New Books in Critical Theory

'Overcoming the war of religion between analytics and continentals with a brand-new metaphysical insight, Graham Harman has restored to philosophy its greatness and value.'-Maurizio Ferraris, Italian continental philosopher and author of the Manifesto of New RealismThe Graham Harman Reader (Zero Books, 2023) is the essential compendium of shorter works by one of the most influential philosophers of the twenty-first century. The writings in this volume are split into seven chapters. The first concerns Harman's resistance to both downward and upward reductionism. The second chapter contains works that develop the specific fourfold structure of Object-Oriented Ontology. In the third, we find Harman's novel arguments for why causal relations between two entities can only be indirect. The fourth chapter discusses why aesthetics deserves to be called first philosophy. The fifth chapter contains Harman's underrated contributions to ethics and politics, and the sixth deals with epistemology, mind, and science. A concluding seventh chapter contains several previously unpublished writings not available anywhere else. Written in Harman's typical clear and witty style, the Reader is an essential resource for veteran readers of Harman and newcomers alike.Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

An abolitionist approach to STS and the history of the life sciences: this is the model that Cristina Mejia Visperas offers in her book, Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory (NYU 2022). By now, scientists’ experiments on captive men at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison are well known, thanks to the brave and important testimony of former captive-subjects in books like Allen Hornblum’s Acres of Skin. Building on this documentary work, Visperas turns attention to the prison experiments’ “optical rationality,” the way of seeing images that came out of a space that was simultaneously prison and laboratory. For Visperas, skin is a scientific apparatus and a metaphor for what science makes visible—and what it leaves as a void, namely, the endurance of anti-Black racism in the US, from slavery to mass incarceration. At its core, the book asks “What is the relationship between science and the project of freedom?”—and it hopes towards a reparative bioethics that dismantles scientific racism and the prison nation that it upholds.This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and graduate students at Vanderbilt University in the seminar “Critical Bioethics.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Against Ageism: A Queer Manifesto starts with what it is not: it is not a socio-economic argument against ageism, celebrating “the elderly” as economically viable. Author Simon(e) van Saarloos is not interested in natural arguments about age, which portray different age groups as valuable because of assumed inherent qualities. Instead, this manifesto starts with an experience of childhood sexual abuse, and moves on to dissect the ways in which constructions of “age” and “youth” function to support and reproduce white supremacist patriarchy. The book includes two reproductions of works by painter Samantha Nye."Age! What is good for? Absolutely nothing! (Apart from greasing the wheels of capitalist reproduction.) In this queer manifesto, Simon(e) van Saarloos weaves a wealth of militant sex-liberationist, afrofuturist, transfeminist and decolonial imaginaries into their anti-ageist sails, charting a confident course across contemporary society's generational hang-ups as well as visiting, in some more personal moments, their own."-Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation and Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against FamilySimon(e) van Saarloos is the author of Take ‘em Down (Publication Studio Guelph) and Playing Monogamy (Publication Studio Rotterdam). They were the curator of the 2021 exhibition on Abundance (“We must bring about the end of the world as we know it” – Denise Ferreira da Silva) in Het HEM and are also the host of *The Asterisk Conversations podcast.Lani Hanna is a doctoral candidate in Feminist Studies at University of California Santa Cruz. Her dissertation considers the strategies and tactics of queer, transfeminist, and left political counter-institutional archives that operate as community gathering spaces to survive against displacement in gentrifying cities. She lives in Oakland and is a part of the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair and Interference Archive Collective in Brooklyn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

How did British society become financialised? In Are We Rich Yet? The Rise of Mass Investment Culture in Contemporary Britain (U California Press, 2022), Dr Amy Edwards, a senior lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Bristol, analyses the cultural, social, and economic history of the 1980s to understand how British society became a nation of investors. The book ranges from well-known examples, such as Yuppies and privatisation of national utilities, through to everyday examples of share shops and investment clubs. Linking the analysis to broader trends in British and in financial history, alongside issues of class and gender, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in why money is so important to contemporary life.Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Today I talked to Todd McGowan about his book Enjoyment Right & Left (Sublation Media, 2022).While understanding the psychic structure of pleasure and desire might seem to be unrelated to grasping our current political crisis, Todd McGowan argues that the intrinsically excessive nature of enjoyment is critically important to this effort. In a world that appears completely divided between right and left, McGowan calls for a universal form of enjoyment that unites people in an egalitarian project. Todd McGowan's previous books include Emancipation After Hegel, Capitalism and Desire, and The Impossible David Lynch, among others. He teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont. Cody Skahan (cas12@hi.is) is a student in the MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow. His work focuses on environmentalism in Iceland, especially the social and political implications of the youth environmentalist movement in an arctic country that has created for itself a façade of being environmentally and socially progressive. More generally, his other interests span anywhere from critical theory, psychoanalysis, anarchism, cultural studies, anime studies, and applying theory through praxis. Cody co-hosts a social theory and anthropology podcast with two of his friends called Un/livable Cultures available wherever you get podcasts and has a blog at where he is trying to write more rather than just only read and talk about books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Cynicism is usually seen as a provocative mode of dissent from conventional moral thought, casting doubt on the motives that guide right conduct. When critics today complain that it is ubiquitous but lacks the serious bite of classical Cynicism, they express concern that it can now only be corrosively negative. The Function of Cynicism at the Present Time (Oxford UP, 2020) takes a more balanced view. Re-evaluating the role of cynicism in literature, cultural criticism, and philosophy from 1840 to the present, it treats cynic confrontationalism as a widely-employed credibility-check on the promotion of moral ideals--with roots in human psychology.Helen Small investigates how writers have engaged with Cynic traditions of thought, and later more gestural styles of cynicism, to re-calibrate dominant moral values, judgements of taste, and political agreements. The argument develops through a series of cynic challenges to accepted moral thinking: Friedrich Nietzsche on morality; Thomas Carlyle v. J. S. Mill on the permissible limits of moral provocation; Arnold on the freedom of criticism; George Eliot and Ford Madox Ford on cosmopolitanism; Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Laura Kipnis on the conditions of work in the university. The Function of Cynicism treats topics of present-day public concern: abrasive styles of public argument; debasing challenges to conventional morality; free speech, moral controversialism; the authority of reason and the limits of that authority; nationalism and resistance to nationalism; and liberty of expression as a core principle of the university.Helen Small is Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. She is the author of The Value of the Humanities (OUP, 2013) and The Long Life (OUP, 2007) (winner of the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism (2008) and the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize (2008)), and editor of The Public Intellectual (Blackwell, 2002). She has written widely on literature and philosophy, nineteenth-century fiction and public moralism, and the relationship between the Humanities, Sciences, and Social Sciences.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

