The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to critical theory:
Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered by many scholars to be his magnum opus. A. W. Moore, citing Bernard Williams's criteria for a great thinker, ranks Deleuze among the "greatest philosophers". His work has influenced a variety of disciplines across philosophy and art, including literary theory, post-structuralism and postmodernism.
Post-structuralism, sometimes referred as the French theory, is associated with the works of a series of mid-20th-century French continental philosophers and critical theorists who came to international prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. The term is defined by its relationship to the system before it—structuralism. Structuralism proposes that one may understand human culture by means of a structure—modeled on language —that differs from concrete reality and from abstract ideas—a "third order" that mediates between the two.
Steven Shaviro is an American academic, philosopher and cultural critic whose areas of interest include film theory, time, science fiction, panpsychism, capitalism, affect and subjectivity. He earned a PhD from Yale in 1981.
Critical management studies (CMS) is a loose but extensive grouping of theoretically informed critiques of management, business and organisation, grounded originally in a critical theory perspective. Today it encompasses a wide range of perspectives that are critical of traditional theories of management and the business schools that generate these theories.
Cultural geography is a subfield within human geography. Though the first traces of the study of different nations and cultures on Earth can be dated back to ancient geographers such as Ptolemy or Strabo, cultural geography as academic study firstly emerged as an alternative to the environmental determinist theories of the early Twentieth century, which had believed that people and societies are controlled by the environment in which they develop. Rather than studying pre-determined regions based upon environmental classifications, cultural geography became interested in cultural landscapes. This was led by Carl O. Sauer, at the University of California, Berkeley. As a result, cultural geography was long dominated by American writers.
Minority is a philosophical concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their books Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (1975), A Thousand Plateaus (1980), and elsewhere. In these texts, they criticize the concept of "majority". For Deleuze and Guattari, "becoming-minor(itarian)" is primarily an ethical action, one of the becomings one is affected by when avoiding "becoming-fascist". They argued further that the concept of a "people", when invoked by subordinate groups or those aligned with them, always refers to a minority, whatever its numerical power might be.
Rosi Braidotti is a contemporary philosopher and feminist theoretician.
The University of Minnesota Press is a university press that is part of the University of Minnesota.
Douglas Kellner is an academic who works at the intersection of "third generation" critical theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School and in cultural studies in the tradition of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, also known as the "Birmingham School". He has argued that these two conflicting philosophies are in fact compatible. He is currently the George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Jussi Parikka is a Finnish new media theorist and Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics at Winchester School of Art. He is also Docent of digital culture theory at the University of Turku in Finland. Until May 2011 Parikka was the Director of the Cultures of the Digital Economy (CoDE) research institute at Anglia Ruskin University and the founding Co-Director of the Anglia Research Centre for Digital Culture.
Nietzsche and Philosophy is a 1962 book about Friedrich Nietzsche by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in which the author treats Nietzsche as a systematically coherent philosopher, discussing concepts such as the will to power and the eternal return. Nietzsche and Philosophy is a celebrated and influential work. Its publication has been seen as a significant turning-point in French philosophy, which had previously given little consideration to Nietzsche as a serious philosopher.
Ian Buchanan is an Australian cultural theorist, currently serving as Director of the Institute for Social Transformation Research based at University of Wollongong. He has published works on Michel de Certeau, Gilles Deleuze and Fredric Jameson. Buchanan is the founding editor of the Deleuze Studies journal, as well as a number of important book series dedicated to the work of Gilles Deleuze.
Mark Poster was Professor Emeritus of History and Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, where he also taught in the Critical Theory Emphasis. He was pivotal to "bringing French critical theory to the U.S., and went on to analyse contemporary media."
Gillian Howie was a Professor in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool and Director of the Institute for Feminist Theory and Research. She is author of Essential Reorientations: feminism and dialectical materialism (2008), Deleuze and Spinoza: Aura of Expressionism (2002), editor of Critical Quarterly’s special issue on higher education, ‘Universities in the UK: Drowning by numbers’ (2005) and editor of Women: A Cultural Review’s special issue on ‘Gender and Philosophy’ (2003). She also co-edited Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration. Palgrave. ISBN 1-4039-1821-X, with the other co-editors Stacy Gillis and Rebecca Munford. She died of cancer 27 March 2013, aged 47.
What is Philosophy? is a 1991 book by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. The two had met shortly after May 1968 when they were in their forties and collaborated most notably on Capitalism & Schizophrenia and Kafka: Towards a Minority Literature (1975). In this, the last book they co-signed, philosophy, science, and art are treated as three modes of thought.
Cultural studies is a field of theoretically, politically, and empirically engaged cultural analysis that concentrates upon the political dynamics of contemporary culture, its historical foundations, defining traits, conflicts, and contingencies. Cultural studies researchers generally investigate how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power associated with or operating through social phenomena, such as ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation. Cultural studies views cultures not as fixed, bounded, stable, and discrete entities, but rather as constantly interacting and changing sets of practices and processes. The field of cultural studies encompasses a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and practices. Although distinct from the discipline of cultural anthropology and the interdisciplinary field of ethnic studies, cultural studies draws upon and has contributed to each of these fields.
Claire Colebrook, is an Australian cultural theorist, currently appointed Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. She has published numerous works on Gilles Deleuze, visual art, poetry, queer theory, film studies, contemporary literature, theory, cultural studies and visual culture. She is the editor of the Critical Climate Change Book Series at Open Humanities Press.
Gregg Lambert is an American philosopher and literary theorist, who writes on Baroque and Neo-Baroque cultural history, critical theory and film, the contemporary university, and especially on the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. Between 2008 and 2014, he was the founding director of Syracuse University Humanities Center, where he currently holds a research appointment as Dean's Professor of Humanities.
