New Books in Critical Theory

Today I sit down with Brendan Graham Dempsey, Director of Research at the Institute of Applied Metatheory, where he thinks about human meaning-making systems. It’s rare that I have someone on the pod who doesn’t specialize in Asian traditions, but I thought a conversation with Brendan might help crystalize some of the ideas we’ve been discussing so far this season. We talk about what kind of spirituality is possible after postmodernism, the advantages of an integrative worldview, and how to decide which perspective should win out over others when they’re in conflict. In our conversation, it is apparent that Brendan and I are coming at this from different directions, but ultimately we discover some common ground.
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One last thing: we are planning an “Ask Me Anything” episode in the future, so reach out via Substack or my website here and let me know your questions. Ok, on with the show!
Resources relevant to this episode:
Discussion of Pierce’s publication in Metamodern Theory and Praxis: here
Brendan’s main website: here
Evolution of Meaning: here
Ω (Omega): here
Subscribe to Black Beryl Substack to unlock our members-only benefits, including a chapter from Brendan’s forthcoming book Evolution of Meaning (PDF).
Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. See here.

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Orson Welles is a foundational work of Welles criticism. First published by Joseph McBride in the British Film Institute's Cinema One series in 1972 when the author was twenty-four, it now has been extensively revised and updated to reflect the ongoing developments in the work of this great filmmaker. McBride—who, as Martin Scorsese has written, "has a clearer understanding of Welles and his films than almost anyone"—studied Welles at work for more than five years while playing an earnest young film critic and historian in The Other Side of the Wind. Among the new material in this third edition, Orson Welles: Revised and Expanded is McBride's first extended analysis of that film as well as an essay on Welles's acting career and revisions of the other chapters on his adventurous, multifaceted body of work, illuminating and setting the record straight on this often misunderstood director.
Joseph McBride has written or edited twenty-six books, also including two other books on Welles; biographies of Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, and John Ford; the interview book Hawks on Hawks; critical studies of Ford (with Michael Wilmington), Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, the Coen Bros., and George Cukor; and I Loved Movies, But... In 2026, Sticking Place Books reprinted his long-lost edited collection Persistence of Vision, with an extensive new introduction. McBride covered the film industry for many years as a reporter and reviewer for Daily Variety. He is an emeritus professor of the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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This episode features a conversation with historical anthropologist Lisa Mitchell and political theorist Hari Ramesh whose recent books make a case against anti-state thinking in social and political theory. We discussed the need to move beyond frameworks emphasizing either subordination to the state or revolt against the state in order to better understand how marginalized and oppressed groups can use the state as a means to enact transformative justice aimed at greater social equality. As Lisa and Hari point out, this requires moving beyond theories of deliberative democracy that rest on conceptions of rational communication. Instead, they argue for the need to consider the role of embodied practices, such as pulling the emergency chain on trains or blocking road traffic, and instances of “positive coercion,” such as Reconstruction Era laws and the U.S. Civil Rights Act, in expanding the parameters of democratic participation. Through Lisa’s account of what she calls a “materialist genealogy of collective action” in India and in Hari’s readings of B.R. Ambedkar, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the NAACP’s legal brief on Brown v. Board of Education, we come to understand the state as a complex terrain of power with different pressure points that allows for novel forms of relationality and maneuver. In the process, we also see political collectives, not as fixed identity groups, but as the product of shifting coalitions.
Guests
Lisa Mitchell: Professor or History and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Hari Ramesh: Assistant Professor of Government, Wesleyan University
References
Lisa Mitchell, Hailing the State: Indian Democracy Between Elections (Duke University Press, 2023)
Hari Ramesh, Harnessing the State: Oppressed Groups and the Pursuit of Radical Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2026)
John Dewey: philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer who was one of the most prominent American scholars of the twentieth century.
B.R. Ambedkar, “States and Minorities” (1947)
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935)
Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed (2004)
Jurgen Habermas: philosopher and social theorist whose work addressed notions of communicative rationality and the public sphere.
Adhaar card: 12-digit unique identification number tied to biometric data and demographic information issued to residents of India
Telengana movement: a decades-long political and social campaign for the creation of a separate state out of the Telugu-speaking region of Andhra Pradesh in India, which culminated in the formation of Telangana as India’s 29th state on June 2, 2014.
Iris Marion Young: political theorist and socialist feminist who focused on the nature of justice and social difference.
Sally Haslanger: philosopher and feminist theorist who work on the social construction of categories, especially of gender and race.

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In this episode of the Books for Better Understanding series from Notre Dame Press, David Carlson hosts Jonathan A. Anderson and James Elkins for a discussion of Anderson's new book, The Invisibility Of Religion In Contemporary Art (U Notre Dame Press, 2025). Order your copy here

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In 1714, doctor, philosopher and writer Bernard Mandeville published The Fable of the Bees, a humorous tale in which a prosperous hive full of greedy and licentious bees trade their vices for virtues and immediately fall into economic and societal collapse. Outrage among the reading public followed; philosophers took up their pens to refute what they saw as the fable’s central assertion. How could it be that an immoral community thrived but the introduction of morality caused it to crash and burn? In Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe (Princeton UP, 2025) John Callanan examines Mandeville and his famous fable, showing how its contentious claim—that vice was essential to the economic flourishing of any society—formed part of Mandeville’s overall theory of human nature. Mandeville, Callanan argues, was perfectly suited to analyze and satirize the emerging phenomenon of modern society—and reveal the gap between its self-image and its reality.
Callanan shows that Mandeville’s thinking was informed by his medical training and his innovative approach to the treatment of illness with both physiological and psychological components. Through incisive and controversial analyses of sexual mores, gender inequality, economic structures, and political ideology, Mandeville sought to provide a naturalistic account of human behaviour—one that put humans in close continuity with animals. Aware that his fellow human beings might find this offensive, he cloaked his theories in fables, poems, anecdotes, and humorous stories. Mandeville mastered irony precisely for the purpose of making us aware of uncomfortable aspects of our deepest natures—aspects that we still struggle to acknowledge today.

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