Contested knowledge : a guide to critical theory / John Phillips.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Phillips, John, 1956-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Critical theory.

Local Subjects:

Critical theory.

Physical Description:

ix, 240 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

London ; New York : Zed Books ; New York : Distributed in the USA exclusively by St. Martin's Press, 2000.

Summary:

This accessible and wide-ranging introduction to critical theory provides a comprehensive overview of the practice, role, and importance of theory across the humanities and social sciences. It not only maps a notoriously complex area, but it also enables the reader to take the arguments and apply them in practice. Starting with an explanation of how theory relies on implicit assumptions that inform interpretations, the book moves on to depict the long-term philosophical problems that have fed into much 20th century thinking and also more recent debates. The philosophical grounds of contemporary thought are traced from Plato through Descartes to the work of Heidegger and Freud and on to recent developments in structuralism and deconstruction that critically revise many of the previous terms of debate.

Contents:

I Critical 1

Crisis 9

Critique 11

Critical Theory 14

Postmodernism and Critical Theory 14

II Representations 16

Books and life 16

Truth 17

In between 21

To be 24

'Is' and 'ing' 27

III Theory 29

The empirical and the transcendental 29

What theory is and why it is necessary 30

Object and concept 34

Analogy 35

Economy 35

2 Philosophical Impossibilities 42

I The Ancients 42

Philosophy 42

Deception 44

Socratic dialogue 44

Plato's theatre 45

Nous (mind) 47

Plato's cave 51

Ideal objects 53

The visible and the invisible 57

The empirical and the transcendental 61

II Greek/Jew: Closure and Opening 62

Greek 62

Jew 66

Singularity and plurality 69

Opening and closure 70

III Modernity 71

Empiricism 71

Rationality 72

Freedom 73

Man 74

Progress 75

Centrism 75

Descartes' judgement 77

Otherness, infinity and difference 78

How to not define the other 82

Cogito ergo sum 84

The Caetesian subject is not a subject 86

Authority and enlightenment 89

Architectural metaphors 90

Responsibility 94

3 The Political 95

I Being 95

Rhetoric 95

The being of things 96

Being and beings 97

II The Political 98

III False Consciousness 101

Graven images 102

Ideology 107

4 Structuralism and Semiotics 115

I Saussure 115

What is structuralism? 115

The Course in General Linguistics 116

The sign 116

Signifier/signified 117

System and utterance 118

Difference 119

'To a certain extent' 121

System and difference 121

Developments in structuralism 122

An exercise in structuralism 123

II Levi-Strauss 126

Structural linguistics and anthropology 126

Necessary laws 126

Kinship relations 127

Second order first 127

The elementary unit of kinship 128

Uncles with attitude 129

The incest taboo: woman as symbol of exchange 129

The structural analysis of myth 130

The algorithm of myth 133

III Jakobson 134

Two types of aphasia 134

The similarity disorder 135

Metalanguage 137

The contiguity disorder 138

Metaphor and metonymy 139

The map on the wall 141

5 Derrida and Deconstruction 144

I The Text 144

Derrida's work 145

Presence and absence 146

The way we think 147

Structure 149

Play 149

The way of the text 150

Bricoleur and engineer 151

Supplementarity 152

Radical empiricism 154

'Something missing' 155

II Differance 157

The Same 157

Differance 158

Difference a priori 159

A commentary on 'Differance' 159

What to look for 165

III Exemplification 166

Deconstruction 166

Alterity and writing 167

Repetition and writing 169

Superfluity and writing 169

Alterity and transcendence 170

Writing and interpretation 170

Transcendental contraband 171

Exemplification 173

6 Psychoanalysis 176

I Freud and the Dream-work 176

Psychoanalysis and critical theory 176

The unconscious since Freud 176

Dreams 180

Interpretation 181

The dream-work 181

Kettle logic 188

II Lacan, Freud and Sexuality 190

Lacan and language 190

The unconscious is the discourse of the other 190

The unconscious is structured like a language 191

Metaphor and metonymy 191

Sexuality and sexual difference 192

Oedipus 197

Sexual difference 199

Cinema: pleasure and drive 202

The Ring 205

III The Return to Melanie Klein 206

Acquiring knowledge 206

The ruined world 208

Kleinian scientificity (Klein and Bion) 210

Problems 217

7 The Knowledge 219.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 226-233) and index.

ISBN:

1856495574

1856495582

OCLC:

43968875