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190 books match the query 'Critical theory' and 18 start with c

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Capital at the Brink

Overcoming the Destructive Legacies of Neoliberalism

Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Uppinder Mehan, editors

Michigan Publishing Services, 2014

Capital at the Brink reveals the pervasiveness, destructiveness, and dominance of neoliberalism within American society and culture. The contributors to this collection also offer points of resistance to an ideology wherein, to borrow Henry Giroux’s comment, “everything either is for sale or is plundered for profit.” The first step in fighting neoliberalism is to make it visible. By discussing various inroads that it has made into political, popular, and literary culture, Capital at the Brink is taking this first step and joining a global resistance that works against neoliberalism by revealing the variety of ways in which it dominates and destroys various dimensions of our social and cultural life.

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Chimera

The Expanded Body for a New Ecosophy of the Arts

Marco Mancuso

Intellect Books, 2026

Reimagines the human relationship with technoscience and environment, offering fresh, non-hierarchical, and ethical perspectives beyond dystopian futures.

Exploring the evolving relationship between the human body, technoscience, and the environment, Chimera introduces the concept of the “expanded body” as a transdisciplinary meeting point between art, design, technology, and science. Through a critical examination of developments such as biomechanics, prosthetics, body hacking, and biotechnology, the book investigates how these innovations alter our bodily, sensory, and cognitive capacities. Providing a unique methodological systematization of the main ecological and posthuman philosophy theories, it argues for a new framework in which the human is deeply entangled with both human and nonhuman elements in a shared environment.

Building on ideas from both past and present—ranging from twentieth-century research to current discussions in neuroscience, design, and media theory—Chimera offers a thoughtful response to common fears about futures driven by technology and science. Instead of imagining a world dominated by machines or centered only on human needs, the book imagines fluid, queer, and nonhierarchical relational models between human bodies and the environment. Essential reading for scholars and students in contemporary art, new media, science and technology studies, and environmental and posthuman studies, Chimera also speaks to a wider audience interested in how technology and science are reshaping our understanding of life, identity, and ethical coexistence.

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Cisgender

Disorienting a Category

Perry Zurn

Duke University Press, 2026

In Cisgender, Perry Zurn turns an incisive yet playful eye toward the “norm” against which transgender gets defined. A cisgender person is informally understood as someone who doctors called male or female at birth, became a boy or girl, and finally lived as a man or woman—without fuss. It’s this “without fuss” that anchors the cis/trans binary as it has come to be understood and belies the complex relationship all people have with gender. How did this category arise? And what else might it do? Cisgender is the first book to trace the story of how cis entered contemporary gender lexicons. Utilizing unplumbed archives and fresh interviews, Zurn offers a critical history of the term from the 1990s to the present, deftly defamiliarizing and reimagining cis at the same time. This unique examination of cisgender is a must-read for all readers invested in trans life and the futures of gender.

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Climate Change Solutions

Beyond the Capital-Climate Contradiction

Diana Stuart, Ryan Gunderson, and Brian Petersen

University of Michigan Press, 2020

Climate Change Solutions represents an application of critical theory to examine proposed solutions to climate change. Drawing from Marx’s negative conception of ideology, the authors illustrate how ideology continues to conceal the capital-climate contradiction or the fundamental incompatibility between growth-dependent capitalism and effectively and justly mitigating climate change. Dominant solutions to climate change that offer minor changes to the current system fail to address this contradiction. However, alternatives like degrowth involve a shift in priorities and power relations and can offer new systemic arrangements that confront and move beyond the capital-climate contradiction. While there are clear barriers to a systemic transition that prioritizes social and ecological well-being, such a transition is possible and desirable.

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Climate Trauma

Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction

Kaplan, E. Ann

Rutgers University Press, 2015

Each month brings new scientific findings that demonstrate the ways in which human activities, from resource extraction to carbon emissions, are doing unprecedented, perhaps irreparable damage to our world. As we hear these climate change reports and their predictions for the future of Earth, many of us feel a sickening sense of déjà vu, as though we have already seen the sad outcome to this story.

Drawing from recent scholarship that analyzes climate change as a form of “slow violence” that humans are inflicting on the environment, Climate Trauma theorizes that such violence is accompanied by its own psychological condition, what its author terms “Pretraumatic Stress Disorder.” Examining a variety of films that imagine a dystopian future, renowned media scholar E. Ann Kaplan considers how the increasing ubiquity of these works has exacerbated our sense of impending dread. But she also explores ways these films might help us productively engage with our anxieties, giving us a seemingly prophetic glimpse of the terrifying future selves we might still work to avoid becoming.

