Introducing Critical Theory: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides Book 0)

Critical theory upends the universal values of the Enlightenment: objectivity, rationality, science, equality and freedom of the individual. These liberal values are an ideology by which dominant groups subjugate other groups. All relations are power relations, everything is political, and claims of reason and truth are social constructs that maint

Another, explicitly anti-liberal, anti-universal, approach to achieving social justice has also been employed, particularly since the middle of the twentieth century, and that is one rooted in critical theory. A critical theory is chiefly concerned with revealing hidden biases and underexamined assumptions, usually by pointing out what have been te

Any questioning or discrediting of what is currently the most efficient means of producing acquiescence and docility, of promoting self-interest as the raison d’être of all social activity, is rigorously marginalized.

What beliefs keep the system in place? And what new narratives could change or replace the system?

Or, as illustrated by one of my all-time favorite quotes:

*“The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody sees.”

*Erwin Schödinger

Even though we have been in the post-Freudian era for some time, reductive versions of his ideas have become common-sense assumptions for many who have never read a word of his work.

Central to the Critique is its meditation on the systemic strategies of separation that prevent the objective reality of daily life from being perceived by the individuals who inhabit it—a problem no less acute today than when it was written, in the late 1950s.

Deconstruction posited that all texts are unstable and irreducibly complex and that ever variable meanings are imputed by readers and observers.