Books in the New Directions in Critical Theory series

Hartmut Rosa advances an account of the temporal structure of society from the perspective of critical theory. He identifies three categories of change in the tempo of modern social life: technological acceleration, evident in transportation, communication, and production; the acceleration of social change, reflected in cultural knowledge, social institutions, and personal relationships; and acceleration in the pace of life, which happens despite the expectation that technological change should increase an individual's free time.According to Rosa, both the structural and cultural aspects of our institutions and practices are marked by the "e;shrinking of the present,"e; a decreasing time period during which expectations based on past experience reliably match the future. When this phenomenon combines with technological acceleration and the increasing pace of life, time seems to flow ever faster, making our relationships to each other and the world fluid and problematic. It is as if we are standing on "e;slipping slopes,"e; a steep social terrain that is itself in motion and in turn demands faster lives and technology. As Rosa deftly shows, this self-reinforcing feedback loop fundamentally determines the character of modern life.

While post- and decolonial theorists have thoroughly debunked the idea of historical progress as a Eurocentric, imperialist, and neocolonialist fallacy, many of the most prominent contemporary thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School-Jurgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rainer Forst-have defended ideas of progress, development, and modernity and have even made such ideas central to their normative claims. Can the Frankfurt School's goal of radical social change survive this critique? And what would a decolonized critical theory look like?Amy Allen fractures critical theory from within by dispensing with its progressive reading of history while retaining its notion of progress as a political imperative, so eloquently defended by Adorno. Critical theory, according to Allen, is the best resource we have for achieving emancipatory social goals. In reimagining a decolonized critical theory after the end of progress, she rescues it from oblivion and gives it a future.

We invoke the ideal of tolerance in response to conflict, but what does it mean to answer conflict with a call for tolerance? Is tolerance a way of resolving conflicts or a means of sustaining them? Does it transform conflicts into productive tensions, or does it perpetuate underlying power relations? To what extent does tolerance hide its involvement with power and act as a form of depoliticization?Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst debate the uses and misuses of tolerance, an exchange that highlights the fundamental differences in their critical practice despite a number of political similarities. Both scholars address the normative premises, limits, and political implications of various conceptions of tolerance. Brown offers a genealogical critique of contemporary discourses on tolerance in Western liberal societies, focusing on their inherent ties to colonialism and imperialism, and Forst reconstructs an intellectual history of tolerance that attempts to redeem its political virtue in democratic societies. Brown and Forst work from different perspectives and traditions, yet they each remain wary of the subjection and abnegation embodied in toleration discourses, among other issues. The result is a dialogue rich in critical and conceptual reflections on power, justice, discourse, rationality, and identity.

The Hegelian-Marxist idea of alienation fell out of favor after the postmetaphysical rejection of humanism and essentialist views of human nature. In this book Rahel Jaeggi draws on the Hegelian philosophical tradition, phenomenological analyses grounded in modern conceptions of agency, and recent work in the analytical tradition to reconceive alienation as the absence of a meaningful relationship to oneself and others, which manifests in feelings of helplessness and the despondent acceptance of ossified social roles and expectations.A revived approach to alienation helps critical social theory engage with phenomena such as meaninglessness, isolation, and indifference. By severing alienation's link to a problematic conception of human essence while retaining its social-philosophical content, Jaeggi provides resources for a renewed critique of social pathologies, a much-neglected concern in contemporary liberal political philosophy. Her work revisits the arguments of Rousseau, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, placing them in dialogue with Thomas Nagel, Bernard Williams, and Charles Taylor.

Axel Honneth has been instrumental in advancing the work of the Frankfurt School of critical theorists, rebuilding their effort to combine radical social and political analysis with rigorous philosophical inquiry. These eleven essays published over the past five years reclaim the relevant themes of the Frankfurt School, which counted Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Jurgen Habermas, Franz Neumann, and Albrecht Wellmer as members. They also engage with Kant, Freud, Alexander Mitscherlich, and Michael Walzer, whose work on morality, history, democracy, and individuality intersects with the Frankfurt School's core concerns.Collected here for the first time in English, Honneth's essays pursue the unifying themes and theses that support the methodologies and thematics of critical social theory, and they address the possibilities of continuing this tradition through radically changed theoretical and social conditions. According to Honneth, there is a unity that underlies critical theory's multiple approaches: the way in which reason is both distorted and furthered in contemporary capitalist society. And while much is dead in the social and psychological doctrines of critical social theory, its central inquiries remain vitally relevant. Is social progress still possible after the horrors of the twentieth century? Does capitalism deform reason and, if so, in what respects? Can we justify the relationship between law and violence in secular terms, or is it inextricably bound to divine justice? How can we be free when we're subject to socialization in a highly complex and in many respects unfree society? For Honneth, suffering and moral struggle are departure points for a new "e;reconstructive"e; form of social criticism, one that is based solidly in the empirically grounded, interdisciplinary approach of the Frankfurt School.