You may not realise it, but you are probably already practicing anarchism in your daily life. From relationships to school, work, art, even the way you organise your time, anarchism can help you find fulfilment, empathy and liberation in the everyday.From the small questions such as 'Why should I steal?' to the big ones like 'How do I love?', Scott Branson shows that anarchism isn’t only something we do when we react to the news, protest or even riot. With practical examples enriched by history and theory, these tips will empower you to break free from the consumerist trappings of our world.Anarchism is not just for white men, but for everyone. In reading Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life (Pluto Press, 2022), you can detach from patriarchal masculinity, norms of family, gender, sexuality, racialisation, individual responsibility and the destruction of our planet, and replace them with ideas of sustainable living, with ties of mutual aid, and the horizon of collective liberation.Scott Branson is a queer and trans writer, translator, teacher, artist, and anarchist organiser, living in Western North Carolina. They translated Guy Hocquenghem's second book, Gay Liberation After May 68, as well as Jacques Lesage De La Haye’s The Abolition of Prison, and co-edited Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies. They are also a frequent co-host on the anarchist podcast The Final Straw Radio.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

How did Foucault’s thought develop in the 1960s? In The Archaeology of Foucault (Polity, 2022) Stuart Elden, a professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick, completes the series of intellectual biographies of Foucault he began with Foucault's Last Decade. Drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished and unavailable material, the book charts Foucault’s career from the end of his doctoral studies to his election to chair the Collège de France. In addition to considering key texts including Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and The Archaeology of Knowledge, the book discusses his work as a literary and artistic critics, key shifts in his politics, and his teaching career. The final text in a remarkable and brilliant series, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in Foucault. You can hear previous episodes Foucault's Last Decade, Foucault: The Birth of Power and The Early Foucault on the New Books Network, and Prof Elden blogs at Progressive Geographies.Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Traditionally, the definition of political cinema assumes a relationship between cinema and politics. In contrast to this view, author Mauro Resmini sees this relationship as an impasse. To illustrate this theory, Resmini turns to Italian cinema to explore how films have reinvented the link between popular art and radical politics in Italy from 1968 to the early 1980s, a period of intense political and cultural struggles also known as the long ’68.Italian Political Cinema: Figure of the Long '68 (U Minnesota Press, 2023) conjures a multifaceted, complex portrayal of Italian society. Centered on emblematic figures in Italian cinema, it maps the currents of antagonism and repression that defined this period in the country’s history. Resmini explores how film imagined the possibilities, obstacles, and pitfalls that characterized the Italian long ’68 as a moment of crisis and transition. From workerism to autonomist Marxism to feminism, this book further expands the debate on political cinema with a critical interpretation of influential texts, some of which are currently only available in Italian.A comprehensive and novel redefinition of political film, Italian Political Cinema introduces its audience to lesser-known directors alongside greats such as Pasolini, Bertolucci, Antonioni, and Bellocchio. Resmini offers access to untranslated work in Italian philosophy, political theory, and film theory, and forcefully advocates for the continued artistic and political relevance of these films in our time.Mauro Resmini is associate professor of cinema and media studies and Italian at the University of Maryland, College Park.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Folúkẹ́ Adébísí’s Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility (Bristol UP, 2023) details the ways in which the law is heavily implicated in creating, maintaining, and reproducing racialized hierarchies which bring about and preserve acute global disparities and injustices. This essential book provides an examination of the meanings of decolonization and explores how this examination can inform teaching, researching, and practicing of law. Furthermore, the book explores the ways in which the foundations of law are entangled in colonial thought and in its [re]production of ideas of commodification of bodies and space-time. Thus, it is an exploration of the ways in which we can use theories and praxes of decolonization to produce legal knowledge for flourishing futures.Kendall Dinniene is a fourth year English PhD student at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Their research examines how contemporary American authors respond to anti-fatness in their work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory