r/CriticalTheory

There is a question about what destigmatization should strive for with respect to people-category predication, and what actually happens to people-category predication during destigmatization. The worry is that some lives could become livable only by collapsing the livability of others.

I think the people-category predicative structures “C can be X” and “C cannot be X,” when installed as public meanings of the category itself, have a formally exclusionary structure.

If the public meaning of “women” includes “cannot be sexualizable,” then women who identify with “can be sexualizable” cannot live a life in which their identity is intelligible. Likewise, if the public meaning of “women” includes “can be sexualizable,” then women who identify with “cannot be sexualizable” cannot live a life in which their identity is intelligible.

The reasoning appeals to ◊A → □◊A in S5 modal logic. For reference, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-modal/

I use ⊨ for semantic entailment, ⊭ for failure of semantic entailment, ◊ for possibility, □ for necessity, ¬ for negation, ∧ for conjunction, and ∃ for existential quantification. Let Σ_C mean the public meaning, category rules, or socially available interpretation of people category C, and let P mean “X predicates C at the category level.” “C can be X” can be represented as Σ_C ⊨ ◊P. In S5, ◊P → □◊P, so once possibility is installed as part of the category meaning, that possibility is treated as necessarily available within the relevant modal frame. “C cannot be X” can be represented as Σ_C ⊨ ¬◊P, or equivalently Σ_C ⊨ □¬P.

By contrast, “C neither can nor cannot be X” should be represented as (Σ_C ⊭ ◊P) ∧ (Σ_C ⊭ ¬◊P). The public meaning of C entails neither that X is possible for C, nor that X is impossible for C. The category meaning leaves the matter unsettled.

This avoids the central exclusion problem because the first two structures install either X-possibility or X-impossibility into the public meaning of the category itself. If Σ_C ⊨ ◊P, then lives that require C to be publicly settled as not-X-readable lose intelligibility at the category level. If Σ_C ⊨ ¬◊P, then lives that require C to be publicly settled as X-readable lose intelligibility at the category level. The neutral structure refuses both category-level settlements by blocking the inference from membership in C to either X-possibility or X-impossibility. A person may still be X, or may understand themself as not X, but the category itself does not decide the matter.

There is a further complication about so-called negative identities. “Living as not sexualizable” is not necessarily a life defined by absence, lack, or mere negation. It can be a positive way of inhabiting embodiment, social presence, and public intelligibility. The appearance of negativity partly depends on which predicate is treated as primitive. If P means “sexualizable predicates C,” then “C cannot be sexualizable” appears as Σ_C ⊨ ¬◊P. But if Q means “not-sexualizable predicates C,” then that same form of life can be represented without a leading negation as Σ_C ⊨ ◊Q, with ◊Q → □◊Q in S5. Conversely, if Q is treated as primitive, “C can be sexualizable” can be represented through negation as Σ_C ⊨ ◊¬Q. The asymmetry is therefore not built into the forms of life themselves. It is partly produced by a linguistic convention that lets some identities appear positive while casting others as identities of negation. “Living as sexualizable” is also defined against “living as not sexualizable,” even if ordinary grammar makes only the latter look negative.

This structure can still be exclusionary in a thinner second-order sense, because it excludes projects that require one category-level predication to be installed as public meaning. Someone who needs “C can be X” to be true of the category as such, or who needs “C cannot be X” to be true of the category as such, will experience the neutral structure as a loss. That loss is less serious than the original exclusion problem because the neutral structure does not impose a sexual predicate, or its negation, on category members. It excludes rival category monopolies rather than excluding first-order lives.

There is also a related problem about the movement from existential observation to category predication. “There are some people who are women and are sexualizable” does not entail “women are sexualizable.” Formally, ∃x(Wx ∧ Sx) does not entail the generic or category-level predication G(W,S). The existence of some women who are sexualizable does not by itself make sexualizability part of the public meaning of “women.” But the absence of logical entailment does not prevent social movement from the existential observation to the category meaning. Repeated, prominent, or institutionally reinforced observations of women who are sexualizable can be read as evidence for the broader category predication, even though the inference is invalid as a matter of logic. A permitted observation about some members of a category can help stabilize a public meaning about the category as such.

This matters for destigmatization because a project can officially deny that it is installing a category-level meaning while nevertheless producing the conditions under which that meaning becomes socially available. It can say “some people who are women are sexualizable,” while repeated representation, recognition, and public habituation make the stronger category predication increasingly difficult to avoid. The formal distinction remains intact, but social interpretation does not reliably respect it.