Federico Finchelstein draws on a striking combination of thinkers-Jorge Luis Borges, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Schmitt-to consider fascism as a form of political mythmaking. At a moment when forces redolent of fascism cast a shadow over world affairs, this book provides a timely critical analysis of the dangers of myth in modern politics.

This book brings together a broad selection of Siegfried Kracauer's work on media and political communication, much of it previously unavailable in English. It features writings spanning more than two decades, from the 1930s to the early Cold War period.

Didier Fassin, Axel Honneth, and an assembly of leading thinkers examine how people experience, interpret, and contribute to the making of and the response to critical situations. Featuring analysis from below as well as above, from the inside as well as the outside, Crisis Under Critique is a singular intervention.

Didier Fassin, Axel Honneth, and an assembly of leading thinkers examine how people experience, interpret, and contribute to the making of and the response to critical situations. Featuring analysis from below as well as above, from the inside as well as the outside, Crisis Under Critique is a singular intervention.

Lorenzo C. Simpson offers a persuasive and powerful argument that hermeneutics is a valuable tool not only for critical theory but also for addressing many of the urgent issues of today. He shows its utility for unpacking intractable debates in the philosophy of science, multiculturalism, social epistemology, and racial and social justice.

Eva von Redecker reconsiders critical theory's understanding of radical change in order to offer a bold new account of how revolution occurs. She argues that revolutions are not singular events but extended processes: beginning from the interstices of society, they succeed by gradually rearticulating social structures toward a new paradigm.

Uncovering the melancholic tradition of the global left.

This book brings together leading scholars in social and political philosophy to develop new perspectives on recognition and its role in social life. It begins with a debate between Axel Honneth and Judith Butler, the first sustained engagement between these two major thinkers on this subject.

This book brings together leading scholars in social and political philosophy to develop new perspectives on recognition and its role in social life. It begins with a debate between Axel Honneth and Judith Butler, the first sustained engagement between these two major thinkers on this subject.

During the twentieth century, the view that assertions and norms are valid insofar as they respond to principles independent of all local and temporal contexts came under attack from two perspectives: the partiality of translation and the intersubjective constitution of the self, understood as responsive to recognition. Defenses of universalism have by and large taken the form of a thinning out of substantive universalism into various forms of proceduralism. Alessandro Ferrara instead launches an entirely different strategy for transcending the particularity of context without contradicting our pluralistic intuitions: a strategy centered on the exemplary universalism of judgment. Whereas exemplarity has long been thought to belong to the domain of aesthetics, this book explores the other uses to which it can be put in our philosophical predicament, especially in the field of politics. After defining exemplarity and describing how something unique can possess universal significance, Ferrara addresses the force exerted by exemplarity, the nature of the judgment that discloses exemplarity, and the way in which the force of the example can bridge the difference between various contexts. Drawing not only on Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment but also on the work of Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Jurgen Habermas, Ferrara outlines a view of exemplary validity that is applicable to today's central philosophical issues, including public reason, human rights, radical evil, sovereignty, republicanism and liberalism, and religion in the public sphere.

Does critical theory still need psychoanalysis? Amy Allen offers a cogent and convincing defense of its ongoing relevance. She draws on Freud, Klein, and Lacan to develop a more realistic strand of psychoanalytic thinking that centers on notions of loss, negativity, ambivalence, and mourning.

Capitalism on Edge offers a novel diagnosis of the current moment to reveal that the potential for sweeping transformation must come from an unexpected direction. Albena Azmanova demonstrates that capitalism is not on its deathbed, revolution is not in the cards, and utopianism cannot steer us toward a brighter future.

In The Experience of Injustice, the French philosopher Emmanuel Renault opens an important new chapter in critical theory. Inspired by Axel Honneth, Renault argues that a radicalized version of Honneth's ethics of recognition can provide a systematic alternative to the liberal-democratic projects of such thinkers as Rawls and Habermas.

Noelle McAfee uses psychoanalytic theory to explore the subterranean anxieties behind current crises and the ways in which democratic practices can help work through seemingly intractable political conflicts. Fear of Breakdown contends that politics needs something that only psychoanalysis has been able to offer.

C. Heike Schotten offers a critique of U.S. settler-colonial empire that draws on political, queer, and critical indigenous theory to reframe the concept of terrorism. She provides an anatomy of the War on Terror's moralism, arguing for a new interpretation of biopolitics that is focused on sovereignty and desire rather than racism and biology.

Ernst Bloch gives a striking account of materialism that traces emancipatory elements of modern thought to medieval Islamic philosophers' encounter with Aristotle. He argues that the great medieval Islamic philosopher Avicenna (Ibn Sina) planted the seeds of a radical materialism still relevant for critical theory today.

This book presents a new account of the significance and the human costs of work. A collaboration between experts in philosophy, social theory, and clinical psychology, it brings together empirical research with incisive analysis of work's political stakes to present a diagnosis of the pathologies of contemporary work and propose powerful remedies.

