Look in the mirror. Also a few decent ones on
www.dissensus.com
Well that's nice of you to say, but what I meant was - theorists and philosophers and critical thinkers who don't actually write about music, but their concepts open it up in interesting ways, or can be repurposed by the likes of us.
The Barthes stuff about jouissance etc seemed to have loads of uses and applications at that time. (Also Barthes did actually write about music, he was passionate about it... in particular "The Grain of the Voice" was, and maybe still is, very fruitful - although AutoTune, because it interferes with the grain by putting something in between the body and the vocal output as it reaches the listener's ear complicates that...).
Bataille similarly, and Kristeva.
And then Deleuze & Guattari, and Virilio, seemed to have a lot of potential - particularly with rave culture.
Then you had your Donna Haraways and so forth.
But that is over 25 years ago.
Not sure who or what are the reigning or upcoming figures or zones within current critical theory - Badiou and Zizek have been established names for a long time now, and I never noticed much use being made of them in terms of popular or underground music.
Is queer theory and radical gender theory still the cutting edge zone?
I guess Robin James of It's Her Factory is probably at the cutting edge of applying these ideas to music, and to very bang up to date, mainstream music too.
I did this thing on my website back at the end of the Nineties called the Rave Theory Tool Kit, it was a half-jokey half-serious collection of all these left over quotes I'd gathered and typed out, things that seemed to have applications to music but I'd never found a place to put them. Some going back as far as Nietzsche but mostly the French crit crew and then 90s cybertheory types like Arthur Kroker.
I wonder if I was to do it again, what names could be added to the litany?