Tag: Critique

Free Download A Critique of Liberal Cynicism: Peter Sloterdijk, Judith Butler, and Critical Liberalism by Will Barnes
English | August 12, 2022 | ISBN: 1793655669 | True EPUB/PDF | 164 pages | 0.3/1.4 MB
Where does Extreme Liberal Cynicism-so common in academic and popular culture-come from, and is it capable of solving the problems it identifies? A Critique of Liberal Cynicism: Peter Sloterdijk, Judith Butler, and Critical Liberalism identifies the motivations and resources within liberal cynicism and their potential for overcoming its pernicious extremes. Will Barnes describes Extreme Liberal Cynicism as a product of mourning, guilt, and the experience of powerlessness stemming from the trauma of holding liberal investments in a world in which these investments are vulnerable to ideological critique and seem to have failed.

Free Download Lubomír Dunaj, "Civilization, Modernity, and Critique: Engaging Jóhann P. Árnason’s Macro-Social Theory "
English | ISBN: 1032217723 | 2023 | 276 pages | PDF | 4 MB

Free Download Maria Margaroni, "Textual Layering: Contact, Historicity, Critique "
English | ISBN: 1498501338 | 2017 | 322 pages | EPUB | 1151 KB
Textual Layering: Contact, Historicity, Critique sets out to rethink our relation to textual tradition against the background of several contemporary developments, including the emergence of digital culture, the increasing spectacularization of psychic as well as social life, the renegotiation of historical thinking, and the precarious position of the theoretical humanities within academia. To this end, the volume re-invests the concept of "layering," a concept currently used in a wide range of fields, including metaphor studies and linguistics, cybernetics, the social sciences, art, and architecture. Drawing on existing definitions of "layering," the chapters in this book return to and re-appraise some of the most crucial concerns in the post-1960s theoretical scene: that is, concerns over the strained interplay between writing and the body; textuality and history; critique, différance and the feminine; memory, trace, and the immemorial. The aim of the diverse-often polemical-analyses carried out in this volume is to reactivate the critical force of textual tradition today through a renewed appreciation of its historical embeddedness, its libidinal sources, as well as its complex economy of separation and contact, diachronicity and synchronicity, (re)layering and de-layering.

Free Download Matteo Battistini, "Global Marx: History and Critique of the Social Movement in the World Market "
English | ISBN: 9004520694 | 2022 | 283 pages | PDF | 4 MB
Global Marx is a collective research on Marx’s account of capital’s domination through his critique of disciplinary languages, investigation of political structures and analysis of specific political spaces within the world market. His discourse appears here as global not only because global is the geography of the world market but also because Marx redefined the relationships between the spaces on which capital exerts its command. Global Marx

Free Download Richard Anderson-Connolly, "A Leftist Critique of the Principles of Identity, Diversity, and Multiculturalism"
English | ISBN: 1498590675 | 2019 | 248 pages | EPUB | 2 MB
Identity politics is a lightning rod in American society. To both its progressive supporters and conservative critics, it is seen as defining the agenda of the Left. Both sides are wrong. Identity politics is not a leftist project. Instead it enables the neoliberal political economy that has caused historic levels of inequality and triggered repression and mass incarceration to deal with the social wreckage. Identity politics is a form of biological essentialism, impeding morality built upon universal humanism and politics built upon solidarity.

Free Download Michel Foucault, ""What Is Critique?" and "The Culture of the Self" "
English | ISBN: 022638344X | 2024 | 208 pages | EPUB, PDF | 288 KB + 1278 KB
Newly published lectures by Foucault on critique, Enlightenment, and the care of the self.

Free Download Affective Capitalism: For a Critique of the Political Economy of Affect
English | 2023 | ISBN: 9819981735 | 387 Pages | PDF EPUB (True) | 7 MB
Drawing on Tarde’s and Deleuze’s monadology, this book investigates the affective turn of contemporary capitalism. The concept of affect provides critical insight to overcome the limitations of social constructivism and cognitive capitalism. Affective capitalism transforms the population’s everyday bodily experiences into quantitative metrics that can be observed, measured, and processed on a non-conscious register, turning them into dividuals prepared to react and be affected by specific information at a given moment. In an era where social wealth increasingly relies on the ‘social factory,’ algorithms and big data constitute the living labor beyond employment. This book argues that affect also holds a potential for dismantling today’s real subsumption of life by capital. The network effect, mostly actualized as a company’s market capitalization, is constantly traversed by the molecular becoming of affect, leading to new assemblages, such as free software movement, decentralized platforms, peer-to-peer networking, blockchain, and universal basic income.

Free Download Paola Rudan, "Woman: History and Critique of a Polemical Concept "
English | ISBN: 9004680403 | 2023 | 164 pages | PDF | 13 MB
The book follows the movements of the concept of "woman" from the Early modern to the post-colonial age, through the words of women who challenged its patriarchal definition, laying the groundwork for a feminist critique of the present.

Free Download Simona Stano, "Critique of Pure Nature "
English | ISBN: 3031450744 | 2023 | 147 pages | EPUB, PDF | 21 MB + 4 MB
This book challenges the Western contemporary "praise for Nature". From food to body practices, from ecological discourses to the Covid-19 pandemic, contemporary imaginaries abound with representations of an ideal "pure Nature", essentially defined according to a logic of denial of any artificial, modified, manipulated ― in short, cultural ― aspect.

Free Download Sarah Bianchi, "An Aesthetic Critique of Digital Enhancement: Government of the Self and Desire"
English | ISBN: 1666928313 | 2023 | 312 pages | EPUB, PDF | 547 KB + 2 MB
The socio-cultural phenomenon of digital enhancement, that is, the attempt to perfect the subject’s offline life by means of digital media, seduces people into participating in digitalization. Subjects paradoxically want to participate in digital change even though it is well known that digitalization also impairs their freedom and privacy, and this book investigates both the freedom-impairing and the freedom-enhancing aspects of digital enhancement. Sarah Bianchi provides an empirically informed critical aesthetic diagnosis, a perspective that makes the overlooked affect- and power-sensitive Janus face of subjectivity in digital enhancement perceivable: the subjects’ desire to be governed by the logic of perfection-that is, the heart of digital enhancement-and their simultaneous desire for self-government. To this end, An Aesthetic Critique of Digital Enhancement: Government of the Self and Desire makes Foucault’s "history of the present" in its Nietzschean genealogy productive for contemporary critical thought on digital enhancement. Through genealogical critique, this approach provides the needed semantics to question the costs of our digital present and to conceptualize how an enlightened agency might be critically constructed.