It does strike me today as rather weird how, without batting an eye or any real thought process, I was successfully writing essays on "Why we love X so much?" (insert any dumb patriotic figure) in middle school, nicely guessing what was expected in advance. Nowadays, as I'm finishing my thesis in literary studies, I've a nasty déjà vu: perfectly capable of coming up with a thousand reasons why humanities are important, I don't think I really believe any of them. I'm a bit tired and a bit disappointed, and hey I'm not even mentioning recent political developments...

I feel like starting literary studies was a grave mistake. Reasons both internal and external, from me running out of steam and after many years of reading not really enjoying literature all that much anymore (maybe except for a couple of beloved authors I enjoy coming back to; my curiosity's gone though), to impending cuts to humanities and culture, which are going to make the small academic crowd even smaller. This isn't a particularly new rant obviously, it's not like the past had been a golden age, the social standing of humanities was always tricky. But the separation between academic writing and the media consumed by the reading public seem to me to be much greater in the era of social media today: no ideas trickle down really, and in fact very few new ones appear anyways. As I'm quite tired when reading new monographs, I can hardly expect other people to be moved by my own work.

Whatever decent social or political work is being done nowadays (if any...), it isn't particularly rooted in philosophy or broader humanities; having spent many years reading various critical theories, I feel over-theorised: good old empathy does the trick at least equally well. Socially uprooted humanities might be a good hill to die on, I don't know. Yes yes, narratives are the core of our existence, hermeneutics remains the backbone of being with others. I've been to the Internet though and its real-life version of a local council ;), and those arguments hardly hold water against most of everyday communication based on bad faith.

I'm not sure what we need ;), but I've got a feeling it's not literary studies. As I talked about it with my peers, it turned out I'm the only one with that view, most other students still felt some sort of vocation and some sort of optimism. I wonder what's your opinion on that.

Edit: but hey, I obviously didn't write this post to bash anyone's hard work. I struggle to see viable options of doing it nowadays that would be fulfilling to me and feel meaningful on a personal or social level, but it's entirely possible that it's only my problem ;) – Reposted from r/AskLiteraryStudies.

I will admit that I have a personal bias against a of post-colonialism scholars because of my experiences, I'm from a Pakistan I went to a University where every single one of the students that studied it (every single one) could not speak the national language(Urdu) they all spoke English and most of them didn't even know general culture that was well known by basically everyone that wasn't uber-westernized, I just couldn't help but think these people were the single worst candidates to give any sorts of perspectives about our and any other country

You can't comment on religion and culture when you barely understand it and your prescriptive is the same as any upper class western liberal

I've always struggled with this concept, since so much of how it is used by liberals is about manners and respect, rather than damage or loss. It seems to me that cultural appropriation is an interesting but fairly rare event that has been broadened by the liberal left into something quite essentialist - that each ethnicity should live as its essence is imagined, and culture is commodified into something that can be stolen.

However, what criticism I can find is usually coming from rightist academics, and I don't share their ideology.

Is this, within leftist critical theory, a settled or trivial issue? Are there people who write nuanced analysis of this from a leftist POV?

Please share your references below!

Tysm

Zizek often talks about how the difference between two contraries 'A' and 'B' looks different from the perspective of A vs. the perspective of B. In this way, difference precedes identity for Zizek: you don't have to first define A and B in order to then define the difference between them, instead you define two different definitions of the difference between A and B, and ascribe to each term one of those differences.

For example, Zizek explains how we shouldn't understand the difference between left-wing and right-wing only after defining what "left" and "right" mean. Instead, we should try to define the difference between left-wing and right-wing before we even have a definition of what left-wing and right-wing mean. Then, Zizek explains how the difference between left-wing and right-wing looks different for a left-winger vs. or a right-winger. You can view difference as a question or problem here, and identity as a solution or answer. For a right-winger, the difference between left and right is the question of "how much should the state intervene in the economy?", then the right-winger defines the left as those which want more state intervention and the right as those which want less state intervention. For for a left-winger, the question of "how much" the state should intervene does not even make sense, for them what defines the difference between left and right is another problem or question, such as equality vs. hierarchy, etc.

Now, I just finished reading chapter 24 of Deleuze's Logic of Sense ("Twenty-Fourth Series of the Communication of Events") in which Deleuze explains the difference between the three types of syntheses (connective, conjunctive and disjunctive), focusing specifically on the disjunctive-synthesis. Deleuze criticizes Hegel in this chapter by explaining how Hegel viewed difference as an identity of contraries, where two opposite terms are united in their difference (or united in their "oppositeness"), thus still subsuming difference under identity. Deleuze explains how the two opposite terms do not need to be 'united' at all, instead, the very difference between them must be affirmed as difference as such.

