r/CriticalTheory

Always interested in critique and making things better. One example im dealing with at the moment is the work of Masahiro Sakurai, the creator of kirby and super smash bros. Hes mades ome amazing games and i love kirby but he has faced notable critiicsim due to a lack of racial diversity in the smash games and some racial charcitures in both smash ultimate and his earlier games (game and watch original animation had to be removed, the use of charecters like donkey kong to represent black charcecters from street fighter) but i also dont want to think his games are garbage because of those aspects. Sorry if this is the wrong place for this but i appreciate critical theory for its ability to create dialogue through constructive critiicsm and was wondering if people had any essays, papers or articles on the subject or really just some advice

I've written an essay inspired by a dance performance I saw some months ago about the material grounds of the symbolic frame through which we all express ourselves as language users.

It made me think about why I feel like meaning, in the sense of grounding being in something more than just linear causality, is disappearing from the world. We no longer draw sense from the impossible, but increasingly only from the probable.

The essay concludes that we are experiencing the death of the subject not only as a source of meaning (as the death of the Author by Barthes) but also as a constituent part of semiotic processes. I frame the argument through Badiou, who defines the subject as an "agency" within material worlds that can transform the space of the possible, as opposed to just acting according to pre-defined norms, like contemporary AI. Would love to hear what you think, it's not a paid Substack!

Human-created mathematical tools and physical formulas are products of human thought. They function as instruments for describing certain classes of phenomena. Although they can achieve increasingly accurate approximations, they can never be identical with reality itself.

In mechanics, for example, the concept of “force” originally arises from human sensory experience. The first step is to quantify this feeling and correlate it with measurable quantities (such as volume, resistance, or displacement). In this way, force is spatialized and connected with numbers, making it calculable. We can see that every step of this process involves human practical activity.

Similarly, time is associated with phenomena such as planetary rotation, revolution, or even frequencies of light. In doing so, the internal subjective sense of time is transformed into an externally measurable and spatially representable structure, allowing time itself to be expressed and computed in graphical or mathematical form.

From this perspective, so-called “objective laws” are, from beginning to end, laws of human practical activity. Only because certain regularities are extremely stable do we come to regard them as a purely “objective” reality independent of human beings.

At the same time, I have always believed that any claim we make must be grounded in the fact that we are human. Anything beyond human existence is, for me, ultimately unknowable, and therefore indistinguishable from nothingness.

On the one hand, I tend to think that the so-called “objective laws” independent of human consciousness are something quite abstract and almost metaphysical, somewhat similar to Kant’s notion of the “thing-in-itself”: if something is fundamentally unknowable, then it is effectively equivalent to nothing.

On the other hand, any “objective law” that can be clearly articulated and understood is already a manifestation of human consciousness; it cannot exist independently of human cognition.

Although I have not deeply studied Hegel’s philosophy, I am inclined to understand “objective laws” as a dynamic process arising from the interaction between human consciousness and material reality in practice. In this process, consciousness first becomes aware of its own limitations and continuously sublates (aufhebt) them. It is therefore an ongoing, dynamic process of development.

I would appreciate hearing your thoughts on this.

We are still living in a world of colonialism. Colonial relations still shape global trade, resource extraction, debt, migration, language, education, and the production of knowledge itself. If post-colonialism is more than just a theory, what are your micro-actions toward post-colonialism? How do you challenge colonial assumptions, power relations, or ways of knowing in your everyday life?

For me, post-colonialism isn’t just about addressing colonialism as a standalone force. I see colonialism as historically intertwined with other systems of power; patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, and at times organized religion (thinking here of Weber’s *Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism*). These systems reinforce and reproduce one another in complex ways. Because of that, my own micro-actions are about learning colonial history, questioning whose knowledge is treated as legitimate, examining power relations that seem natural or inevitable, seeking our marginalized perspectives, and being conscious of how inequality is reproduced in everyday life. None of these actions are revolutionary on their own, but they feel like small ways of resisting structures that continue to shape the present. What do your own micro-actions toward post-colonialism look like?

Talked about the Übermensch and whether it’s something you become or an ideal, Zarathustra and the teaching of the overman, the “last man,” Nietzsche as the most-read philosopher in the world and why he speaks to young people’s souls in a way analytic philosophy doesn’t, and the Christian moral interpretation of the world. There are timestamps in the description

Foucault's account of biopower in History of Sexuality Vol. 1, and the disciplinary apparatus in Discipline and Punish, both rely on an institutional structure doing the observing and correcting, even once internalized, the Panopticon's point is that the inmate polices themselves because the institution might be watching.

Self-tracking removes even the institutional possibility of an external watcher in many cases; no warden, no doctor reviewing the sleep score, often not even another human who will ever see the data.

Has critical theory developed an account of biopower that doesn’t route through an institutional gaze at all, where the optimizing function operates purely through a person’s relationship with their own continuously generated data? Or does the literature argue an institution is still implicitly present (the platform, the device maker, eventually an insurer) even when no human within it is actually looking?

