Critical Theory

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...

War is Hell is a study of the philosophy of war and peace, ranging critically from ancient peace thinking to today. The author uses a Socratic method, focused on political philosophy rather than on cultural or psychological aspects of war and peace...

When we criticize social institutions and practices, what kinds of reasons can we offer for such criticism? Political philosophers often assume that we must rely on universal moral principles that are not necessarily connected to the particular social...

In the wake of the new far-right populisms, the fragmentation of global narratives of progress, and the dismantling of economic globalization, there are signs that neoliberalism is beginning to enter its death throes or at least starting to fundamentally...

Originally published in 1974, Kojin Karatani's Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility has been among his most enduring and pioneering works in critical theory. Written at a time when the political sequences of the New Left had collapsed into crisis and...

The Counterhuman Imaginary proposes that alongside the historical, social, and institutional structures of human reality that seem to be the sole subject of the literary text, an other-than-human world is everywhere in evidence. Laura Brown finds that...

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...

First published in 1948, The State and the Citizen traces the development of the idea of the State as the ultimate source of authority. The author then proceeds to suggest the proper ends and limitation of State action. He analyses the conceptions of...

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...

Honorable Mention, Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, Modern Language Association Twenty-first-century philosophy has been drawn into a false opposition between speculation and critique. Nathan Brown shows that the key to...

A radical rethinking of the theory and the experience of mental images Here, in English translation for the first time, is Gilbert Simondon's fundamental reconception of the mental image and the theory of imagination and invention. Drawing on a vast...

The principal motif that runs throughout The Virtual Point of Freedom is a confrontation with the discourse of freedom, or, more specifically, the falsely transgressive ideal of a total emancipation that would know no constraints. Far from delineating a...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Gregor Moder's Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity is a lively entry into current debates surrounding the issues raised by Hegel's readings of Spinoza, from the Lacanians and Deleuzians to the Althusserians and Heideggerians. Hegel and Spinoza...

Jeff Diamanti describes the destructive relationship between climate and capital through the exponential growth of the petroleum industry over the last 40 years. Building on key insights in the environmental and energy humanities, Diamanti introduces the...

In ancient Rome, any citizen who had brought disgrace upon the state could be subject to a judgment believed to be worse than death: damnatio memoriae, condemnation of memory. The Senate would decree that every trace of the citizen's existence be removed...

Revisiting Guy Debord's seminal work, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Eric-John Russell breathes new life into a text which directly preceded and informed the revolutionary fervour of May 1968. Deepening the analysis between Debord and Marx by...

In 1980, at the end of the most intensely political period of his work and life, Louis Althusser penned Philosophy for Non-philosophers. Available here for the first time in English, Philosophy for Non-philosophers constitutes a rigorous and engaged...

Alain Badiou (1937- ) is one of the most high profile and controversial philosophers writing in France today. A leading light in the generation of thinkers who come of intellectual age in 1968, his work deftly draws on a wide range of intellectual...

'Ambitious, sophisticated, timely and downright inspirational.' - Philip Hayward, University of Technology Sydney, Okinawan Journal of Island Studies'A must read ... a new analytical agenda for the Anthropocene, coherently drawing out the power of...

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,...

The essays collected in this volume develop the theoretical perspective initiated in Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's classic Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Central to the argument of The Rhetorical Foundations of Society is the establishment of rhetorical...

Hegel's philosophy of history-which most critics view as a theory of inevitable progress toward modern European civilization-is widely regarded as a failure today. In Does History Make Sense? Terry Pinkard argues that Hegel's understanding of historical...

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, there appeared in Central Europe a generation of Jewish intellectuals whose work was to transform modern culture. Drawing at once on the traditions of German Romanticism and Jewish messianism, their thought was...

Louis Althusser argued that Marx initiated a transformation of philosophy, a new way of doing philosophy. This book follows that provocation to examine the way in which central Marxist concepts and problems from primitive accumulation to real abstraction...

Distilling into concise and focused formulations many of the main ideas that Mari Ruti has sought to articulate throughout her writing career, this book reflects on the general state of contemporary theory as it relates to posthumanist ethics, political...

Religion, Theory, Critique is an essential tool for learning about theory and method in the study of religion. Leading experts engage with contemporary and classical theories as well as non-Western cultural contexts. Unlike other collections, this...

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...

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...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781635901689Author Tiziana TerranovaFormat PaperbackPage Count 232Imprint Semiotext (E)Publisher Semiotext (E)

Critical social theory has long been marked by a deep, creative, and productive relationship with psychoanalysis. Whereas Freud and Fromm were important cornerstones for the early Frankfurt School, recent thinkers have drawn on the object-relations...

Bringing together authors from two intellectual traditions that have, so far, generally developed independently of one another - critical theory and new materialism - this book addresses the fundamental differences and potential connections that exist...

Slavoj Zizek's prolific comments on anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, scapegoating, popular nationalism, the refugee crisis, Eurocentrism, the War on Terror, neocolonialism, global justice, and rioting comprise a dizzying array of thinking. But what can we...

Adrian Johnston's trilogy Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism aims to forge a thoroughly materialist yet antireductive theory of subjectivity. In this second volume, A Weak Nature Alone, Johnston focuses on the philosophy of nature required for such a...

The concept of revolution marks the ultimate horizon of modern politics. It is instantiated by sites of both hope and horror. Within progressive thought, "revolution" often perpetuates entrenched philosophical problems: a teleological philosophy of...