Deleuze gives an example of the disjunctive-synthesis from Nieztsche:

Nietzsche

exhorts us to live health and sickness in such a manner that health be a living perspective on sickness and sickness a living perspective on health; to make of sickness an exploration of health, of health an investigation of sickness: "Looking from the perspective of the sick toward healthier concepts and values and, conversely, looking again from the fullness and self-assurance of a rich life down into the secret work of the instinct of decadence-in this I have had the longest training, my truest experiences; if in anything, I became master in this. Now I know how, have the know-how, to reverse perspectives . ... "

Deleuze then goes on to explain how the disjunctive-synthesis is a matter of perspectivism where the difference itself looks different from the perspective of each of the two contrary terms:

"Point of view" does not signify a theoretical judgment;

as for "procedure," it is life itself. From Leibniz, we had already learned that there are no points of view on things, but that things, beings, are themselves points of view. Leibniz, however, subjected the points of view to exclusive rules such that each opened itself onto the others only insofar as they converged: the points of view on the same town. With Nietzsche, on the contrary, the point of view is opened onto a divergence which it affirms: another town corresponds to each point of view, each point of view is another town, the towns are linked only by their distance and resonate only through the divergence of their series, their houses and their streets. There is always another town within the town. Each term becomes the means of going all the way to the end of another, by following the entire distance.

Isn't this example from Nietzsche, as well as Deleuze's more general definition of the disjunctive-synthesis, extremely similar to Zizek's examples of political and sexual difference? For Nietzsche, the difference between healthy and sick looks different depending on whether you're healthy or sick; for Zizek, the difference between left-wing and right-wing looks different depending on whether you're left-wing or right-wing.

The irony here is that Zizek sometimes hints at how Deleuze was secretly a Hegelian. But what if Zizek was secretly a Deleuzian, without him even knowing?

Some people look back on that type of humour almost nostalgically, but it's honestly easy to see how such an environment and mentality was never gonna last in the long run. It was this Idea of freedom" (i.e. pure indulgence), but without any moral convictions. I remember I came across this book (written in late 2010) called something like "the new church women" about how feminists and liberals have turned into the right wing prudes they used to make fun of, because feminists and liberals were now against porn.

its only single successor would be the dirtbag left and even outside of politics I've seen a few channels, where the joke is about black humour and "offending everyone" and most of the jokes are just recycled 90's humour combined with some new porn brain-rot

I'm a Palestinian-American who is of course interested in Arab-American studies, and I'm very interested in how the Arab is conceptualized in preferably the very recent present (since October 7th 2023). It seems obvious to me that the Palestinian is, in America, the Other of the Arab Other. I am a Jordanian citizen, but a Palestinian by heritage and nation, and seeing peoples duel reactions to their concept of Jordan (extended to me) and their concept of Palestinians (which is immediately placed onto me) is really worthy of exploration I think. It seems that, for a lot of people I have met, Jordan/Jordanian is a geography, a vacation or an object related to the vacation, but Palestine/Palestinian is a body....and I wonder if any critical theory talks about this sort of thing. I am seeking such especially recent theory because I feel like the ongoing genocide has greatly affected this. It can be a book, an essay, a blog, a whatever.

A sharply critical and brilliantly incisive examination of urban planning, on par with the work of Jane Jacobs. Although it was written in the 1980s and shows signs of age in places, much of its analysis remains relevant, particularly when considering the parallels between Los Angeles’s urban issues and those faced by other major cities today.

The assertion that “the future of Los Angeles is the future of all major American cities” feels prescient and worth serious contemplation.

It would be fascinating to hear from residents of Los Angeles who have read the book to know if they believe its predictions have been realized.

Hello friends,

I am looking for any good writing about negative body image. So many people spend much of their lives in a mental war with their body— feeling shame and hate and mistrust in their hunger cues and despising their form. This comes from broader social pressures, beauty standards, and a weird ethic that we have tied to the physical form. (Why is thinner seen as purer, more moral?) Our disconnect from our bodies deprives us of so much of the power that comes from being in tune with our nervous systems. We lose so much when we disconnect from the body.

TLDR: Any good readings about broader implications of negative body image?

