The Twentieth Century to Today · School
Critical Theory
The Frankfurt School combined Marx and Freud to critique modern society; Habermas later turned to communicative reason.
Representative figures · 7
Walter Benjamin本雅明
Art in the age of mechanical reproduction, the fading aura, the flâneur of the arcades, brushing history against the grain: critic, translator and untimely thinker, who took his own life in flight.
Max Horkheimer霍克海默
Founder of critical theory and organiser of the Frankfurt School: Enlightenment turns into its opposite, reason becomes instrumental, and critical theory keeps hope for emancipation alive.
Herbert Marcuse马尔库塞
One-dimensional man, repressive desublimation, the Great Refusal: joining Freud with Marx, he became the mentor of the student movement of 1968, one of its 'three Ms'.
Theodor W. Adorno阿多诺
Negative dialectics and the critique of the culture industry: the whole is the false, to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, and philosophy's task is to speak for the non-identical. He was also Schoenberg's pupil and a composer.
Jürgen Habermas哈贝马斯
Communicative reason, the public sphere, discourse ethics, modernity as an unfinished project: leader of the second generation of the Frankfurt School and post-war Germany's most influential public intellectual.
Slavoj Žižek齐泽克
Lacan plus Hegel plus Hollywood: ideology is the fantasy we act out knowingly, enjoyment is the core of politics, and with jokes, films and obscenities he brought German idealism back into the public square.
Judith Butler朱迪斯·巴特勒
Gender is performative: there is no identity behind the performance, only norms repeatedly cited. Gender Trouble transformed feminism and queer theory, and she then turned to vulnerability, mourning and non-violence.