Verena Erlenbusch rejects attempts to define what terrorism is in favor of a historico-philosophical investigation into the conditions under which uses of this contested term become meaningful. Genealogies of Terrorism is an empirically grounded and philosophically rigorous critical history with important political implications.

Revives the key concept of reification from Marx and the Frankfurt School to spotlight the resistance to neoliberal capitalism now forming

Adrian Parr identifies the emancipatory potential of environmental politics both inside and outside existing structures and within opposing paradigms. Ultimately, environmental politics is the refusal to surrender life to the violence of global capitalism and militarism. This defiance can serve as the source for the birth of a new earth.

The first philosophers of the Frankfurt School famously turned to the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud to supplement their Marxist analyses of ideological subjectification. Since the collapse of their proposed "e;marriage of Marx and Freud,"e; psychology and social theory have grown apart to the impoverishment of both. Returning to this union, Benjamin Y. Fong reconstructs the psychoanalytic "e;foundation stone"e; of critical theory in an effort to once again think together the possibility of psychic and social transformation. Drawing on the work of Hans Loewald and Jacques Lacan, Fong complicates the famous antagonism between Eros and the death drive in reference to a third term: the woefully undertheorized drive to mastery. Rejuvenating Freudian metapsychology through the lens of this pivotal concept, he then provides fresh perspective on Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse's critiques of psychic life under the influence of modern cultural and technological change. The result is a novel vision of critical theory that rearticulates the nature of subjection in late capitalism and renews an old project of resistance.

Scholars in the humanities and social sciences have turned to ethics to theorize politics in what seems to be an increasingly depoliticized age. Yet the move toward ethics has obscured the ongoing value of political responsibility and the vibrant life it represents as an effective response to power. Sounding the alarm for those who care about robust forms of civic engagement, this book fights for a new conception of political responsibility that meets the challenges of today's democratic practice. Antonio Y. Vazquez-Arroyo forcefully argues against the notion that modern predicaments of power can only be addressed ethically or philosophically through pristine concepts that operate outside of the political realm. By returning to the political, the individual is reintroduced to the binding principles of participatory democracy and the burdens of acting and thinking as a member of a collective. Vazquez-Arroyo historicizes the ethical turn to better understand its ascendence and reworks Adorno's dialectic of responsibility to reassert the political in contemporary thought and theory.

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 exclusion and domination that structure contemporary societies. In a rare dialogue, these two philosophers explore the affinities and tensions between their perspectives to provoke new ideas for social and political change.Honneth sees modern society as a field in which the logic of recognition provides individuals with increasing possibilities for freedom and is a constant catalyst for transformation. Ranciere sees the social as a policing order and the political as a force that must radically assert equality. Honneth claims Ranciere's conception of the political lies outside of actual historical societies and involves a problematic desire for egalitarianism. Ranciere argues that Honneth's theory of recognition relies on an overly substantial conception of identity and subjectivity. While impassioned, their exchange seeks to advance critical theory's political project by reconciling the rift between German and French post-Marxist traditions and proposing new frameworks for justice.

What Is a People? seeks to reclaim "e;people"e; as an effective political concept by revisiting its uses and abuses over time. Alain Badiou surveys the idea of a people as a productive force of solidarity and emancipation and as a negative tool of categorization and suppression. Pierre Bourdieu follows with a sociolinguistic analysis of "e;popular"e; and its transformation of democracy, beliefs, songs, and even soups into phenomena with outsized importance. Judith Butler calls out those who use freedom of assembly to create an exclusionary "e;we,"e; while Georges Didi-Huberman addresses the problem of summing up a people with totalizing narratives. Sadri Khiari applies an activist's perspective to the racial hierarchies inherent in ethnic and national categories, and Jacques Ranciere comments on the futility of isolating theories of populism when, as these thinkers have shown, the idea of a "e;people"e; is too diffuse to support them. By engaging this topic linguistically, ethnically, culturally, and ontologically, the voices in this volume help separate "e;people"e; from its fraught associations to pursue more vital formulations.Together with Democracy in What State?, in which Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Kristin Ross, and Slavoj iek discuss the nature and purpose of democracy today, What Is a People? expands an essential exploration of political action and being in our time.

In On the Difficulty of Living Together, Manuel Cruz launches a nuanced study of memory and forgetting, defining their forms and uses, political meanings, and social and historical implications. Memory is not an intrinsically positive phenomenon, he argues, but an impressionable and malleable one, used to advance a variety of agendas. Cruz focuses on five memory models: that which is inherently valuable, that which legitimizes the present, that which supports retributive justice, that which is essential to mourning, and that which elicits renunciation or revelation. His methodical approach makes sense of memory's positive and negative effects, its contradictions, and its tensions. Cruz shows us that remembering is not necessarily an end in itself, nor is it a supreme value, immune to external influence. The exercise of memory guarantees nothing, though many insist it is a progressive act preventing the repetition of past mistakes. Tying the making of memory to the movements of history, Cruz prioritizes memory's political dimensions over its philosophical aspects and helps us remember its myriad uses.