This also gives some reason to favor eliminating gender categories, or at least sharply weakening their authority to settle what can or cannot be predicated of people as category members.

I am a student studying philosophy and pre-law, my dream has always to become a union lawyer. I read a lot of literature surrounding labor philosophy and other capitalistic critics.

Recently I let my friend borrow some Mark Fisher to start them out. We were pretty fucked up and talking about it one night and I told them how awful it all was. I went on a long rant about how after graduating I was deeply suicidal, a feeling I had never felt so strongly before. I come from a pretty upper middle class family, some of which don't have the best politics but I stay away from those family members. Anyways I have a lot of guilt surrounding that, not just because I was born into it but my behavior has also perpetuated the privilege I enjoy.

I said that obviously I didn't kill myself and I see that as I made the selfish decision. Every luxury I enjoy is at the suffering of others, and while I do try to practice smart shopping and consumerism I can't help but feel this lingering weight of the world. I think about how I'm only able to attend school because of the opportunities that have been presented to me from my privilege, whenever people compliment on the good I'm doing I feel as though...well what else would I have done? There are a lot of other factors that I find pretty bleak about my political and social standing, and just about the world in general. I talked about how I'm constantly depressed because of it, how unfair life is and I'm the one gaining from that unfairness. I made a joke that if the revolution knocked on my door I knew what was coming to me.

When I said this to my friend he looked pretty concerned. He told me that there's a reason people who think like me kill themselves and I'm too involved in politics.

But it's just hard to not look back at myself, my family, the environment I live in and not see how suffering is perpetuated from us. How we all contribute to the racism, misogyny, and classism that plagues our culture.

It's hard because this is my life. This is the only thing that wakes me up in the morning. It's what I'm studying and planning on devoting my life to. But sometimes, I do think about the suffering I create and feel there is no way to rectify it. I see myself as being alive and injustice to the world.

Or maybe I'm a privileged white girl who spent too much time reading alone in her room and I just need to get over myself lol

Anthony Teso argues in Platypus Review that DSA is not doing enough to break from the Democrats and reformist politics. Is the critique valid? Will the momentum behind DSA be captured by the Democratic Party?

"BY ANY SURFACE MEASURE, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has become a serious political force. As of February 2026, DSA said it had surpassed 100,000 members, and Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City’s 2025 mayoral election gave the organization its most visible municipal triumph to date.[1] Yet from a rigorous Marxist standpoint, the organization’s present political and organizational trajectory raises deep strategic concerns. The problem is not that its immediate demands are necessarily wrong. The problem is that the methods and structures it has adopted may systematically prevent those demands from ever being realized. This essay argues that DSA’s commitment to electoralism within the Democratic Party, its reformism without a developed theory of the state, its class composition, and its ideologically diffuse “big tent” model together forms a set of contradictions that Marxist analysis reveals as structural rather than accidental."

"The issue is not whether DSA can win elections, pass reforms, or radicalize a layer of activists. It plainly can. The issue is whether its dominant strategy builds the forms of working-class power capable of surviving collision with capital and the state. On that question, the doubts remain serious. A Marxist critique of DSA is therefore not a complaint that it wants too much; it is the harsher claim that, by tying socialist politics to institutions designed to absorb and domesticate them, it may be constructing the very machinery of its own containment."

James Scott's concept of legibility, the state's need to make complex social arrangements administratively visible and controllable, has a spatial dimension that deserves more attention. The built environment offers some of the clearest examples of what legibility destroys.

Kowloon Walled City is the extreme case. By the standard metrics of planning, including fire safety, sanitation, structural integrity, and legal tenure, it failed dramatically. But it also produced an extraordinarily dense relational fabric, a dynamic informal economy, and a spatial intricacy that has generated decades of documentation and fascination. Its neighbor, the Tung Tau Estate, a government housing tower complex built during the same time period, adequately met the standard planning metrics Kowloon failed, but has generated almost no cultural or documentary record at all. The planning measurements that condemned one and validated the other are structurally incapable of identifying the qualities that distinguish them. To clarify, the point is not that Kowloon Walled City was a good place to live, but that its spatial conditions (unmeasured by standard metrics) enabled complex, evolving human interaction.

What interests me is the epistemological dimension: we have built an entire evaluative apparatus that measures what industrial production provides and is silent about what it destroys. The metrics are not neutral instruments applied to a pre-existing reality. They are legibility devices that construct the reality they claim to measure, classifying living neighborhoods as slums and structurally dead housing as adequate.