Primary text: Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1976).

I’m beginning to wonder whether identity politics and class politics, while theoretically reconcilable, become structurally antagonistic within representative democracy. Class politics tries to assemble a majority around broadly shared material interests—wages, housing, healthcare, ownership—whereas identity politics emphasizes harms and claims that are unevenly distributed among particular groups. Nancy Fraser famously argues that justice requires both redistribution and recognition, but she also warns that recognition can displace redistribution. Electoral systems may intensify that danger because parties must convert complex social conflicts into discrete constituencies, symbolic gestures and ... ad taglines.

Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels offer the harsher version of this critique: a society can become more racially or sexually representative at the top while remaining just as unequal overall. Representative democracy is particularly capable of delivering this kind of progress because replacing members of an elite is easier than challenging the class structure that makes an elite possible. Wendy Brown’s analysis of neoliberalism seems relevant here as well: when substantive popular sovereignty has been hollowed out, politics increasingly becomes competition over recognition, status and representation within an economic order that is treated as nonpolitical and unchangeable.

The obvious counterargument, associated in different ways with Stuart Hall, the Combahee River Collective and Chantal Mouffe, is that no class coalition exists outside race, gender, nationality and culture; “the working class” is itself a politically constructed identity. So perhaps the problem is not identity politics as such, but whether identity-based grievances are articulated into universal material demands or organized as separate claims upon representatives. Or has identity become the language through which class power protects itself from democratic challenge?

hi! enjoying principle of hope atm. i searched around a bit online but wasn’t able to find any reader’s guides for it (thinking kind of like Routledge’s for Hegels PS, or Ian Buchanan’s for AntiOedipus). Does smthng like that exist for Bloch or specifically principle of hope? tia!

All of our pseudoscientific attempts at measuring human intelligence and categorizing human beings by their supposed intelligence are bullshit and our entire meritocracy and our eugenics and all our other elitist ideas built upon this assumption are bullshit too.

We are often led to believe that whatever a person does is what that person is. A person who does some clever things is regarded as innately clever and we assume that they have always done clever things in the past and they will continue to do clever things in the future and so they are therefore more valuable than other people.

Anyone with a conscious living brain is capable of doing clever things, capable of intelligence. Just as there are no good people or evil people, which is another absurd reification of human behavior that we have yet to fully grow out of, there are no smart people or stupid people. There are just actions, things that people do. People will do something clever one day and do something stupid the next. People will do one thousand clever things in a row and then they will do the stupidest thing imaginable and create a catastrophe.

Most of us (hopefully) can agree that it is ignorant and dehumanizing and wrong to define a human being's worth by their disabilities - why should it by any different to do the same for their abilities? Why would reducing people to what they *can* do be any more acceptable than reducing people to what they *can't* do? It would seem to me that dehumanization is dehumanization, regardless of whether it is positive or negative; the superhuman is just as dehumanized as the subhuman.

Maybe it's time to stop thinking of intelligence as a thing that people have and start thinking of it as a thing that people do, something that all people are capable of, something you cannot measure with some universal metric, something that is relational and context-dependent. Conservative propaganda film Forrest Gump famously claimed that "stupid is as stupid does" but perhaps we shouldn't be trying to evaluate human worth at all and we shouldn't base our conceptions of human intelligence on a movie that repeatedly insists that the main character is mentally disabled just because he has a funny accent and doesn't understand the rules of football.

In Eros and Civilization, Eros becomes part of a larger argument against surplus repression, instrumental rationality, and the organization of life around domination, productivity, and managed need.

From what I understand, Marcuse wants to restore Eros to its proper place alongside Logos, and argues that liberation means freeing up the pleasure principle from forms of social domination. He distinguishes between “basic repression,” which may be necessary for civilization, and “surplus repression,” which comes from domination. He also imagines a fusion of Logos and Eros — a “rationality of gratification” built around cooperation and the free development of human needs. 

What I keep wondering is whether Marcuse really sees Eros as an actual emancipatory force, or whether it functions more as a critical counter-principle — a way of exposing what civilization has deformed.

In other words:

Is Eros in Marcuse something that could genuinely organize life otherwise?
Or is it mostly a theoretical and utopian pressure against the existing order?

I’m also curious how people here read the connection between Eros and politics in Marcuse.

Does he really think liberation would involve a transformed erotic relation to life, labor, and the body?
Or is “Eros” doing more metaphorical work than practical work in the text?

This essay argues that “being a good person” is not enough to change society in any meaningful structural sense. It distinguishes between individual moral behavior ("micro-morality") - being honest, kind, ethical in daily life - and large-scale social change ("macro-morality"), which requires collective action and engagement with institutions and systems of power. Indeed, sole reliance on micro-morality creates a type of 'moral schizophrenia' - the ability to feel decent while the world burns around us.