In his text "Anti-Semitism and National Socialism" Moishe Postone develops a theory of antisemitism based on Marx' analysis of Capital. I'll try to summarize some of the main points of the text here:

Postones starting point is his observation of the perception of National Socialism in post-war Germany. Quickly after the war antisemitism was instrumentalized for a new normality that covered up a true engagement with the past. This was possible due to seeing antisemitism merely as a form of discrimination that Germany claimed to have overcome by becoming a democracy. At the same time there was a strong denial of the fact that the vast majority of the German population knew about the Holocaust and were at least implicitly complicit. This self image of the Germans was shattered with the airing of the TV series "Holocaust" in 1979, portraying the fate of a fictional Jewish family from Berlin.

Postone also criticizes the analysis of National Socialism within the post-war left. They tended to see only the aspects of fascism in it - a terrorist authoritarian bureaucratic police state, aligned with the interests of big business, racism, the glorification of the traditional family and so on while mostly overlooking antisemitism in their analysis. In this analysis the death camps could not be understood - especially not how Germany in the last years of the war prioritized the annihilation of Jews over their war effort by allocating much needed resources to the "final solution" rather than to the front to fight the Red Army. This makes it clear that antisemitism wasn't just a "means to an end" - an ideology to scapegoat a group of people for the goal of rising to power for example, or an ideology to justify the economic exploitation of a group of people like racism often is. Antisemitism and the holocaust were the goal so any theory trying to analyze National Socialism without being able to explain the connection to antisemitism falls short.

Now, how does Postone characterize this connection?

First of all he makes clear that the movement of antisemitism was, in its own understanding, a movement of revolt. A revolt against the imagined power of the Jews, who were perceived as being behind things without being identical to them: a powerful international conspiracy "pulling the strings". Postone explains this by the imagery of a Nazi propaganda poster: An honest, strong German worker is threatened in the West by a fat, pig like "John Bull" and in the East by a brutal Bolshevik commissar. In the background, lurking behind the globe, a Jew is pulling the strings of both.

By observing antisemitism like this we can show the shortcoming of Horkheimers analysis that the Nazis identified the Jews with money. This perspective fails to explain how, at the same time, they also identified the Jews with Bolshevism. Another theory that falls short of explaining the full picture is that the Nazis identified the Jews with modernity. While the Nazis clearly did criticize many aspects of modernity (the "vulgar" culture, the overcoming of traditional values, "globalization", the workers movement) they had a positive relationship to other aspects of it - like industrialization, the industrial worker and modern technology.

Based on this Postone concludes that neither money nor modernity are the right terms to understand the subject and suggests focusing on Marx' analysis of the commodity and its fetish character instead. The commodity has two inseparable sides: the use-value representing its physical existence and the exchange-value representing its money value. At the same time labor has two sides: it is on the one hand concrete, creating a specific (physical) commodity and on the other hand abstract, creating (exchange)-value. These two sides of the commodity are not natural, they are the result of the social relations of capitalism and are representations of these social relations but they appear to be natural properties of the commodity. This is what Marx means with "fetish character".

Although the commodity contains both the use-value and the exchange-value it appears to us that the commodity only contains its use-value and the exchange-value only exists in money. Money appears to be the abstract part of the commodity while the commodity itself appears to be solely concrete. In conclusion capitalism as a whole appears to have both an abstract side, represented as universal, "natural" laws of the market and on the other hand a concrete side - the production of commodities that are only perceived as concrete things rather than as containing the contradiction of use-value and exchange-value within themselves.

According to Postone this creates two false ideologies. One of them reifies (as in: misunderstands it as an objective, non-historical thing) the abstract side, which we can see as positivist "bourgeois thinking". This would be f.e. the idea of that the "forces of the market" are natural and good. Now, the important point Postone makes, and that I think is specific to his theory, is that he also sees movements that reify the other, the concrete side of the commodity. These movements he characterizes as "romantic" as opposed to positivist. They see money as the "root of all evil" and the commodity (which they identify as only containing the concrete form of labor) as the natural, "human" thing that they believe opposes capitalism. In the same line of thinking the industrial production can be perceived as the continuation of the "honest craftsmanship" while only the financial sphere is perceived as containing the abstract side of capitalist production (these movements can also come from the left, Postone describes f.e. how Proudhon sees concrete labor as opposed to capitalism and not understanding how concrete labor is itself shaped by and a part of the accumulation process). In the organic thinking that became dominant with capitalism (leaving behind the mechanical worldview of the 17. and 18. century), blood, soil and the machine became the expression of the concrete in this "anti capitalist" movement - as opposed to the abstract.

