New Books in Critical Theory

Jan 04 2025 1862 ep. 55 mins 5k
New Books in Critical Theory Podcast artwork

Interviews with Scholars of Critical Theory about their New Books

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Todd McGowan, "Universality and Identity Politics" (Columbia UP, 2020)

Jan 04 2025 65 mins  
The great political ideas and movements of the modern world were founded on a promise of universal emancipation. But in recent decades, much of the Left has grown suspicious of such aspirations. Critics see the invocation of universality as a form of domination or a way of speaking for others, and have come to favor a politics of particularism—often derided as “identity politic

Stuart Elden, "The Early Foucault" (Polity Press, 2021)

Jan 03 2025 53 mins  
What were the key ideas and influences on Michel Foucault’s early career? In The Early Foucault (Polity Press, 2021), Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick and author of the Progressive Geographies blog, charts Foucault’s formative intellectual years leading up to the publication of the ground-breaking The History of Madness. The

Camille Robcis, "Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Jan 02 2025 64 mins  
On this episode, J.J. Mull interviews scholar and historian Camille Robcis. In her most recent book, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Robcis grapples with the historical, intellectual, psychiatric and psychoanalytic meaning of institutional psychotherapy as articulated at Saint-Alban Hospital in Franc

I. Augustus Durham, "Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius" (Duke UP, 2023)

Jan 02 2025 72 mins  
In Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius (Duke UP, 2023), I. Augustus Durham examines melancholy and genius in black culture, letters, and media from the nineteenth century to the contemporary moment. Drawing on psychoanalysis, affect theory, and black studies, Durham explores the black mother as both a lost object and a found subject often obscured when constituting a cultu

In Conversation: The Antinomies of Afropessimism

Jan 01 2025 63 mins  
In this episode, S. Sayyid talks with Barnor Hesse (Northwestern University) on the Antimonies of Afropessimism. Professor Barnor Hesse teaches in the department of African American Studies, at Northwestern University, he is the author of Raceocracy: White Sovereignty and Black Life Politics (forthcoming); co-editor of After #Ferguson, After #Baltimore: The Challenge of Black Death

Frederick Crews, "Freud: The Making of an Illusion" (Picador, 2018)

Dec 31 2024 62 mins  
The figure of Sigmund Freud has captivated the Western imagination like few others. One hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of Studies on Hysteria, the good doctor from Vienna continues to stir controversy in institutions, academic circles, and nuclear households across the world. Perhaps Freud’s sharpest and most adamant critic, Frederick Crews has been debating

Loneliness

Dec 30 2024 20 mins  
Loneliness is what results when a person is cut off from the living world. Ecological loneliness, in particular, is reciprocal - what we mete out always comes back to trouble us. However, as Laura Marris demonstrates, loneliness can entail the shadow work for understanding how a society based on capital and on growth, can create profound isolation. She suggests that this work can l

Emily Herring, "Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People" (Basic Books, 2024)

Dec 29 2024 66 mins  
Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People (Basic Books, 2024) is the first English-language biography of Henri Bergson, the philosopher who defined individual creativity and transformed twentieth century thought. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Henri Bergson became the most famous philosopher on earth. Where prior thinkers sketched out a p

Harvey J. Kaye, "The British Marxist Historians" (Zero Book, 2022)

Dec 29 2024 77 mins  
The British Marxist Historians, originally published in 1995, remains the first and most complete study of the founders of one of the most influential contemporary academic traditions in history and social theory. In this classic text, Kaye looks at Maurice Dobb and the debate on the transition to capitalism; Rodney Hilton on feudalism and the English peasantry; Christopher Hill on

Peter Salmon, "An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida" (Verso, 2020)

Dec 28 2024 79 mins  
Who is Jacques Derrida? For some, he is the originator of a relativist philosophy responsible for the contemporary crisis of truth. For the far right, he is one of the architects of Cultural Marxism. To his academic critics, he reduced French philosophy to “little more than an object of ridicule.” For his fans, he is an intellectual rock star who ranged across literature, polit