The harder question: is the destruction of spatial vitality a contingent outcome of bad planning decisions, or is it a structural consequence of the organizational logic that governs how environments are produced? If the centralized, standardized, and industrial speed making process necessarily eliminates the qualities that incremental adaptive growth produces, then the problem isn't reformable through better design. It's embedded in the mode of production.

I explore this in the linked article and will make the connections more explicit as I develop future articles in this series. I'm interested in perspectives from anyone working at the intersection of critical theory and the built environment, particularly around Scott, Lefebvre, or Harvey.

Among these groups, or at least among those who sustain a career in them, there appears (based on my admittedly limited experience, so please correct me if I'm wrong) to be a very liberal, individualist ideology of "who cares, I am only the supplier, they can make their own 'decisions'". Personal 'choice' or not (and I would not, as someone close to addicts and am one myself to an extent, particularly with smoking and, worse, drinking, argue that these things are 'choices' in the way that many believe or want to believe they are), these industries are literally the venue through which many numb, forget, and destroy themselves as they try to survive capitalism, (post-?)colonialism, patriarchy, etc. I understand how, in extreme circumstances, this becomes a necessary profession, but I'd make a distinction between those who happily fuel others' addictions as long as it brings cash to their pockets (through wages or, especially, tips) and those who would leave these professions as soon as they can. When it comes to these industries, which deal with substances that are more chemically addictive than most, is it worth it to blame mostly those on top or, at the risk of jeopardizing those in genuinely desperate situations, is it necessary to target to intermediaries as well? Especially when one considers the power of the bartender or even the drug dealer (depending on the exact set of relations) to refuse service?

Review of

Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?
by Gabriel Rockhill
Monthly Review Press, 2025, 416 pp.

And:

The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West
by A.J.A. Woods
Verso, 2026, 256 pp.

I thought I’d share this here because the piece reads Frankenstein through a critical‑theory lens: not as a horror story, but as an example of how societies produce deviance.

Drawing on Shelley’s pacifist background, it asks whether the creature’s violence was socially manufactured...a product of exclusion, aesthetic norms, and disciplinary power...and whether the culture of the time could have even imagined a nonviolent alternative.

In that sense, it echoes Foucault’s analysis of how “abnormal” bodies are constructed and then punished.

But it argues that a different outcome was genuinely available, that the "creature" had a viable moral outcome the novel doesn't address.

This essay argues that "pornography" describes less a specific content than a mode of representation to satiate historically specific desires. I then use this definition to interpret a range of mass cultural media from "react videos" and "food porn" to Queer Eye and Superhero films. I argue that, in contrast to the original defenders of capitalism in the 18th century who thought that capitalism would serve as a corrective to our passions, capitalism has instead stoked them in increasingly spectacular and lascivious ways, particularly as its capacity to satiate our needs dwindles Reading this terrain of pornographies as a map of our collective longings , I argue, can offer some guidance to leftists trying to appeal downtrodden, yearning masses.

Part I addresses pornography as a contingent category and uses this to examine the reality show Queer Eye

Part II extends this analysis to the superhero genre and argues that despite the genre's obviously reactionary tropes, it contains glimmers of socialist longing

Part III (which appears next week) will discuss workplace sitcoms, fantasies of unalienated labor and how these efforts to stoke desire relate to Albert Hirschman's book which lends its title to this essay

Part IV (appearing in two weeks) shifts to Marx and Hegel to discuss alienation/asceticism and bourgeois entertainment as responses to the question of passions/interests raised by Hirschman.

Hi, I'm a student writing a master's thesis on the role of intellectuals in history and in Gramsci. For this reason, I'd like to dedicate my third and final chapter to postcolonial rereadings of Gramsci, and my advisor suggested I look for something on Indian rereadings. So, I'm looking for texts in Italian or English on postcolonial rereadings of Gramsci. I'm only familiar with Perry Anderson. Thanks ; ))))))))

The pessimistic tradition has a recurring motif: the exit. Schopenhauer's negation of the will. Mainlander's will-to-death. Von Hartmann's collective self-extinction. Each of these thinkers, in his own way, reached for the same solution - a final cessation, a passage into non-being. Suffering is the problem; non-being is the answer.

I want to suggest that this answer is less a conclusion than a habit. And like many habits of thought, it deserves critical scrutiny.

