David Lay Williams, "The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx" (Princeton UP, 2024)

When we watch film various visual elements direct our understanding of the narrative and its meaning. The subjective position of each viewer informs their reading of images in a multitude of ways. From this perspective, religion can be imaged in film and may be found by viewers but its interpretation will depend upon the relationships between media and audience. In Imaging Religion in Film: The Politics of Nostalgia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), M. Gail Hamner, Professor of Religion at Syracuse University, offers a dynamic theoretically informed methodology to examine the ethico-political dimensions of religion and film. She offers a semiotics of religion that relies on her reading of Charles Peirce and Gilles Deleuze, who aid us in thinking about how viewers react to and transform cinematic images. Through three case studies, including Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala (1972); Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997); and the Coen brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), she explores how religion is imaged in social and discursive fields through notions of nostalgia and transcendence. In our conversation we discuss postmodern aesthetics, the pedagogy of self, philosophical gelling through mechanical reproduction, the political economy of film, Deleuzian relations of gaze, situation, and reflection, the space between humanity and animality, confessional ways out of alienation, and ideas about how to watch a film. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

19 Touko 201455min

Brett Scott is the author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money (Pluto Press, 2013). Scott is a journalist, urban deep ecologist, and Fellow at the Finance Innovation Lab. While much of Scott’s book focuses on explaining various aspects of the financial services section, the heart of the book is a call to action. Scott infuses this call with a variety of first-hand experiences as a campaigner for radical approaches to disrupt the sector. For this reason, the book acts as a guide to activism, applicable for those interested in global finance, but also other domains that are ripe for criticism. His blog that he mentions at the end of the podcast can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

19 Touko 201428min

Culture is inescapably linked to questions of political economy. In Neoliberal Culture: Living With American Neoliberalism (Ashgate, 2012), Patricia Ventura explores the relationship between contemporary American culture and the ideology that seems to underpin much of American life. The book integrates a range of theoretical perspectives, including the work of Michel Foucault and David Harvey, with contemporary social policy and cultural studies examples. The examples, ranging from Las Vegas’ urban organisation and Oprah’s book club through to cinematic representations of the Iraq war, all support the central thesis that American culture has turned away from the welfare state settlement of the Cold War towards a much harsher social reality. The new settlement is one of increased personal responsibility for structural and systematic failures in contemporary America. The book seeks to situate the analysis in a broader global contact, focusing on issues around immigration and global trade to add context to the focus on Neo-Liberal cultural artefacts. The book concludes with two examples that offer hope for resistance to the march of Neo-Liberalism. Both are focused on food, using one of the basic aspects of our daily lives to rethink how America, and thus the world, will organise its resources in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

7 Touko 201442min

In her fourth book, Lynne Huffer argues for a restored queer feminism to find new ways of thinking about sex and about ethics. Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex (Columbia University Press, 2013) brings forth a breadth of sources — known and less well-known, French and American, primary and secondary — ranging from Colette, Violette Leduc, and Marcel Proust to the book of Genesis, from Supreme Court cases to Virginie Despentes’ rape-revenge film Baise-moi, from Irigaray to Foucault, through which Huffer reads and writes toward a queer feminist future. Beautifully written and stimulating for the theorist and non-theorist alike, Huffer’s new book combines the personal and the scholarly in experimental ways, such as her analysis of the Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham story. Carefully navigating the couloirs of queer and feminist theory, this is a book about sexuality, ethics, alterity, betrayal, and love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

23 Huhti 20141h 10min

More and more of the world is living in cities, yet we rarely stop to examine how our spaces are organised and controlled. In a remarkable new book, Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City (Verso, 2013), Bradley Garrett tells the story of his urban explorations that attempt to show the space from an entirely new viewpoint. The book draws on ethnographic fieldwork with a community of urban explores that begins in London and takes on global sites in the development of what the book refers to as ‘place hacking’. The explorers unearth the hidden histories of the London Underground, experience sites (and sights) of seemingly closed neo-liberal capital’s constructions and point to ways that the city could be a space for creativity beyond the blandness of coffee and consumer culture. Fundamentally Explore Everything aims to ensure we never look at our city spaces in the same ways again. Unusually for a book informed by critical theory, the text is richly illustrated with photographs taken as part of the place hacking activities, connecting the theoretical underpinnings of the text with the breathtaking excitement generated in the act of exploration. The text is also a record of the engagement with activism, police forces and security, as well as the media, raising profound questions as to the future role of the university and scholarship in an age where academia is encouraged and expected to have much more visible public impact. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

15 Huhti 201446min

Sarah Franklin‘s new book is an exceptionally rich, focused yet wide-ranging, insightful account of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and the worlds that it creates and inhabits. Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship (Duke University Press, 2013) treats IVF as a looking-glass in which can see not only ourselves, but also transformations in modern notions of biology, technology, and kinship. In addition to a fascinating ethnography of the various kinds of work (by artists, by scientists, by patients and doctors) at IVF and stem cell research facilities, readers will find insightful explorations of the work of Marx and Engels, Haraway, Plato, Strathern, Derrida, Firestone, along with a wide range of authors of feminist texts from the 1980s and after. It is a book full of hands, socks, pipettes, eggs, screens, organisms, and arguments, it is fascinating, and it was a great pleasure to talk with Sarah about it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

9 Maalis 20141h 6min

So much of Science Studies, of STS as a field or a point of engagement, is deeply concerned with objects. We create sociologies and networks of and with objects, we study them as actors or agents or actants, we worry about our relationships to them and their relationships to each other. We wonder if humans and their objects are really so different, or whether we are all octopuses shrinking behind our own ink. In Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Timothy Morton offers a way of thinking with and about hyperobjects, particular kinds of things of which we see only pieces at any given moment. (Though by the end of the book, Morton invites us to consider that perhaps every object is a hyperobject.) Hyperobjects have a number of qualities in common, and the first half of Morton’s book introduces and explores them: they stick to other beings, and they potentially transform our taken-for-granted notions of time, space, locality, causality, and the possibility of ever being “away.” How this all happens is explained in a wonderfully personal and engaging narrative voice that ranges from Heidegger to The Lord of the Rings to the Tardis to Op Art, and the second half of the book introduces some of the consequences of and opportunities created by thinking with hyperobjects. It is about global warming and intimacy and object-oriented ontology and modern art and the possibilities of a phenomenology after we get rid of any notion of “the world” as something out-there and beyond-us. For those who are interested in STS and its environs, it offers a very different and very thoughtful language for articulating narratives beyond a simple “object agency” frame or a human/object binary. It’s also a great pleasure to read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

23 Helmi 20141h 11min

The British Marxist economist Maurice Dobb is now largely forgotten. That’s too bad for a number of reasons. He was a brilliant thinker who wrote some of the most insightful analyses of the development and workings of capitalism around. You can still read his work and profit. He was the intellectual godfather of several notable British Marxist historians of the “New Left” of the 1960s and 1970s: Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, among others. And, perhaps most importantly, his life gives us a window into a forgotten time, one in which a economists took communism seriously and fellows at Cambridge could earnestly believe in a bright communist future. This, I think, is a time we must not forget. Thanks to Timothy Shenk‘s well-researched, readable biography Maurice Dobb: Political Economist (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013), we won’t have to. Shenk tells Dobb’s tale in all its tortured complexity. A member of the establishment and an anti-establishmentarian. A dyed-in-the-wool Marxist and a deadly serious empirically-oriented economist. A supporter of the Soviet Union and a critic of Soviet power. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

22 Helmi 20141h 3min