This was, in fact, a central concern of the Frankfort School. Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse all recognized that individual morality is powerless against modern systems (capitalism, bureaucracy, mass culture). Their tone was bleak, pessimistic. The Gandhi example seems to provide historical proof that a bridge between micro and macro morality is possible - he used it for collective action. He turned his individual morality into a tool for larger collective action.

Habermas approached this same problem. In The Theory of Communicative Action, he distinguishes between the lifeworld (everyday communication, shared norms, personal moral reasoning) and the system, which is driven by money, power and bureaucratic logic.

Communism Lives! The transformation of DSA into a revolutionary workers party continues, which is reflected in the increasing radicalism of DSA's elected representatives, even if they are not, at least openly, communist. Will communists in DSA succeed, or will the reformist tendencies take the lead? Is it time for DSA to turn to more explicit communist politics?

"We Communists, it is said, have returned after a long period of dormancy. Everyone is saying it. Mayor Mamdani is a Communist, the DSA is full of Communists; or, if you ask certain Democrats, Republicans themselves are the real Communists!

Modern politics has become a big trial, and everyone stands accused. The charge is Communism. From his venal pulpit, ‘Truth Social,’ a platform full of lies, even the big orange rapist himself proclaims boldly that "the Communists are finally making their move"—that he's "been waiting and preparing for this moment for a long time."

We Communists are a little confused, President Trump. We have not yet made our move. We were going to, but it seems our 'Democratic Socialist' cousins have jumped the gun a bit, and already earned themselves the allegation. But it is a title they do not deserve!"

"Yet now, with the political 'centre' finally forced to the defensive, defending an indefensible status quo, reiterating again and again the brazen lie that they are ultimately a force for good, these slurs are no longer coming from the right alone. They are coming from the Democratic establishment itself, rearming themselves, in good Clintonite tradition, with a rhetoric of triangulation.

It's no surprise at all to us, then, that the first mainstream report on DAC's assuredly terrible tweets, that good liberal democracy could never support, did not come from the right! The call came from inside the house: CNN! This liberal-leaning media titan, in between its habitual bouts of carrying water for genocidaires, has now turned its guns on even Democrats, as the party cannibalises itself ever further in an attempt to reckon with reaping what it's sown."

"We say that the DSA are not in fact Communists, not because they have taken the wrong direction, but because they have not elaborated their struggle enough. All across the organisation, we see the scars of conservative half-measures, of demands that only go part of the way. But it is their definite opposition to the existing order which is denounced as Communist, and which rapidly wins the hearts of the masses."

"Did Hasan Piker not call for a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, to the applause of the students at Yale? Did Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez not nod along to him when he lamented the collapse of the U.S.S.R.? The language of a Communism now holds credence in the Democratic Socialist movement."

"We are quickly reaching a situation where, if a politician is branded as a Communist, the worker only has to say: “All the better for her.”"

"The spectre of Communism, long thought vanquished, finally returns, and it haunts all the Earth—it is time for the Communists to vanquish it for good, and meet this weak epithet with the strength of its real positions. We tell the bourgeoisie: your moment is over, your chances are spent. We are no longer coming for concessions, but everything you own."

Hi everyone, I hope this is the right subreddit to ask, but if not, please kindly redirect me! I'm studying Breton's Manifestoes of Surrealism and I'm wondering what he means to say in this passage:

>Let me come back again to the waking state. I have no choice but to consider it a phenomenon of interference. Not only does the mind display, in this state, a strange tendency to lose its bearings (as evidenced by the slips and mistakes the secrets of which are just beginning to be revealed to us), but, what is more, it does not appear that, when the mind is functioning normally, it really responds to anything but the suggestions which come to it from the depths of that dark night to which I commend it. However conditioned it may be, its balance is relative. It scarcely dares express itself and, if it does, it confines itself to verifying that such and such an idea, or such and such a woman, has made an impression on it. What impression it would be hard pressed to say, by which it reveals the degree of its subjectivity, and nothing more. This idea, this woman, disturb it, they tend to make it less severe. What they do is isolate the mind for a second from its solvent and spirit it to heaven, as the beautiful precipitate it can be, that it is. When all else fails, it then calls upon chance, a divinity even more obscure than the others to whom it ascribes all its aberrations. Who can say to me that the angle by which that idea which affects it is offered, that what it likes in the eye of that woman is not precisely what links it to its dream, binds it to those fundamental facts which, through its own fault, it has lost? And if things were different, what might it be capable of? I would like to provide it with the key to this corridor.

I feel like the woman comes quite out of left field here. Is he arguing that women lack the dreaming capabilities of men? Is he relating the waking state to women (and later the dream state to men as he follows this passage with, "The mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by what happens to him")?

Thank you in advanced for any help.

Could you recommend secondary literature that would help me understand the relationship between Hegel and Habermas? I am a professional Hegel scholar myself, but I would not say that I am especially familiar with critical theory.