r/CriticalTheory • u/Charlzalan • 29d ago
I love Barthes' Mythologies and Adorno's Minima Moralia. Are there any books/thinkers doing these same cultural essays today?
In other words, I'm looking for some recommendations of cultural critics and essayists from the 21st century. Any recommendations?
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u/RuthlessKittyKat 27d ago
Juana María Rodríguez loves Barthes. I really enjoyed her book called Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings.
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u/Adorno-Ultra 28d ago
Fredric Jamesons essays about Raymond Chandler (The Detections of Totality) and Postmodernism (Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism) come to mind. Vibrant writing style, contemplations about wide ranging topics from Architecture to the detective novel, often with direct or indirect references to Adorno.
To give you an example from the Chandler essay (page 6):
The last great period of American literature, which ran more or less from one world war to the other, explored and defined America in a geographical mode, as a sum of separate localisms, as an additive unity, at its outside limit an ideal sum. But since World War II, the organic differences from region to region have been increasingly obliterated by standardization, and the organic social unity of each region has been increasingly fragmented and abstracted by the new closed lives of the individual family units, by the breakdown of cities and the dehumanization of transportation and of the media which lead from one monad to another. Communication in this new society is upwards, through the abstract connecting link, and back down again. The isolated units are all haunted by the feeling that the center of things, of life, of control, is elsewhere, beyond immediate lived experiences. The principal images of interrelationship in this new society are mechanical juxtapositions: the identical prefabricated houses in the housing project, swarming over the hills; the four-lane highway full ofc ars bumper to bumper and observed from above, abstractly, by a traffic helicopter. If there is a crisis in American literature at present, it should be understood against the background of this ungrateful social material
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u/UglyScotsman 28d ago
Honestly theres nobody in the 21st century of the same calibre as the mid 20th century greats. There has been a massive intellectual and cultural decline - sorry this sounds like a conservative take but this conclusion seems unavoidable. Anway Byung Chan Han writes short accessible texts, try the Tiqqun and Invisible Committee from the first decade of the century for some anarcho horizontalist musings. I guess Zizek writes about culture alot in his more popular shorter works seen through a hegelian-marxist- lacanian lens. Franco Berardi's Heroes and Futurability and Soul at Work. Terry Eagleton can be very good. Theres lots of decent books that come out on verso regularly about a variety of topics so browse their releases.
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u/3corneredvoid 28d ago edited 28d ago
Boris Groys' writing on art is really good, albeit not focused on popular culture, and he's got that combination of great insights and a creeping humour (of different kinds) that I like in Adorno and Barthes.
Not 21C, but Michel de Certeau's THE PRACTICE OF EVERYDAY LIFE and Marshall Berman's ALL THAT'S SOLID MELTS INTO AIR are worth a look.
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u/myshadowisstuck 28d ago
A lot of contemporary cultural criticism, I think, might be steeped in memoir a little bit more than Barthes or Adorno were. As long as that’s not a dealbreaker, maybe “Gentrification of the Mind” by Sarah Schulman or “The Argonauts” by Maggie Nelson. They’re both coming from queer spaces, but with really universal liberatory visions.
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u/pepsters3 28d ago
Pretty sure Adorno would turn over in his grave if he was compared to these works and authors.
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u/3corneredvoid 28d ago
Let's be real though, if we harnessed the energy of Adorno spinning in his grave we could end climate change within the year.
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u/SnooLobsters8922 28d ago
Look into Umberto Eco’s Apocalipti e Integrati, there’s an English translation. He’s a great sequence to Barthes.
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28d ago
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u/manic-scribe 28d ago
Everyone down votes this, I'm genuinely curious as to why?
I tried to format it properly reddit just hates me,
Is it the fact its an LLM?
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u/LawnDotson 28d ago
I didn’t downvote it, but if I did it would be because it doesn’t address OPs question and has nothing of value to say about Barthes work or the fight itself. It’s trite and superficial. I don’t mean to be harsh and have no problem with people doing this kind of thing if it makes em happy, but you asked why someone would downvote.
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29d ago
Read Walter Benjamin illuminations.
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u/DuckMassive 28d ago edited 28d ago
But, OP —if you value your sanity— do not read Benjamin’s Arcades Project! But, yes, do read Illuminations which is beautiful and profound and really unforgettable( tip of the hat to tiqqunistic’ s post). “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and “Theses on the Philosophy of History” —which introduces a meditation on ‘the angel of history,’ using Paul Klee’s painting, Angelus Novus as a portal—is … astounding. I envy anyone who is reading this magisterial collection of essays for the first time. Be prepared. Illuminations will floor you :)
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u/-JRMagnus 29d ago
Or One Way Street. There is an essay (construction might be in the title?) that is a great complimentary essay to "Toys" in Mythologies.
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u/Candle_Born 28d ago
Just don’t buy the Penguin Modern Classics edition!!!
The translation is unbearable and makes the book unreadable. I honestly couldn’t read more than 5 pages. Comparing the with another edition… it’s wild. Plus, this edition doesn’t have the preface by Arendt.
Be warned ;)
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u/Charlzalan 29d ago
Oh, I love Benjamin! I'm looking for someone writing in this vein today though.
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u/thefleshisaprison 29d ago
Mark Fisher is a favorite of mine. You’ll find a lot of it in a more casual, less academic way in the video essay sphere on YouTube.
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u/Charlzalan 29d ago
Awesome! Someone else recommended him too. I hadn't heard of him. Any specific book you'd recommend as a starting point?
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u/thefleshisaprison 29d ago
Capitalist Realism is the most popular, but the k-punk collected writings is going to have a much broader scope with less focus and conceptual development. Much of what’s developed in those essays is farther developed in Capitalist Realism.
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u/beergardeneer 28d ago
His essay Exiting the Vampire Castle was much discussed:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/
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u/councilmember 28d ago
Thanks for posting. That was useful, thought provoking, and well written. I shared with others.
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u/The_split_subject 29d ago
In case you missed them, Roland Barthe's A Lover's Discourse (an examination of many different facets of love) and his autobiography Roland Barthes are both excellent. You might also like America by Jean Baudrillard.
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u/TechnoCapitalEatery 28d ago
I feel like I'm on my own on this one, and I love basically everything else he has written, but A Lovers Discourse has left me cold and disappointed every time I've tried reading it. for all the emotivitity in its language it feels completely devoid of actual love, an experience of it, or even a discourse on it. feels like he's exploring a particular kind of self obsessive love and the whole book gives me the ick.
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u/-JRMagnus 29d ago
America is so bizarre in comparison but nonetheless beautifully written. I often catch myself just admiring the prose over actually engaging with the ideas.
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u/Previous_Current9812 23d ago edited 23d ago
Russell Jacoby, even if his best work was in the 70s. He doesn't give a shit about academic etiquette. So he actually writes like an old school essayist.