Steven Shaviro


Steven Shaviro is an American academic, philosopher and cultural critic whose areas of interest include film theory, time, science fiction, panpsychism, capitalism, affect and subjectivity. He earned a PhD from Yale in 1981, and teaches Film, Culture and English at the University of Washington.

Work

His most widely read book is Doom Patrols, a "theoretical fiction" that outlines the state of postmodernism during the early 1990s, using poetic language, personal anecdotes, and creative prose. He has also written extensively about music videos as an artform.
Shaviro has written a book about film theory, The Cinematic Body, which according to the preface is "about postmodernism, the politics of human bodies, constructions of masculinity, and the aesthetics of masochism." It also examines Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection and the dominance of Lacanian tropes in contemporary academic film theory. According to Shaviro, the use of psychoanalysis has mirrored the actions of a cult, with its own religious texts.
Shaviro's book Connected, Or, What It Means to Live in the Network Society, appeared in 2003. A later book, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics was published in May 2009. Five years later, he wrote a book about speculative realism in philosophy, inspired by Alfred North Whitehead.