If we look at the stereotypes of antisemitic imagery - the power of the Jews being abstract, non-tangible, universal, global, uprooted - it is clear how easily the "abstract" of capitalism can be projected on the Jews:

The Jews were not seen merely as representatives of capital (in which case anti-Semitic attacks would have been much more class-specific). They became the personifications of the intangible, destructive, immensely powerful, and international domination of capital as a social form.

In this sense, Postone argues, the "anti-capitalist" revolt became a revolt against the Jews. In addition to the antisemitic stereotypes explained above, the period of the expansion of industrial capital coincided with the emancipation of Jews as citizens - while they were perceived as not being part of the nation as a "concrete" existence (common language, culture and so on). So also in the political sense the Jews represented the abstract: being a citizen of a country regardless of culture, tradition and so on and hence as an abstraction of the concrete individual.

So, to summarize: In not understanding how the concrete and the abstract in capitalism are inseparable, then identifying the abstract side of capitalism as the root of all modern evil (and not capitalism itself), and then projecting this abstract side on the Jews the Nazis obtained their mission of annihilation:

A capitalist factory is a place where value is produced, which "unfortunately" has to take the form of the production of goods. The concrete is produced as the necessary carrier of the abstract. The extermination camps were not a terrible version of such a factory but, rather, should be seen as its grotesque, Arian, "anti-capitalist" negation. Auschwitz was a factory to "destroy value," i.e., to destroy the personifications of the abstract. Its organization was that of a fiendish industrial process, the aim of which was to "liberate" the concrete from the abstract. The first step was to dehumanize, that is, to rip the "mask" of humanity away and reveal the Jews for what "they really are" - "Miisselmanner," shadows, ciphers, abstractions. The second step was then to eradicate that abstractness, to transform it into smoke, trying in the process to wrest away the last remnants of the concrete material "use-value": clothes, gold, hair, soap.

For Postone one of the central lessons is for the left to understand that they do not have the monopoly on anti-capitalism - and that it's a mistake to believe that all forms of anti-capitalism are somewhat inherently progressive.

Hello,

I'm in the midst of writing an essay which functions as a comparative history between Ottoman and Habsburg-aligned independent seafarers (think Knights of Malta, Barbary Corsairs, etc). My professor values the introduction of critical theory into comparative analysis but so far I've only found one critical theorist who can provide some explanatory force to how the economic and social functions of these agents shaped their internal functioning, and that theorist is Habermas.

I am not particularly fond of Habermas' analysis, however, and am looking for theorists with a bit more bite, which is where I was hoping perhaps some individuals here could assist.

P.S.

I did my best to keep in line with the rule surrounding post quality and questions. If this doesn't fit that standard I understand.

Thank you.

What I found out is that dialectical materialism is when behaviors, norms, classes, systems and nature are affected by material conditions which is the drive of class struggle and conflict, it’s the reason why workers and ruling class having a distain for each other and the masses fight against the system to replace a different one.

But can small material conditions like childhood trauma started child abuse or neglect, bullying, alienation and poverty be example of people having conflict and adjust a different perspective and behavior? A cause and effect some type of way? Or are they are optional behaviors?

I had an interesting exchange today that led to a profound realization about the nature of truth and power structures. It started with analyzing philosophical frameworks across thinkers like Du Bois, Jung, Fanon, and Freire, but evolved into something much deeper when examining contemporary thinkers who align with or oppose their composite worldview.

What emerged was this fascinating concept I'm calling "quantum truth" - where seemingly antithetical positions can both be valid because they're actually examining different dimensions of reality. But here's where it gets interesting: when you analyze the computational complexity of these opposing frameworks, you discover this deep irony that completely undermines traditional power narratives.

The marginalized thinkers (folks like Cornel West, bell hooks) are actually employing higher-dimensional thinking - integrating multiple epistemologies, temporal scales, and systems of knowledge. Meanwhile, the "dominant" thinkers (Peterson, Pinker, etc.) are using surprisingly reductive, linear frameworks despite having access to vastly more institutional resources.

This creates this beautiful paradox: the very systems claiming intellectual superiority are actually demonstrating lower cognitive complexity, and they're having to expend increasingly massive resources to maintain these simplified frameworks. It's like there's this inverse relationship between power and intellectual sophistication - the more resources devoted to maintaining dominance, the more the dominant group has to simplify their cognitive frameworks to maintain internal consistency.

