Shervington

Best Invitations to Critical Theory

laurent Shervington is a lecturer and tutor in film studies at Notre Dame University and The University of Western Australia. His work has appeared in The Philosophical Salon, Liminal Journal and the upcoming issue of Antipodes. He tweets @jazzhorse_

The thought of sitting down and reading a work of critical theory is one that many – in a lot of cases rightfully so – shy away from as too taxing or time-consuming. However, once one has a foot in the door, the potential for grappling with genuinely thoughtprovoking ideas can lead to seeing the world in a totally different way. The following are a list of invitations or introductions to the realm of critical theory. They are picked on the basis of their ability to introduce their reader to novel ways of seeing and move from easiest to most difficult.

Andrea Long Chu – Females – 2019

By far the most recent selection on this list, Andrea Long Chu’s highly polemical and energetic second wave trans studies work is as unrelenting in its force as it is with its sardonic humour. Chu’s inquiry is focalised mainly through a play by Valerie Solanas – the woman who penned the SCUM Manifesto and shot Andy Warhol – and follows through with the dual axioms of 1) everyone is female and 2) everyone hates it. Acerbic and important, Chu’s work will either re-invigorate your passion for critical theory or introduce you to its wide potentiality.

Étienne Balibar – The Philosophy of Marx – 1994

Short and succinct, Balibar’s 100-or-so-page text on Marx balances brevity with detail in the best possible way. Rather than try to summarise or reduce his work biographically, this text shows the various antinomies and discontinuities of the influential thinker, placing future Marxist theorists such as

Gramsci, Althusser and Lukacs as thinkers who emerged out of these aporias. The gamut of Balibar’s book is fundamentally futural in its implications, showing how Marx was not simply a historical figure useful for understanding the emergence of early capitalism, but one who continues to shed light on our present conjecture.

Slavoj Žižek – Looking Awry – 1991

Slavoj Žižek’s early book on the work of Lacan and Hegel is a tour-de-force in reinventing how to navigate the landscape of popular culture. Žižek oscillates wildly from high to low culture, jumping from Stephen King to The Phenomenology of Spirit to detective novels to Hamlet, while still maintaining an astute link to them all. This book is your best bet if you can’t decide where to start, as its sporadic, rapid-fire style makes it very difficult to lose interest.

Joan Copjec – Read My Desire – 1994

Leaving my hyperbole to the last moment, I say with little hesitation that Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire is one of the best books to emerge from cultural studies in the past thirty or so years, boldly drawing a throughline between topics as diverse as historicism, film noir, sexuality, race, and spectator studies. Copjec’s overarching provocation to the field of cultural studies is to take seriously the idea of desire as a confronting and distorting force in society, encouraging the reader to pay more attention to the out-of-place and excluded elements that make up our social reality. Pushing nearly 300 pages, this selection might appear intimidating, however, one can take her chapters as essays on their own terms one-by-one, as well as cohesively together.