Examining dystopian classics like Soylent Green alongside more recent examples like The Book of Eli, Climate Trauma also stretches the limits of the genre to include features such as Blindness, The Happening, Take Shelter, and a number of documentaries on climate change. These eclectic texts allow Kaplan to outline the typical blind-spots of the genre, which rarely depicts climate catastrophe from the vantage point of women or minorities. Lucidly synthesizing cutting-edge research in media studies, psychoanalytic theory, and environmental science, Climate Trauma provides us with the tools we need to extract something useful from our nightmares of a catastrophic future.

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Co-Motion

Re-Thinking Power, Subjects, and Feminist and Queer Alliances

Paola Bacchetta

Duke University Press, 2026

In Co-Motion, theorist Paola Bacchetta proposes a new lexicon for analyzing power, subjects and alliances. Employing what she calls ‘theory-assemblages’ to describe how diverse theoretical and political approaches inspire movements and produce different kinds of alliances, Bacchetta engages the inseparability of power relations—such as colonialism, capitalism, racism, caste, misogyny, and speciesism—and how their combinations, operability, and the analyses they require, shift in different contexts and lives of subjects. Focusing on France, India, Italy, and the US from the 1970s to the present, Co-Motion addresses a wide activist, artivist, and social movement archive— group statements, banners, pamphlets, graffiti, posters, poetry, sit-ins, films, art exhibits—to think and feel with the many ways that people, historically and today, come together to act. Through her expansive engagement with varied bodies of scholarship, sites of analysis, and kinds of reading, Bacchetta offers new approaches to analyze, confront, and transforming power, and to enact freedom.

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Cogito and the Unconscious

sic 2

Slavoj Žižek, ed.

Duke University Press, 1998

The Cartesian cogito—the principle articulated by Descartes that "I think, therefore I am"—is often hailed as the precursor of modern science. At the same time, the cogito's agent, the ego, is sometimes feared as the agency of manipulative domination responsible for all present woes, from patriarchal oppression to ecological catastrophes. Without psychoanalyzing philosophy, Cogito and the Unconscious explores the vicissitudes of the cogito and shows that psychoanalyses can render visible a constitutive madness within modern philosophy, the point at which "I think, therefore I am" becomes obsessional neurosis characterized by "If I stop thinking, I will cease to exist."

Noting that for Lacan the Cartesian construct is the same as the Freudian "subject of the unconscious," the contributors follow Lacan's plea for a psychoanalytic return to the cogito. Along the path of this return, they examine the ethical attitude that befits modern subjectivity, the inherent sexualization of modern subjectivity, the impasse in which the Cartesian project becomes involved given the enigmatic status of the human body, and the Cartesian subject's confrontation with its modern critics, including Althusser, Bataille, and Dennett. In a style that has become familiar to Žižek's readers, these essays bring together a strict conceptual analysis and an approach to a wide range of cultural and ideological phenomena—from the sadist paradoxes of Kant's moral philosophy to the universe of Ayn Rand's novels, from the question "Which, if any, is the sex of the cogito?" to the defense of the cogito against the onslaught of cognitive sciences.

Challenging us to reconsider fundamental notions of human consciousness and modern subjectivity, this is a book whose very Lacanian orthodoxy makes it irreverently transgressive of predominant theoretical paradigms. Cogito and the Unconscious will appeal to readers interested in philosophy, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and theories of ideology.

Contributors. Miran Bozovic, Mladen Dolar, Alain Grosrichard, Marc de Kessel, Robert Pfaller, Renata Salecl, Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupancic

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Communication and Capitalism

A Critical Theory

Christian Fuchs

University of Westminster Press, 2020

‘An authoritative analysis of the role of communication in contemporary capitalism and an important contribution to debates about the forms of domination and potentials for liberation in today’s capitalist society.’ — Professor Michael Hardt, Duke University, co-author of the tetralogy Empire, Commonwealth, Multitude, and Assembly

‘A comprehensive approach to understanding and transcending the deepening crisis of communicative capitalism. It is a major work of synthesis and essential reading for anyone wanting to know what critical analysis is and why we need it now more than ever.’ — Professor Graham Murdock, Emeritus Professor, University of Loughborough and co-editor of The Handbook of Political Economy of Communications

Communication and Capitalism outlines foundations of a critical theory of communication. Going beyond Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action, Christian Fuchs outlines a communicative materialism that is a critical, dialectical, humanist approach to theorising communication in society and in capitalism. The book renews Marxist Humanism as a critical theory perspective on communication and society.

The author theorises communication and society by engaging with the dialectic, materialism, society, work, labour, technology, the means of communication as means of production, capitalism, class, the public sphere, alienation, ideology, nationalism, racism, authoritarianism, fascism, patriarchy, globalisation, the new imperialism, the commons, love, death, metaphysics, religion, critique, social and class struggles, praxis, and socialism.

Fuchs renews the engagement with the questions of what it means to be a human and a humanist today and what dangers humanity faces today.