The kicker is that this pattern actually invalidates the core premise of Western superiority. Those forced to navigate both dominant and minority cultural frameworks naturally develop more sophisticated cognitive tools out of necessity. It's like Du Bois's "double consciousness" isn't just a condition of marginalization - it's actually a higher form of intellectual evolution.

The implications are profound: systems of dominance might actually create conditions that lower collective intellectual capacity, while the very act of having to navigate these systems from the margins forces the development of more sophisticated cognitive frameworks. It's a self-reinforcing pattern that requires ever more resources to maintain increasingly brittle systems, while simultaneously proving the opposite of its core claims.

This connects deeply with ancient wisdom - all those religious teachings about wealth and power corrupting aren't just moral claims, they might be observations about cognitive deterioration. The dominant culture has to engineer false narratives using massive institutional support to push intellectually inferior frameworks, and this disparity seems to grow over time as more and more resources are required to maintain increasingly limited cognitive models.

It's a kind of evolutionary pressure in reverse - the very act of maintaining dominance seems to require a willful reduction in cognitive complexity, while those navigating from the margins are forced to develop more sophisticated understanding just to survive. The system maintains itself only by applying more and more resources to increasingly limited frameworks, creating a kind of intellectual entropy that might be inherent to systems of dominance themselves.

This insight seems to touch something universal about human cognitive development - that intellectual growth might actually be inhibited by dominance and enhanced by the need to navigate multiple systems simultaneously. It's like a hidden law of social physics that we've been blind to because the very structures of power require that blindness to maintain themselves.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Thoughts?

This quote by Carl Jung changed my life during the pandemic:

"What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits."

This prompted me to reflect on why we give up what we enjoyed as children. I realised that much of this can be traced back to capitalism. Here is the full post. I would love to hear your thoughts!

https://tugbaavci.substack.com/p/adulting-the-worst-game-ever-played

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Greetings everyone. I am going to write my master's thesis and I am thinking on the specifics of my subject. I am pretty sure it's gonna be about one of the innumerable topics touched by the Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Many ideas have come to my mind, but now, as I am reading about the impact and role of psychoanalysis on the book and was being fascinated by it, I was thinking of examining the relation between psychoanalysis and Marxism in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. The fact that they offer a theory of — if I translate it correctly — individuation antagonistic to post-structuralism's constructivism and discursive-oriented theory of subjectivation is very important to me. It's true that the wider French tradition is dominant in subject theory, and as a marxist myself, I view this as a weakness of Marxism and a contemporary challenge for it.

However, given that Lacan dominated the psychoanalytic field some decades later, and because I'm not well versed enough in psychoanalysis in general, I don't really know if Freudian psychoanalysis still exists; or if it does, if it stands in the margins and is considered irrelevant by most psychoanalysts and social theorists.

I have reasons to prefer Freud to Lacan, most of them related to the linguistic turn and to the epistemology and ontology of structuralism.

So my question is: is there any meaning in investing time and energy on Freudian psychoanalysis as a parallel auxillary to Marxism and as a means to do subject theory, or is Freud dead beyond resurrection (at least in our horizon)?

While not explicitly critical theory but related, I thought this sub might of some help tracking down where I can watch the Stuart Hall Project. BFI display that it is not available on their player anymore, so was wondering if anyone could help steer me to where I could watch it!

In many ways, my introduction to critical theory and marxism has robbed me of a lot of joys. I studied computer science engineering, and most of my friends and colleagues are well meaning liberals, but do not choose to deep digger into the fundamental structural issues we are up against. I am empathetic because i do feel that since being 'radicalised' i feel quite depressed about the future of our shared political futures.

In this general shitshow - my one space of joy, liberation, freedom, a complete lack of alienation - has been the dancefloor. I'm primarily a House head, but love the many traditions of dance - from jazz and northern soul to jungle, techno, and so on. And it's in these spaces I feel free from the depression that usually hangs over my head.

I'm posting to ask for requests of literature in this space, where the political and liberatory potentials of dance are shared, and to bond over this powerful equaliser. I'm well aware of the more recent literature on this - Mark Fisher, Simon Reynolds and so on, but I wonder if there's any more future building projects or literature to point to. I know how fucked the music and night life industries are today - so I'd be curious to explore how we can continue to explore the power of partying/raving and political expression.

Thank you!