The concept of non-being is not derived from experience. We have never encountered nothing. No one has. Every moment of consciousness, by definition, is a moment of something. What we call "nothing" is always a concept generated by a mind that is already something - an abstraction built by subtracting everything from the current moment and imagining what remains. The problem is that nothing remains. And yet we treat this act of subtraction as if it refers to a real state that could, in principle, obtain.

This is exactly the kind of move that critical theory should examine: a concept that presents itself as a description of reality, but is in fact a reification of a cognitive operation.

Pessimism smuggles in a metaphysical comfort. The idea that suffering can be escaped through non-being relies on the assumption that non-being is a genuine possibility. But what if it isn't? What if "nothing" is not a state that can obtain, but merely the limit of our imagination - a thought we can think, but which corresponds to nothing real?

Modern physics, for what it's worth, is not helpful here. The quantum vacuum is not empty. Absolute emptiness appears to be physically incoherent. This isn't a proof, but it's a suggestive alignment: our most rigorous description of reality finds no room for the concept that pessimism has treated as its ultimate fallback.

Why this matters for pessimism. If non-being is not a real possibility, then the central promise of the pessimistic tradition, the idea that suffering can be ended, is called into question. Not because the suffering isn't real. It is. But because the exit may be a fiction, a conceptual escape hatch built into a system that has no actual exit.

This leaves us in an uncomfortable position. The pessimists of the past at least had the consolation of an ending. If we take non-being off the table, we are left with suffering that has no guaranteed terminus. Death becomes not a liberation, but a temporary interruption in a chain of experiences that, given the structure of reality, may have no final stop.

What I'm proposing. I'm not arguing that this is definitely the case. I'm arguing that critical thought should examine non-being with the same suspicion it brings to other unexamined concepts — progress, the self, the subject. What interests does this concept serve? What comfort does it provide? And what happens to our thinking if we refuse to grant it?

I explore this line of thought in my book Perpetual Sorrow, which is available for free at fracture-of-being.com. I'd be interested to hear whether this community finds the deconstruction of non-being a productive direction.

Hello!

I am a lowly political philosophy postgrad who has, in an act of genuine insanity (sorry mr foucault I know how you feel about that) chosen a critical theory sociology module and chosen an essay question on foucault. The question is...

Is the genealogy of critique proposed by Foucault a viable project? Does critique survive the operation?

I'm pretty worried that I don't fully understand his genealogy of critique (I've found reading crit theory scholars pretty hard because 1. I'm used to poli theory which loves clarity and 2. I am disabled and have a pretty poor working memory - I keep getting to the end of sentences and forgetting what they said at the start). As I understand it:

• Critique involves the relationship between knowledge, power and the subject.
• We would expect knowledge to free us from the coercive force of power, but in fact power is able to use knowledge to empower it's coercive force.

In the seminar on the subject, the lecturer seemed to describe it as a bit of a cycle where there is no truth at the end of the rainbow, just more levels of power.

At the moment, I'm thinking of making a bit of an argument that

1. the genealogy of critique is a viable project - it is important that critique is a continuous or cyclical process, constantly regenerating society, rather than a search for an answer. Acknowledging how power uses knowledge gives us a reason to continue asking questions.
2. Critique survives because, while knowledge can be used by power, we have also seen in recent times how misinformation can be wielded the same way (alternative facts, fake news), and in a world with the internet we cannot expect the moderation to be done for us.
3. Power's use of knowledge to coerce has become far easier in the age of the internet due to how easy it is for those in power to reach us. In this light, mistrust is a way of retaining our agency in whatever way we can and will, hopefully, ultimately reduce the coercive potential of knowledge and misinformation both.

My question is basically: am I barking up the wrong tree re: the theory and is my potential answer to the question totally off course?

Would be very appreciative of any support!!! : ) Thank you!

If you're interested in improving housing systems and housing policy, building sustainable working class power for the long term, or even in better understanding how power works in general, I highly recommend it.

I wrote a longer review in other subreddits, but reddit's filters take it down if I copy/paste it.

I am super interested in medical anthropology and the colonization of medical systems, i.e. the shift from land-based, indigenous medicines administered more locally to a hierarchical, research-dominant structure of medical authority. if anyone could recommend some readings/sources, I would be very grateful!

my background is psychology and I've only dipped a toe in anthropology but I would rather be thrown in the deep end and figure it out from there.

I tried posting this in ask anthropology, no bites.