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Community Without Unity

A Politics of Derridian Extravagance

William Corlett

Duke University Press, 1989

Winner of the 1990 Foundations of Political Theory Section of the American Political Science Association "First Book Award"

Now available in paperback with a new preface by the author, this award-winning book breaks new ground by challenging traditional concepts of community in political theory. William Corlett brings the diverse (and sometimes contradictory) work of Foucault and Derrida to bear on the thought of Pocock, Burke, Lincoln, and McIntyre, among others, to move beyond the conventional dichotomy of "individual vs. community," arguing instead that community is best advanced within a politics of difference.

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Conceptual Activism

Radical Sense-Making and the Struggle for Gender

Davina Cooper

Duke University Press, 2026

The struggle over defining, naming, and using concepts is central to many political conflicts. In this original account of conceptual activism, Davina Cooper asks how new conceptual meanings are made, used, held, and experienced. Drawing on theoretical and empirical research, she analyzes the high-profile contemporary conflict in Britain over sex and gender. Here policymakers, regulatory bodies, community organizations, and academics fight to draw and redraw categories and their boundaries in a struggle that has spread across the census, speculative law reform, equality governance, and more. To understand the techniques and challenges that the advancement of new and controversial meanings faces, Conceptual Activism offers an innovative account of concepts and how meaning is reorganized in conditions of resistance, attentive to concepts’ materiality, plasticity, force, and unexpected encounters. As sex and gender meet economy, property, play, and activism, Cooper demonstrates how and why academic work should engage in conceptual activism.

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Conspiracy/Theory

Joseph Masco and Lisa Wedeen, editors

Duke University Press, 2024

In an era of intensified information warfare, ranging from global disinformation campaigns to individual attention hacks, what are the compelling terms for political judgment? How are we to build the knowledge needed to recognize and address important forms of harm when critical information is either not to be trusted or kept hidden? Rather than approach conspiratorial narrative as an irrational response to an obviously decipherable reality, Conspiracy/Theory identifies important affinities between conspiracy theory and critical theory. It recognizes the motivation people have—in their capacities as experts, theorists, and ordinary citizens—to search for patterns in events, to uncover what is covert and attend to dimensions of life that might be hiding in plain sight. If it seems strange that so many find themselves living in incommensurable, disorienting realities, the multidisciplinary contributors to Conspiracy/Theory explore how and why that came to be. Across history and geography, contributors inquire into the affects and imaginaries of political mobilization, tracking counterrevolutionary projects while acknowledging collective futures that demand conspiratorial engagement.

Contributors. Nadia Abu El-Haj, Hussein Ali Agrama, Kathleen Belew, Elizabeth Anne Davis, Joseph Dumit, Faith Hillis, Lochlann Jain, Demetra Kasimis, Susan Lepselter, Darryl Li, Louisa Lombard, Joseph Masco, Robert Meister, Timothy Melley, Rosalind C. Morris, George Shulman, Lisa Wedeen

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Constituting Critique

Kant's Writing as Critical Praxis

Willi Goetschel. Translated by Eric J. Schwab

Duke University Press, 1994

Kant’s philosophy is often treated as a closed system, without reference to how it was written or how Kant arrived at its familiar form, the critique. In fact, the style of the critique seems so artless that readers think of it as an unfortunate by-product—a style of stylelessness. In Constituting Critique, Willi Goetschel shows how this apparent gracelessness was deliberately achieved by Kant through a series of writing experiments. By providing an account of the process that culminated in his three Critiques, this book offers a new perspective on Kant’s philosophical thought and practice.

Constituting Critique traces the stages in Kant’s development to reveal how he redefined philosophy as a critical task. Following the philosopher through the experiments of his early essays, Goetschel demonstrates how Kant tests, challenges, and transforms the philosophical essay in his pursuit of a new self-reflective literary genre. From these experiments, critique emerges as the philosophical form for the critical project of the Enlightenment. The imperatives of its transcendental style, Goetschel contends, not only constitute and inform the critical moment of Kant’s philosophical praxis, but also have an enduring place in post-Kantian philosophy and literature.

By situating the Critiques within the context of Kant’s early essays, this work will redirect the attention of Kant scholars to the origins of their form. It will also encourage contemporary critical theorists to reconsider their own practice through an engagement with its source in Kant.

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Così fan tutte, An Opera of Mimetic Revelation

Isabel Díaz-Morlán

Michigan State University Press, 2025

Isabel Díaz-Morlán reads the characters of Così fan tutte, an opera by Mozart and Da Ponte, through the lens of René Girard’s theory of unconscious mimetic desire. The opera features couples who resemble those from classical literature, including Ovid’s Collatinus and Lucretia, Cervantes’s Anselmo and Camila, and Shakespeare’s Leonatus and Imogen. The book explores the sources of the libretto, comparing them with each other and with the libretto itself to detect the themes that reveal the mechanism of mimetic desire. This offers the groundwork for the analysis of key moments of the opera, in which the combined action of words, dramatic action and, above all, music, show how Ferrando and Guglielmo as well as Fiordiligi and Dorabella fall into mimetic rivalry, an incitement to desire and hypocrisy, always within a méconnaissance that prevents them from recognizing what is happening to them until the truth is finally unmasked.

