No sympathy for the devil

Since this question isn’t specific, I was a little overwhelmed trying to think of how to answer it as completely as possible, though I suppose this is the kind of question I should’ve started to think about anyway. So this is long, probably not totally exhaustive, and sorted by category of the things that I generally choose to read about so you can pick and choose based on what you’re into. PDFs are included for ones I could find (mostly from Monoskop, which is a fantastic resource). On top of this, I have a bunch of specialised essays about bioart/ethics and prosthetics that I didn’t end up sorting through. But anyway, thank you for asking. Have fun, friends. 

Traditional art theory:

Umberto Eco, On Ugliness (this is a favourite of mine, it is in the form of a response to Eco’s History of Beauty, investigating “the voyeuristic impulse behind our attraction to the gruesome and the horrible.” Some people admittedly find this book unsettling. I could easily put this under monster theory, but it deals specifically with visual arts and culture. It’s really fantastic if this is your thing.)

Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (the seminal work on Bacon and a nod to my love affair with Deleuze, of course, how could I not include this.)

Jean-François Lyotard, Miscellaneous Texts I: Aesthetics and Theory of Art (I could only find an English PDF through my university library, so the link won’t work here.)

Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (Panofsky can be a little dry sometimes, but this one is pretty good.)

Digital/new media:

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Canadian theorist boost)

Hito Steyerl, Wretched of the Screen (someone recommended this to me a couple of years ago and I fell in love with it. I particularly enjoy “In Defense of the Poor Image”)

Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images

Cybernetics:

N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Postman (history of technology/cybernetics, lit crit, culture studies; arguably one of the most important books of my life)

Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (the seminal text on cybernetics)

Mark Hansen & WJT Mitchell, Critical Terms for Media Studies (divided into sections of Aesthetics, Society, and Technology, dealing with subjects of art, body, memory, biomedia, materiality, law, networks, and more.)

Mark Hansen & Bruce Clarke, Emergence and Embodiment (this is better than anything I could say about it: “In response to the apparent dissolution of boundaries at work in the contemporary technosciences of emergence, neocybernetics observes that cognitive systems are operationally bounded, semi-autonomous entities coupled with their environments and other systems. Second-order systems theory stresses the recursive complexities of observation, mediation, and communication.”)

Tiqqun, This is Not a Program (the biopolitical subject and omnipresent Empire; forms of pacification, surveillance, sedative, authority)

Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near (Texts on transhumanism and futurological perspectives on artificial intelligence)

John Johnston, The Allure of Machinic Life

Misc. philosophy:

Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (I really love this book, and it is pretty important. I find it has always been very useful to me no matter what, as it encompasses a lot of the things I gravitate towards theoretically. Postmodern theory, sex politics, economics, semiotics, desire, it’s all here.)

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus (The Masterpiece. Really, I would read anything by Deleuze and Guattari you can get your hands on, including Kafka)

Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess (I know people are sometimes conflicted about Bataille, but I like to read him, and some of the texts in this book have helped me work through certain ideas in a new way that I didn’t expect. They are all quite short. Recommended if you are into the visceral, death, eroticism. There is also a bit of economic theory.)

Gilles Deleuze, Difference & Repetition (I’m gonna put this here, say that it’s important and great, and then say: really just read everything Deleuze has ever written, and I won’t mention him again to save space/time.)

Plato, The Symposium

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

Monster theory: 

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (the source of theory on abjection)

Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

Donna Hardaway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (boundaries between evolutionary/technological/biological narratives; notably: “A Cyborg Manifesto”)

Jeffery Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”

Tyson E. Lewis, “Monsters and the Law of Separation: From Critique to Revolution in Marxism’s Bestiary”

Allen S. Weiss, “Ten Theses on Monsters and Monstrosity”

Everything by H.P. Lovecraft

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus

Sci-fi:

Just about everything by Philip K. Dick, but if you are new to his work, start with this: “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”

William Gibson, Neuromancer

Isaac Asimov, I, Robot and anything in the Robot series

Stanislaw Lem, Solaris and His Master’s Voice

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet

Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, The Roadside Picnic

Other critical theory:

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia and Negative Dialectics

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (a history of thought, “archaeology of human sciences,” woven through art, lit, economics and natural sciences. A really under-appreciated work.)

Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish (power structures, surveillance, the good stuff.)

Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self (a collection of essays and lectures dealing with self-presentation/understanding/regulation and the distance between the authority of the individual and liberal democracies.)

Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am and “Différance”

General literature:

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago I, II (Russian, depressing, long as hell, but really good if you’re into that sort of thing. Also recommended: Cancer Ward)

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (“A carnivalesque romp through the dark ages of Stalin’s Moscow,” to quote the back of my copy)

Albert Camus, The Plague (I love this book with my whole heart)

bell hooks, All About Love (I feel very strongly that everyone should read this book. It should be required in schools. It's really great and important.)

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy