B Noys
Biographic Data
| ID | 30172 |
|---|---|
| NAME | B Noys |
| GIVEN NAMES | B |
| FAMILY NAME | Noys |
| SIGNATURE | NOYS B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chichester |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6105-3665 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 40 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Envisioning the Good Life: The Limits of Contemporary Vitalism
A new vision of the good life as collective transformation against the fragmentation of contemporary life A powerful criticism of contemporary vitalist understandings of life as excess An alternative idea of life as integrated into the totality of society and nature A wide-ranging map of theoretical and philosophical notions of life in the present moment A new argument for the collective transformation of the world, rather than a mythic transfigu…
The Crisis of the Present Moment and the Crisis of Contemporary Theory
Instead of crisis as a punctual event the contemporary experience is one of overlapping forms and modes of crisis resulting in a complex rhythm. While attempting to respond to this situation contemporary theory has often struggled to focus on the present moment of crisis. Instead, it has turned to a fundamental rift in the past or to the need to invent a utopian future as ways of escaping the present crisis. This is due to the influence of Heideg…
Crisis and Transition
The work of the late Foucault, especially the turn to the care of the self and the problem of subjectivity, has often been regarded as a narcissistic withdrawal from politics. This essay argues that such a charge ignores how Foucault was responding to arguments highly critical of individualism developed in the late 1970s, especially Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism (1979). Not only was Foucault concerned with rehabilitating a notion …
Abuso acelerado de substâncias
The Masses Make History’: On Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology
This essay responds to Frederic Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology by arguing that this book is centrally concerned with the masses. By developing Jameson’s own model of allegorical reading, the pressure of the masses on the text is explored. This is demonstrated through a reading of Albert Camus’s The Plague , Jameson’s central example of ‘bad’ allegory. While this novel is ‘bad’ for implying a one-to-one allegorical relationship between the plague…
The Peculiarities of English Culture
Francis Mulhern’s Figures of Catastrophe argues for the existence of a hitherto-unnoticed generic form: the condition of culture novel, which offers a metacultural reflection on the conditions for the existence of culture and for access to culture. Mulhern’s analysis is located within the framework of Marxist reflections on culture, the history of British cultural Marxism, and Mulhern’s own project of the critique and analysis of ‘metaculture’ in…
Arguments within English Theory: Accelerationism, Brexit and the Problem of ‘Englishness’
The decision of the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, to ‘Brexit’, appears as a traumatic shock. Here this shock is examined in the context of the national imaginary of ‘Englishness’ and its relationship to theory. I focus on the theoretical tendency known as accelerationism, which suggests we embrace abstraction and modernity to transcend the limits of contemporary capitalism into a new post-capitalist society. Accelerationism embraces…
Skimming the surface: Critiquing anti-critique
Contemporary forms of anti-critique take issue with critical distance as the root of critique’s ‘Olympian’ and hierarchical stance. Instead, they constantly call us to get closer: to immerse, network, touch or skim. Against claims to hidden or encrypted meaning to be revealed, they stress we stay as close to the surface of things as possible. These forms of ‘surface reading’ characterise a common orientation of literary and critical studies at th…
Introduction: Old and New Weird
The introduction to this special issue proposes a three-stage periodization for the development of weird fiction, the unstable hybrid of horror, science fiction, and fantasy most often associated with H. P. Lovecraft: Old Weird (1880-1940), which is centered on Lovecraft's literary and critical work and the pulp magazine Weird Tales that gave the genre its name; Weird Transition (1940-80), a period marked by the apparent decline of the genre but …
The Art of the Absolute: Relations, Objects, and Immanence
The contemporary theorization of art can be traced in a series of interlocking and antagonistic positions: the dissolution of art into social relations, the tracking of art as the work of objects that recede from our grasp, and the practice of art as instantiating or linking to an immanent plane. I take the question of immanence as central to these debates. This is because immanence implies a superior plane that exceeds specification or determina…
Guy Debord's Time-Image: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978)
July 01 2013 Guy Debord's Time-Image: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978) Benjamin Noys Benjamin Noys Benjamin Noys is Reader in English at the University of Chichester. He is the author of Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (Pluto Press, 2000), The Culture of Death (Berg, 2005), The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), and editor of Communization and Its Discontents (…
Poder, vida y subjetivación
CM y LQ): en el debate contemporáneo sobre "biopolítica", en particular en el contexto italiano y siguiendo, entre otros, el impulso de Roberto Esposito, ha cobrado una cierta fuerza la idea de que una verdadera resistencia al gobierno sobre la vida tendría que implicar necesariamente repensar la categoría de la "vida" (más allá de las oposiciones metafísicas entre lo humano y lo animal, o entre bios y
Political Writings, 1953-1993
This review considers the collection Political Writings, 1953-1993 by Maurice Blanchot as a means to assess the relatively little-known political odyssey of this writer and theorist. Noting the absence of his earlier right-wing political texts from the 1930s in this collection, it attempts to probe Blanchot’s idiosyncratic ‘ultra-left’ turn represented in his texts of the 1950s and 1960s. In particular, I analyse how Blanchot develops a communism…
Shadow Manifesto
The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory
The Density and Fragility of the World: Latour
This chapter examines the work of the contemporary anthropologist of science Bruno Latour. Although not usually regarded as a significant figure in contemporary theory, Latour’s work on networks is becoming increasingly influential and demonstrates the spread of affirmative thinking across the humanities and social sciences. Despite the claim to being a neutral analytic tool Latour’s use of network thinking incarnates an affirmative politics that…
The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory
"The Persistence of the Negative" published on by Edinburgh University Press.
Revolution in Psychology: Alienation to Emancipation The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, and Politics
This review essay analyses the proposed synthesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism, which often presents itself as a critique of the kind of utopianism associated with 'Freudo-Marxism'. In Yannis Stavrakakis's The Lacanian Left (2007) this anti-utopianism slides towards a left reformism, in which the emphasis on constitutive lack prevents any thinking of transformation. Ian Parker's Revolution in Psychology (2007) presents a bracing but red…
Ends in Sight: Marx/Fukuyama/Hobsbawm/Anderson
Gregory Elliott's Ends in Sight (2008) argues that Marxism is no longer a 'real movement' grounded in the historical tendencies of the present, but has retreated into being a utopian idea. Refusing to embrace anti-Marxism, Elliott controversially argues that such a position is the only realistic one that can be held by the Left in the wake of the defeat of historical socialism. In assessing this claim, this review-essay re-traces Elliott's indebt…
Monumental Construction’: Badiou and the Politics of Aesthetics
Alain Badiou offers a thinking of aesthetics geared to the invention of the new, against what he regards as the conformism of contemporary cultural production. His conception of a revived modernism, unafraid of ‘monumental construction’, challenges the modesty of many contemporary conceptions of art. Badiou remains faithful to the ‘modernist moment’, at the same time as arguing the need for a re‐conceptualisation of the modern. This involves a si…
The End of the Monarchy of Sex: Sexuality and Contemporary Nihilism
The hegemonic form of contemporary queer theory is dependent on a model of desire as autonomous and deregulated, derived from post-'68 French theory and particularly the work of Michel Foucault. Such a model is at risk of finding itself in congruence with a deregulated post-Fordist capitalism that recuperates supposedly dissident sexual identities. This article returns to the work of Foucault to identify a largely unacknowledged tendency in his w…
Introduction: `Reactionary times
Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard / Ballard
In his key work Simulacra and Simulations (1981) Jean Baudrillard lauded the British science-fiction writer J. G. Ballard's novel Crash (1973) as 'the first great novel of the universe of simulation' (1994: 119). The novel explored a world of perverse obsession with the erotic potential of the car-crash saturated by media imagery
The Provocations of Alain Badiou
Fascinating (British) Fascism: David Britton’s Lord Horror
Although we are familiar with films and novels as sites of ‘fascinating fascism’ (Sontag) there has been comparatively little attention paid to comics or the graphic novel. David Britton’s Lord Horror forces us to confront this absence. These graphic novels offer an historical fantasy based on the life of the pre-war fascist and wartime traitor William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw Haw. This disturbing representation of fascism is an explicit c…
Introduction: Old and New Weird
The introduction to this special issue proposes a three-stage periodization for the development of weird fiction, the unstable hybrid of horror, science fiction, and fantasy most often associated with H. P. Lovecraft: Old Weird (1880-1940), which is centered on Lovecraft's literary and critical work and the pulp magazine Weird Tales that gave the genre its name; Weird Transition (1940-80), a period marked by the apparent decline of the genre but …
The End of the Monarchy of Sex: Sexuality and Contemporary Nihilism
The hegemonic form of contemporary queer theory is dependent on a model of desire as autonomous and deregulated, derived from post-'68 French theory and particularly the work of Michel Foucault. Such a model is at risk of finding itself in congruence with a deregulated post-Fordist capitalism that recuperates supposedly dissident sexual identities. This article returns to the work of Foucault to identify a largely unacknowledged tendency in his w…
Into the 'Jungle
Hardcore Dance has spent years underground evolving from the still-current stereotype of frenzied thudding bass lines coupled to samples of the tunes of children's programmes, of a music for E-head ravers whose drug-induced dummy sucking became a potent symbol for a subculture stigmatised as infantile and stupid. That evolution has reached the point of 'Jungle', and now Hardcore Dance and Jungle are often used interchangeably as terms of descript…
Arguments within English Theory: Accelerationism, Brexit and the Problem of ‘Englishness’
The decision of the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, to ‘Brexit’, appears as a traumatic shock. Here this shock is examined in the context of the national imaginary of ‘Englishness’ and its relationship to theory. I focus on the theoretical tendency known as accelerationism, which suggests we embrace abstraction and modernity to transcend the limits of contemporary capitalism into a new post-capitalist society. Accelerationism embraces…
The Provocations of Alain Badiou
The Crisis of the Present Moment and the Crisis of Contemporary Theory
Instead of crisis as a punctual event the contemporary experience is one of overlapping forms and modes of crisis resulting in a complex rhythm. While attempting to respond to this situation contemporary theory has often struggled to focus on the present moment of crisis. Instead, it has turned to a fundamental rift in the past or to the need to invent a utopian future as ways of escaping the present crisis. This is due to the influence of Heideg…
The Art of the Absolute: Relations, Objects, and Immanence
The contemporary theorization of art can be traced in a series of interlocking and antagonistic positions: the dissolution of art into social relations, the tracking of art as the work of objects that recede from our grasp, and the practice of art as instantiating or linking to an immanent plane. I take the question of immanence as central to these debates. This is because immanence implies a superior plane that exceeds specification or determina…
Monumental Construction’: Badiou and the Politics of Aesthetics
Alain Badiou offers a thinking of aesthetics geared to the invention of the new, against what he regards as the conformism of contemporary cultural production. His conception of a revived modernism, unafraid of ‘monumental construction’, challenges the modesty of many contemporary conceptions of art. Badiou remains faithful to the ‘modernist moment’, at the same time as arguing the need for a re‐conceptualisation of the modern. This involves a si…
Introduction: `Reactionary times
Time of Death
Communicative Unreason: Bataille and Habermas
Etude de la critique de l'anti-modernisme de Bataille developpee par Habermas dans le cadre de sa critique du postmodernisme fancais et du discours philosophique de la modernite. Proposant une alternative au modele de la raison communicative avance par Habermas, l'A. montre que l'analyse quasi-transcendantale du concept de communication chez Bataille, fondee sur l'idee de deraison communicative, vient palier une lacune dans le discours habermassi…
Into the 'Jungle
Hardcore Dance has spent years underground evolving from the still-current stereotype of frenzied thudding bass lines coupled to samples of the tunes of children's programmes, of a music for E-head ravers whose drug-induced dummy sucking became a potent symbol for a subculture stigmatised as infantile and stupid. That evolution has reached the point of 'Jungle', and now Hardcore Dance and Jungle are often used interchangeably as terms of descript…
Communicative Unreason: Bataille and Habermas
Etude de la critique de l'anti-modernisme de Bataille developpee par Habermas dans le cadre de sa critique du postmodernisme fancais et du discours philosophique de la modernite. Proposant une alternative au modele de la raison communicative avance par Habermas, l'A. montre que l'analyse quasi-transcendantale du concept de communication chez Bataille, fondee sur l'idee de deraison communicative, vient palier une lacune dans le discours habermassi…
Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction
Fascinating (British) Fascism: David Britton’s Lord Horror
Although we are familiar with films and novels as sites of ‘fascinating fascism’ (Sontag) there has been comparatively little attention paid to comics or the graphic novel. David Britton’s Lord Horror forces us to confront this absence. These graphic novels offer an historical fantasy based on the life of the pre-war fascist and wartime traitor William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw Haw. This disturbing representation of fascism is an explicit c…
Time of Death
The Provocations of Alain Badiou
Introduction: `Reactionary times
Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard / Ballard
In his key work Simulacra and Simulations (1981) Jean Baudrillard lauded the British science-fiction writer J. G. Ballard's novel Crash (1973) as 'the first great novel of the universe of simulation' (1994: 119). The novel explored a world of perverse obsession with the erotic potential of the car-crash saturated by media imagery
The End of the Monarchy of Sex: Sexuality and Contemporary Nihilism
The hegemonic form of contemporary queer theory is dependent on a model of desire as autonomous and deregulated, derived from post-'68 French theory and particularly the work of Michel Foucault. Such a model is at risk of finding itself in congruence with a deregulated post-Fordist capitalism that recuperates supposedly dissident sexual identities. This article returns to the work of Foucault to identify a largely unacknowledged tendency in his w…
Revolution in Psychology: Alienation to Emancipation The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, and Politics
This review essay analyses the proposed synthesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism, which often presents itself as a critique of the kind of utopianism associated with 'Freudo-Marxism'. In Yannis Stavrakakis's The Lacanian Left (2007) this anti-utopianism slides towards a left reformism, in which the emphasis on constitutive lack prevents any thinking of transformation. Ian Parker's Revolution in Psychology (2007) presents a bracing but red…
Ends in Sight: Marx/Fukuyama/Hobsbawm/Anderson
Gregory Elliott's Ends in Sight (2008) argues that Marxism is no longer a 'real movement' grounded in the historical tendencies of the present, but has retreated into being a utopian idea. Refusing to embrace anti-Marxism, Elliott controversially argues that such a position is the only realistic one that can be held by the Left in the wake of the defeat of historical socialism. In assessing this claim, this review-essay re-traces Elliott's indebt…
Monumental Construction’: Badiou and the Politics of Aesthetics
Alain Badiou offers a thinking of aesthetics geared to the invention of the new, against what he regards as the conformism of contemporary cultural production. His conception of a revived modernism, unafraid of ‘monumental construction’, challenges the modesty of many contemporary conceptions of art. Badiou remains faithful to the ‘modernist moment’, at the same time as arguing the need for a re‐conceptualisation of the modern. This involves a si…
The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory
The Density and Fragility of the World: Latour
This chapter examines the work of the contemporary anthropologist of science Bruno Latour. Although not usually regarded as a significant figure in contemporary theory, Latour’s work on networks is becoming increasingly influential and demonstrates the spread of affirmative thinking across the humanities and social sciences. Despite the claim to being a neutral analytic tool Latour’s use of network thinking incarnates an affirmative politics that…
The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory
"The Persistence of the Negative" published on by Edinburgh University Press.
Political Writings, 1953-1993
This review considers the collection Political Writings, 1953-1993 by Maurice Blanchot as a means to assess the relatively little-known political odyssey of this writer and theorist. Noting the absence of his earlier right-wing political texts from the 1930s in this collection, it attempts to probe Blanchot’s idiosyncratic ‘ultra-left’ turn represented in his texts of the 1950s and 1960s. In particular, I analyse how Blanchot develops a communism…
Shadow Manifesto
Poder, vida y subjetivación
CM y LQ): en el debate contemporáneo sobre "biopolítica", en particular en el contexto italiano y siguiendo, entre otros, el impulso de Roberto Esposito, ha cobrado una cierta fuerza la idea de que una verdadera resistencia al gobierno sobre la vida tendría que implicar necesariamente repensar la categoría de la "vida" (más allá de las oposiciones metafísicas entre lo humano y lo animal, o entre bios y
Guy Debord's Time-Image: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978)
July 01 2013 Guy Debord's Time-Image: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978) Benjamin Noys Benjamin Noys Benjamin Noys is Reader in English at the University of Chichester. He is the author of Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (Pluto Press, 2000), The Culture of Death (Berg, 2005), The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), and editor of Communization and Its Discontents (…
The Art of the Absolute: Relations, Objects, and Immanence
The contemporary theorization of art can be traced in a series of interlocking and antagonistic positions: the dissolution of art into social relations, the tracking of art as the work of objects that recede from our grasp, and the practice of art as instantiating or linking to an immanent plane. I take the question of immanence as central to these debates. This is because immanence implies a superior plane that exceeds specification or determina…
Introduction: Old and New Weird
The introduction to this special issue proposes a three-stage periodization for the development of weird fiction, the unstable hybrid of horror, science fiction, and fantasy most often associated with H. P. Lovecraft: Old Weird (1880-1940), which is centered on Lovecraft's literary and critical work and the pulp magazine Weird Tales that gave the genre its name; Weird Transition (1940-80), a period marked by the apparent decline of the genre but …
Skimming the surface: Critiquing anti-critique
Contemporary forms of anti-critique take issue with critical distance as the root of critique’s ‘Olympian’ and hierarchical stance. Instead, they constantly call us to get closer: to immerse, network, touch or skim. Against claims to hidden or encrypted meaning to be revealed, they stress we stay as close to the surface of things as possible. These forms of ‘surface reading’ characterise a common orientation of literary and critical studies at th…
The Peculiarities of English Culture
Francis Mulhern’s Figures of Catastrophe argues for the existence of a hitherto-unnoticed generic form: the condition of culture novel, which offers a metacultural reflection on the conditions for the existence of culture and for access to culture. Mulhern’s analysis is located within the framework of Marxist reflections on culture, the history of British cultural Marxism, and Mulhern’s own project of the critique and analysis of ‘metaculture’ in…
Arguments within English Theory: Accelerationism, Brexit and the Problem of ‘Englishness’
The decision of the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, to ‘Brexit’, appears as a traumatic shock. Here this shock is examined in the context of the national imaginary of ‘Englishness’ and its relationship to theory. I focus on the theoretical tendency known as accelerationism, which suggests we embrace abstraction and modernity to transcend the limits of contemporary capitalism into a new post-capitalist society. Accelerationism embraces…
The Masses Make History’: On Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology
This essay responds to Frederic Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology by arguing that this book is centrally concerned with the masses. By developing Jameson’s own model of allegorical reading, the pressure of the masses on the text is explored. This is demonstrated through a reading of Albert Camus’s The Plague , Jameson’s central example of ‘bad’ allegory. While this novel is ‘bad’ for implying a one-to-one allegorical relationship between the plague…
Philosophy (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Political science (14 works) · Politics (14 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works)