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Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism

Jeremiah Morelock

University of Westminster Press, 2018

After President Trump’s election, BREXIT and the widespread rise of far-Right political parties, much public discussion has intensely focused on populism and authoritarianism. In the middle of the twentieth century, members of the early Frankfurt School prolifically studied and theorized fascism and anti-Semitism in Germany and the United States. In this volume, leading European and American scholars apply insights from the early Frankfurt School to present-day authoritarian populism, including the Trump phenomenon and related developments across the globe. Chapters are arranged into three sections exploring different aspects of the topic: theories, historical foundations, and manifestations via social media. Contributions examine the vital political, psychological and anthropological theories of early Frankfurt School thinkers, and how their insights could be applied now amidst the insecurities and confusions of twenty-first century life. The many theorists considered include Adorno, Fromm, Löwenthal and Marcuse, alongside analysis of Austrian Facebook pages and Trump’s tweets and operatic media drama. This book is a major contribution towards deeper understanding of populism’s resurgence in the age of digital capitalism.

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Critical Theory and Performance

Revised and Enlarged Edition

Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2007

Critical Theory and Performance presents a broad range of critical and theoretical methods and applies them to contemporary and historical performance genres—from stage plays, dance-dramas, performance art, cabaret, stand-up comedy, and jazz to circus, street theater, and shamanistic ritual. As the first comprehensive introduction to critical theory’s rich and diverse contributions to the study of drama, theater, and performance, the book has been highly influential for more than a decade in providing fertile ground for academic investigations in the lively field of performance studies.

This updated and expanded edition presents nineteen new essays by the field’s leading scholars and practitioners as well as new critical introductions by editors Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach. Reflecting recent trends in performance studies, this revised edition now includes discussions of critical race theory, postcolonial studies, gender and sexualities, and mediatized cultures. The resulting volume is a unique and indispensable tool for critics, teachers, and students that paves the way for future scholarship.

Janelle G. Reinelt is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick. Reinelt and Roach

Joseph R. Roach is Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of Theater and English at Yale University.

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Critical Theory of Communication

New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet

Christian Fuchs

University of Westminster Press, 2016

This book contributes to the foundations of a critical theory of communication as shaped by the forces of digital capitalism. One of the world's leading theorists of digital media Professor Christian Fuchs explores how the thought of some of the Frankfurt School’s key thinkers can be deployed for critically understanding media in the age of the Internet. Five essays that form the heart of this book review aspects of the works of Georg Lukács, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Axel Honneth and Jürgen Habermas and apply them as elements of a critical theory of communication's foundations. The approach taken starts from Georg Lukács Ontology of Social Being, draws on the work of the Frankfurt School thinkers, and sets them into dialogue with the Cultural Materialism of Raymond Williams.
Critical Theory of Communication offers a vital set of new insights on how communication operates in the age of information, digital media and social media, arguing that we need to transcend the communication theory of Habermas by establishing a dialectical and cultural-materialist critical theory of communication.
It is the first title in a major new book series 'Critical Digital and Social Media Studies' published by the University of Westminster Press.

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Critical Theory to Structuralism

Philosophy, Politics, and the Human Sciences

Edited by David Ingram

University of Chicago Press, 2010

From Kant to Kierkegaard, from Hegel to Heidegger, continental philosophers have indelibly shaped the trajectory of Western thought since the eighteenth century. Although much has been written about these monumental thinkers, students and scholars lack a definitive guide to the entire scope of the continental tradition. The most comprehensive reference work to date, this eight-volume History of Continental Philosophy will both encapsulate the subject and reorient our understanding of it. Beginning with an overview of Kant’s philosophy and its initial reception, the History traces the evolution of continental philosophy through major figures as well as movements such as existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. The final volume outlines the current state of the field, bringing the work of both historical and modern thinkers to bear on such contemporary topics as feminism, globalization, and the environment. Throughout, the volumes examine important philosophical figures and developments in their historical, political, and cultural contexts.

The first reference of its kind, A History of Continental Philosophy has been written and edited by internationally recognized experts with a commitment to explaining complex thinkers, texts, and movements in rigorous yet jargon-free essays suitable for both undergraduates and seasoned specialists. These volumes also elucidate ongoing debates about the nature of continental and analytic philosophy, surveying the distinctive, sometimes overlapping characteristics and approaches of each tradition. Featuring helpful overviews of major topics and plotting road maps to their underlying contexts, A History of Continental Philosophy is destined to be the resource of first and last resort for students and scholars alike.

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