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This authoritative guide introduces the key figures in contemporary critical theory for the
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• Semiotics and discourse analysis • Psychoanalysis e
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• Structuralism and post-structuralism • Postcolonialism risZˆ
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• Ideology critique • Postmodernism szˆ
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• Deconstruction • Second generation Frankfurt School
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• Feminism critical theory
• Queer theory • Marxism and post-Marxism.
There are individual chapters on:
Lacan Levinas Kristeva
Derrida Cixous Foucault
Irigaray Deleuze Baudrillard
Lyotard &Guattari Jameson
Bourdieu Habermas Said E
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Althusser Barthes
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Each chapter provides biographical information and details about the thinker’s intellectual
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context,an explanation of keyconcepts,an outline of the major angles of the theorist’s
work,an indication of ways in which their theory has been applied and suggestions for B
further reading. Y
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Features O
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• Expert commentaries introduce and critically evaluate the established theorists of the day
• Clear explanations of terms and theories S
• Designed as a companion to FromKant to Lévi-Strauss:The Background to Contemporary Critical I
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Theory,edited by Jon Simons.
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Dr Jon Simons is Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham.He is the
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author of Foucault and the Political(Routledge,1995).
S EDITED BY JON SIMONS
Cover design:River Design
Edinburgh University Press
22 George Square E
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Edinburgh EH8 9LF i
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ISBN:978 0 7486 3974 8 b
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www.euppublishing.com rg
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From Agamben to Žižek
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From Agamben To Žižek
Contemporary Critical Theorists
Edited by Jon Simons
Edinburgh University Press
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© in this edition Edinburgh University Press, 2010
© in the individual contributions is retained by the authors
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh
www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in ITC New Baskerville
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 3973 1 (hardback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 3974 8 (paperback)
The right of Jon Simons
to be identifi ed as editor of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Notes on Contributors viii
Introduction 1
Jon Simons
1 Giorgio Agamben (1942–) 14
Paul Hegarty
2 Alain Badiou (1937–) 29
Benjamin Robinson
3 Zygmunt Bauman (1925–) 45
Peter Beilharz
4 Homi K. Bhabha (1949–) 60
David Huddart
5 Judith Butler (1956–) 77
Moya Lloyd
6 Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–97) 93
Caroline Williams
7 Green Critical Theorists 110
David Kidner
8 Donna J. Haraway (1944–) 127
Joan Faber McAlister
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Contents
9 Ernesto Laclau (1935–) and Chantal Mouffe (1943–) 144
Simon Tormey
10 Bruno Latour (1947–) 161
Ilana Gershon
11 Antonio Negri (1933–) 177
Arianna Bove
12 Jacques Rancière (1940–) 194
Samuel A. Chambers
13 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1942–) 210
Stephen Morton
14 Paul Virilio (1932–) 227
John Armitage
15 Slavoj Žižek (1949–) 243
Matthew Sharpe
Names index 259
Subject index 263
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the members of the Critical Theory team at the
University of Nottingham, as well as the contributors to the previ-
ous volumes in this series, From Kant to Lévi-S trauss: The Background
to Contemporary Critical Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2002)
and Contemporary Critical Theorists: From Lacan to Said (Edinburgh
University Press, 2004) for their sage advice about which theorists
to include in this volume. I take responsibility, of course, for all the
shortcomings of the fi nal selection. I would also like to thank the
contributors to this volume for the effort and care that they put into
writing their chapters and for their comments on my introduction.
Peter Andrews has prepared an excellent index for this volume, as he
did for the previous volumes. Jackie Jones of Edinburgh University
Press has been a wonderfully supportive editor; her insight and
encouragement turned one book proposal into a series of three
volumes. James Dale (for the fi rst two volumes) and Eliza Wright
(for this volume) served as accomplished desk editors for the series.
I am grateful to the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana
University, Bloomington, for a generous summer fellowship that
gave me time to complete most of the editing of this volume.
I am also indebted to all those who, by enraging me, remind
me on a daily basis of the absolute need to think critically about
the world. The list is too long to include here, but a special
mention must go to all the denizens of the American ‘conservative
echo-c hamber’.
Jon Simons
February 2010
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Notes on Contributors
John Armitage is Head of the Department of Media at Northumbria
University, UK. He is the founder and co-e ditor, with Ryan Bishop
and Douglas Kellner, of the Berg journal Cultural Politics and the
editor of Paul Virilio: From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond
(Sage, 2001), Virilio Live: Selected Interviews (Sage, 2001) and, with
Joanne Roberts, the co-e ditor of Living With Cyberspace: Technology &
Society in the 21st Century (Continuum, 2002).
Peter Beilharz is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Thesis
Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology at La Trobe University,
Australia. He has written or edited six books on Bauman, including
Zygmunt Bauman – Masters of Social Thought, 4 vols (Sage, 2002), The
Bauman Reader (Blackwell, 2001) and Zygmunt Bauman – Dialectic of
Modernity (Sage, 2000), and is collecting his essays on Bauman for a
separate volume.
Arianna Bove currently teaches at Queen Mary College, University
of London. She is a developer of <www.generation-o nline.org>
where her research, articles and translations can be found. She has
translated many works from Italian and French into English, includ-
ing texts by Agamben, Althusser, Foucault, Negri, Berardi, Virno
and others.
Samuel A. Chambers teaches political theory at Johns Hopkins
University. He writes broadly in political theory, including work
on language, culture and the politics of gender and sexuality.
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Notes on Contributors
He is the author of Untimely Politics (Edinburgh University Press,
2003), The Queer Politics of Television (IB Tauris, 2009) and co-
author, with Terrell Carver, of Judith Butler and Political Theory
(Routledge, 2008). He is also co-e ditor, with Terrell Carver, of
William Connolly: Democracy, Pluralism and Political Theory (2007),
Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics (2008) and Carole Pateman: Feminism,
Democracy, Welfare (2009).
Ilana Gershon received her PhD in cultural anthropology from
the University of Chicago in 2001. An assistant professor in the
Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University,
she writes and teaches about disconnections using new media,
the anthropology of democracy, indigenous self-r epresentation
(specifi cally Maori politicians and Samoan migrants), diaspora,
US ethnic formations, migration, kinship and the anthropol-
ogy of knowledge. Her research has been published in American
Anthropologist, Current Anthropologist, Anthropological Theory, Social
Analysis and other journals. Her book, The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting
over New Media (Cornell, 2010), deploys her long-s tanding inter-
est in Actor- Network Theory to explore ethnographically how
people use different communicative technologies to end romantic
relationships.
Paul Hegarty teaches philosophy and cultural studies in the
Department of French, University College Cork, Ireland. He has
published books on Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, noise and
music, Dennis Cooper, and contributed to Andrew Norris (ed.),
Politics, Metaphysics and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo
Sacer (Duke University Press, 2005).
David Huddart is Associate Professor in the Department of English
at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he teaches lit-
erary theory and World Englishes. He is the author of Homi K.
Bhabha (Routledge, 2006) and Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography
(Routledge, 2008).
David Kidner worked as a process design engineer in the petroleum
industry before turning to social science with a PhD in psychology
from London University. For the past three decades he has taught
critical social science and environmental philosophy in Britain and
the USA, and is currently at Nottingham Trent University. He is the
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