Pierre-Félix Guattari was a French psychoanalyst, political philosopher, semiotician, social activist, and screenwriter. He co-founded schizoanalysis with Gilles Deleuze, and ecosophy with Arne Næss, and is best known for his literary and philosophical collaborations with Deleuze, most notably Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the two volumes of their theoretical work Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Gilles Louis René 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.
Post-structuralism is a philosophical movement that questions the objectivity or stability of the various interpretive structures that are posited by structuralism and considers them to be constituted by broader systems of power. Although post-structuralists all present different critiques of structuralism, common themes among them include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of structuralism, as well as an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute its structures. Accordingly, post-structuralism discards the idea of interpreting media within pre-established, socially constructed structures.
Structuralism is an intellectual current and methodological approach, primarily in the social sciences, that interprets elements of human culture by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structural patterns that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel.
The Sokal affair, also known as the Sokal hoax, was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor, specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist and philosopher with an interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as hyperreality. Baudrillard wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, critique of economy, social history, aesthetics, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his most well-known works are Seduction (1978), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991). His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism. Nevertheless, Baudrillard had also opposed post-structuralism, and had distanced himself from postmodernism.
Continental philosophy is an umbrella term for philosophies prominent in continental Europe. Michael E. Rosen has ventured to identify common themes that typically characterize continental philosophy. These themes proposed by Rosen derive from a broadly Kantian thesis that knowledge, experience, and reality are bound and shaped by conditions best understood through philosophical reflection rather than exclusively empirical inquiry.
Paul Virilio was a French cultural theorist, urbanist, architect and aesthetic philosopher. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military. Virilio was a prolific creator of neologisms, most notably his concept of "Dromology", the all-around, pervasive inscription of speed in every aspect of life.
Simulacra and Simulation is a 1981 philosophical treatise by the philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, in which he seeks to examine the relationships between reality, symbols, and society, in particular the significations and symbolism of culture and media involved in constructing an understanding of shared existence.
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a 1972 book by French authors Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the former a philosopher and the latter a psychoanalyst. It is the first volume of their collaborative work Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the second being A Thousand Plateaus (1980).
"Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" was a lecture presented at Johns Hopkins University on 21 October 1966 by philosopher Jacques Derrida. The lecture was then published in 1967 as chapter ten of Writing and Difference.
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.
Semiotext(e) is an independent publisher of critical theory, fiction, philosophy, art criticism, activist texts and non-fiction.
20th-century French philosophy is a strand of contemporary philosophy generally associated with post-World War II French thinkers, although it is directly influenced by previous philosophical movements.
October is an academic journal specializing in contemporary art, criticism, and theory, published by MIT Press.
Sylvère Lotringer was a French-born literary critic and cultural theorist. Initially based in New York City, he later lived in Los Angeles and Baja California, Mexico. He is best known for synthesizing French theory with American literary, cultural and architectural avant-garde movements as founder of the journal Semiotext(e) and for his interpretations of theory in a 21st-century context. He is regarded as an influential interpreter of Jean Baudrillard's theories, among others.
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."
François Cusset is a writer, intellectual historian, and Professor of American Civilisation at the University of Nanterre.
Libidinal Economy is a 1974 book by French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. The book was composed following the ideological shift of the May 68 protests in France, whereupon Lyotard distanced himself from conventional critical theory and Marxism because he felt that they were still too structuralist and imposed a rigid "systematization of desires". Drastically changing his writing style and turning his attention to semiotics, theories of libido, economic history and erotica, he repurposed Freud's idea of libidinal economy as a more complex and fluid concept that he linked to political economy, and proposed multiple ideas in conjunction with it. Alongside Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, Libidinal Economy has been seen as an essential post-May 68 work in a time when theorists in France were radically reinterpreting psychoanalysis, and critics have argued that the book is free of moral or political orientation. Lyotard subsequently abandoned its ideas and views, later describing it as his "evil book".
