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Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century
Remains, even after half a century, the most comprehensive serious general survey available of the development of intellectual and scientific attitudes toward nature in the history of western civilization from antiquity up to the end of the…
Cinema and Experience: Kracauer, Benjamin, Adorno
Hansen explores the promise of cinema as it defined and changed the notion of experience in modernity and modernist thinkers. Here Hansen proposes a materialst theory of the cinema to help work understand the radical potential that the cinema and…
Tags: critical theory, experience, film, In-between, materialism, media history
Critical Theory: Essays
Collection of Horkhiemer's early essays that define the program of critical theory. Includes seminal essays such as "Traditional and Critical Theory" and "The Latests Attacks on Metaphysics," providing background and context for many of the wartime…
The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays
A collection of essays published during the Weimar Republic that reflect on the contemporary state of reason and society as expressed in the material products of modern mass capitalism, most notebly in dance revues, photography, and the literary…
Tags: critical theory, materialism, media, modernity
Critique of Instrumental Reason
A series critical essays that connect the rise of Enlightenment thinking with the emergence of state bureaucratic apparatuses that oppress human societies through a distinctive form of ‘instrumental rationality’.
Tags: critical theory, history, In-between, modernity
The Lettered City
Rama's classic interdisciplinary study of the convergence of European architecture and literacy in Latin America. He argues the development of Latin American cities functions to reproduce and deploy power associated with European literacy and…
Tags: architecture, colonialism, Latin America, literacy, power
The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization
Written over the scope of 20 years of research, Mignolo argues that European colonizers used writing technologies (like the alphabet) as a weapon of war in Mesoamerica, with subsequent political and cultural projects in the Enlightenment serving to…
Tags: colonialism, In-between, Latin America, literacy, modernity
The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future.
Written by Paul Tillich’s student, Rubenstein argues the holocaust is the rational expression of historical tendencies made possible by the European Enlightenment, it’s focus on rational order and technical mastery of nature.
Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments
A landmark text critiquing the universalizing project of the European enlightenment. It argues the so-called promises of the intellectual movement remain unfulfilled, as does the forward-moving, developmental picture of history as a progressive…
Tags: critical theory, disciplines, modernity
Objectivity
Daston and Galison write the history of the emergence of scientific objectivity, beginning in the eighteenth century and proceeding into the present day. This magisterial study reveals practices of scientific image-making as constitutive of both…
Catching Nature in the Act: Réaumur and the Practice of Natural History in the Eighteenth Century
Terrall's investigation of the eighteenth-century French scientist Réaumur and his circle represents both a fascinating account of the techniques and practices of eighteenth-century naturalists and a stimulating analysis of the production of…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Botany: The Salutary Science
Cook's magisterial study explores Jean-Jacques Rousseau's abiding interest in botany and botanical science and the significance of his botanical writings in the context of the history of plant science. She gives a wide-ranging yet exquisitely nuanced…
Tags: botany, ecology, ethics, In-between, philosophy of nature, Rousseau, science
Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics
A by-now classic and deeply influential critique of the foundational assumptions of ecocriticism (and strands of Romantic literature), Morton’s book issues a challenge to the idea of Nature as a transcendental term—and to the fantasy of a…
Tags: aesthetic, ecocritique, ecology, environment, ethics, In-between, Romanticism
Ariel's Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics
Allewaert uncovers the enmeshment of persons in places-- and the imbrication of the nonhuman and the human-- in eighteenth-century American plantations (and the literature, culture, and thought circulating around and through them). Her book imagines…
Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life
Nealon explores the (liminal yet significant) role played by concepts of vegetable life within biopolitical discussions of life in the humanities today. Where Nealon, following Foucault, suggests that modernity has been primarily invested in an…
Tags: agency, climate, climate change, In-between, philosophy, plants, subjectivity, world
Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Meaning
Barad builds on the insights of Niels Bohr's quantum physics to develop a new queer and feminist ontology and epistemology that radically reframes questions of being, individualism, relationality, representation,agency, and identity. Her notion of…
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Less a single coherent argument than a series of meditations, this book introduces many of the concepts that would become foundational to Marxist thought and critical theory, more generally, including alienation, exploitation, and dialectical…
Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments
Perhaps the most canonical work of Marxist critical theory in the twentieth century, Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment investigates how the project of the Enlightenment transforms into a logic of domination and instrumentalization in…
Tags: capitalism, critical theory, Marxism, materialism, myth, philosophy, psychoanalysis
The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism
A book that responds to many of the different flavors of contemporary materialist theory by offering a model of the ethical commitments many find lacking from some of the more radical new materialisms. The book assembles an incredibly useful,…
Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things
Quickly becoming a classic, Bennett's book asks (among other things) how the term "materialism" came to be synonymous with Marx's notion of materiality, "as economic structures and exchanges that provoke many other events." She asks, "Why did…
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