New Books in Critical Theory11 Kesä 2018

Bruno Chaouat, “Is Theory Good for the Jews?: French Thought and the Challenge of the New Antisemitism” (Liverpool University Press, 2017)

“Is Theory Good for the Jews?” asks author Bruno Chaouat, professor of French at the University of Minnesota, in Is Theory Good for the Jews?: French Thought and the Challenge of the New Antisemitism (Liverpool University Press, 2017) . The title carries a measure of Chaouat’s characteristically ironic, self-deprecatory, yet polemical tone. So, Chaouat wonders, in both winking reference to the anti-Semitic trope of Jewish tribalism and self-involvement, and at the same time in all sincerity, whether “Theory” – in particular the canon of philosophy, literature, and social thought that grew largely out of Heideggerian roots and which continues to find contemporary purchase – is able to use its own tools to deal with today’s resurgent strains of anti-Semitism. In this episode, Chaouat discusses several recent events in French letters, including the 2010 publication of writer, diplomat and French Resistance fighter Stéphane Hessel’s manifesto Time for Outrage and novelist Salim Bachi’s literary op-ed, “Moi, Mohammed Merah,” a fictionalized account of the 2012 Toulouse attacks, told from the point of view of the murderer. We also talk about earlier influential figures, such as Georges Bataille and Jean Genet, and discuss how the vocabularies they invented, which they used to retool ideas of evil, transgression, and “our common inhumanity,” come to be recoded in service of a new “moralistic turn.” Daveeda Goldberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Humanities at York University, in Toronto, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

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Mostafa Hussein, "Hebrew Orientalism: Jewish Engagement with Arabo-Islamic Culture in Late Ottoman and British Palestine" (Princeton UP, 2025)

In the decades before the establishment of a Jewish state in 1948, native and immigrant Jews in Palestine mediated between Jewish and Arab cultures while navigating their evolving identities as settle...

1 Touko 1h 32min

Mapping Out Food and Philosophy

This episode introduces a special issue on food and philosophy. Robert T. Valgenti, of Gastronomica’s Editorial Collective, talks with Andrea Borghini about the increasing attention to food within phi...

1 Touko 0s

Francisco Martínez, "The Future of Hiding: Secrecy, Infrastructure, and Ecological Memory in Estonia's Siberia" (Cornell UP, 2025)

How can lives and things that are rendered invisible be crucial to identity, politics, and the future? Drawing on experimental ethnographic research in northeastern Estonia, this book offers vivid ans...

28 Huhti 54min

Rugged Individualism

In this special student edition of High Theory, Andrew Bennett, Jo Hoffman, Kai North, and Ally Sullivan tell us about Rugged Individualism, a concept they link to Marxist theory. They made this episo...

27 Huhti 18min

Sarah Jaffe, "From the Ashes: Grief and Transformation in a World on Fire" (Bold Type Books, 2024)

From the author of Work Won't Love You Back, a stirring examination of how collective grief can ignite powerful change. Our era is one of significant and substantial loss, yet we barely have time to a...

22 Huhti 1h 7min

169* Hannah Arendt on Oases (JP)

Our Recall This Buck series began by speaking with Christine Desan of Harvard Law School about how key ideas—and the actual currency, physical coins and bills— underlying the modern monetary system ge...

18 Huhti 31min

Manuel Barcia, "Pirate Imperialism: Trade, Abolition, and Global Suppression of Maritime Raiding, 1825–1870" (Yale UP, 2026)

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, imperial powers around the world came into direct confrontation with local resistance in the form of maritime raiding. From the Atlantic basin to the w...

18 Huhti 38min

Audrey Borowski, "Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Described by Voltaire as “perhaps a man of the most universal learning in Europe,” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is often portrayed as a rationalist and philosopher who was wholly detached fro...

17 Huhti 1h 1min