Explained & Defined

Learning philosophical or cultural theories can be rather demanding, and getting your head around some concepts, terms and ideas can be a challenging task. This is why we put together a growing collection of simple explanantions and definitions of some important theoretical topics. Each link on the list below (devided into sections) will take you to a short and simple (as possible) summary and explanation, hopefuly assisting you in your learning.

Terms and Theories

Actor-Network Theory

Banality of Evil

Binary Oppositions

Carnivalesque

Chronotope

Civilizing Process

Clash of Civilizations

Cogito Ergo Sum

Communist Manifesto

Cultural Hegemony

Cultural Materialism

Culture Industry

Denotation and Connotation

Dialectic of the Enlightenment

Dialectical Materialism

Discourse

Double Hermeneutics

Dramaturgy theory

Engaged Theory

Existence Precedes Essence Id, Ego and Superego

Interpellation

Intertextuality

Iron Law of Oligarchy

Langue and Parole

liquid modernity

Logocentrism

Mechanical Solidarity and Organic Solidarity

Metanarrative

Methodological Individualism

Modernization Theory

Moral Panic One Dimensional Man

Paradigm and syntagm

Postcolonialism

Presentation of Self

Private Language Argument

Signifier and Signified  Simulacra and Simulation

Society of the Spectacle

Speech Acts Theory

Structuralism

Subculture

Symbolic interaction

Symbolic violence

The arbitrary nature of the Sign

The Beauty Myth

The Disappearance of Childhood

The End of History

The Iron Cage of Rationality

The Political Unconscious The Male Gaze

Nietzsche

The Last Man

Übermensch

Eternal Return

Will to Power

Foucault

Governmentality

Biopower

Biopolitics

Technologies of Power

Discipline

Power and Knowledge

Discourse

 

Kierkegaard
Leap of Faith

Alienation

money and abstraction
Anxiety
Despair
The Aesthetic, Ethical and Religious
self, individual and individualism

Derrida

Différance

Writing and Trace

Aporia

 

Barthes

Readerly and Writerly texts

The Death of the Author

Carl Jung

Persona

Anima and animus 

Indeviduation

Active Imagination

Synchronicity

Collective Unconscious

 

 

Karl Marx

False Consciousness 

Alienation

fetishization of commodities 

Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Means of Production

Class Consciousness

Class Conflict

 

Anthropology

Founding/ Origin Myth

Mytheme

Totemism

Structuration Theory

Ethnomethodology

Anomie

Thick Description

 

Existentialism

Existence precedes essence
The Absurd

Authenticity
Facticity
The Other and the Look
Angst 
Despair