonial studies and decolonial theory, this important work starts from the assumption that the violence exercised by European colonialism was not only physical and economic, but also 'epistemic'. Santiago...

Many technologies and practices that define the Internet today date back to the 1990s - such as user-generated content, participatory platforms and social media. Indeed, many early ideas about the future of the Internet have been implemented, albeit...

The significant changes that have dominated the social and the scientific world over the last thirty years have brought about upheavals and critical re-appraisals that have proved quite positive in fostering 21st century thought. This interdisciplinary...

For over fifty years the concept of memory has played a crucial role in a large number of academic and societal debates. The Work of Forgetting: Or, How Can We Make the Future Possible? draws attention to the limits of the academic field of memory...

Metaphors of Invention and Dissension explores the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the postcolonial Algerian novel, examining six novels written by two Algerian authors of French expression, Tahar Djaout and Rachid Mimouni. Rajeshwari S...

Although the concept of productive imagination plays a fundamental role in Kant, German Idealism, Romanticism, Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, the meaning of this central concept remains largely undetermined. The significance of productive imagination is...

Omnipresent in popular culture, especially in film and literature, the theme of the 'end of the world' is often rejected from contemporary philosophy as hysterical apocalyptism. This volume attempts to show that, on the contrary, it is vital that we...

Subjects and Simulations presents essays focused on suffering and sublimity, representation and subjectivity, and the relation of truth and appearance in the twenty-first century. Inspired by the work of Jean Baudrillard, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and...

In Beyond the Public Sphere: Film and the Feminist Imaginary, the renowned philosopher and critical theorist Maria Pia Lara challenges the notion that the bourgeois public sphere is the most important informal institution between social and political...

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...

The Ends of Critique re-examines the stakes of critique in the 21st century. In view of increasingly complex socio-political realities and shifts in a fully globalized world, the roles and manners of critique also change. The volume offers an...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781786603838Author Phillip HomburgFormat PaperbackImprint Rowman & Littlefield InternationalPublisher Rowman & Littlefield International

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...

The Enigma of Justice: Freedom and Morality in the Work of Immanuel Kant, G.W.F Hegel, Agnes Heller, and Axel Honneth offers a novel perspective on the idea of justice. Claire Nyblom argues that justice is a cultural and historical constant, routinely...

Gilbert Simondon: Information, Technology and Media is a comprehensive introduction to the work of the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon. In particular it examines Simondon's original informational ontology, as developed from a synthesis of...

Creolizing Critical Theory highlights the Caribbean as a philosophical site from which, for centuries and until today, theorists have articulated pressing critiques of capitalism and colonialism. Some of these critiques, such as those of the Saramaka...

This book investigates the relationship of the work of Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud, centered around Benjamin's fractured subject. Through a reading of Benjamin's work on sovereignty and myth, it establishes the emergence of this fractured subject...

Endings are not just singular moments in time, but the outcomes of a process. And whatever a book's conclusion, its form has a history. Literary Conclusions presents a new theory of textual endings in eighteenth-century literature and thought. Analyzing...

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...

In Foucault's Futures, Penelope Deutscher reconsiders the role of procreation in Foucault's thought, especially its proximity to risk, mortality, and death. She brings together his work on sexuality and biopolitics to challenge our understanding of the...

Hegel's "highway of despair," introduced in his Phenomenology of Spirit, represents the tortured path traveled by "natural consciousness" on its way to freedom. Despair, the passionate residue of Hegelian critique, also indicates fugitive opportunities...

The problem of change recurs across Frantz Fanon's writings. As a philosopher, psychiatrist, and revolutionary, Fanon was deeply committed to theorizing and instigating change in all of its facets. Change is the thread that ties together his critical...

Recognition is one of the most debated concepts in contemporary social and political thought. Its proponents, such as Axel Honneth, hold that to be recognized by others is a basic human need that is central to forming an identity, and the denial of...

Fifty years ago, the two leading German philosophers and sociologists since the Second World War, Jurgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, embarked on a sweeping and contentious debate that would continue for decades. Their coauthored 1971 book Theory of...

Melancholia Africana argues that in the African and Afro-diasporic context, melancholy is rooted in collective experiences such as slavery, colonization, and the post-colony. From these experiences a theme of loss resonates-loss of land, of freedom, of...

From the post-War writings of Sartre and Blanchot to the post-structuralism of Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva, French philosophers have consistently debated the poetry of Stephane Mallarme, almost as a rite of passage. Alain Badiou, Jean-Claude...

In Brutalism, eminent social and critical theorist Achille Mbembe invokes the architectural aesthetic of brutalism to describe our moment, caught up in the pathos of demolition and production on a planetary scale. Just as brutalist architecture creates...