Abstract
This paper probes the import of the idea and practice of critique as drivers of inquiry in the humanities. I start by tracing the historical trajectory of critique since the 1960s, from its role as a skeptical hermeneutic tool used to open up disciplines to insurgent methodologies and subaltern voices to its unmasking as a limiting “sensibility” (Rita Felski) bent on a form of debilitating, “paranoid” reading (Eve Sedgwick) that preempts more fruitful forms of engagement with literary and cultural artifacts. I then outline a typology of the philosophical practice of critique as a formal method that has historically enabled inquiry into the relation between knowledge and action, theory and practice. Drawing on Rodolphe Gasché and others, I briefly discuss the Kantian and Nietzschean understandings of critique as philosophical bookends for critical practice in the humanities. The bulk of my paper is devoted to juxtaposing Bruno Latour’s and Judith Butler’s more recent analyses of the temporal logic of critique. For both, critique requires situating oneself in the present while accepting its contingency, which entails embracing the contingency that drives the critique’s own operations. Awareness of contingency neutralizes the temptation to project a desired normative framework onto a phantasmatic future, which is critique’s biggest hazard. In exposing the temporality of critique to defuse its utopian vestiges and temptation for transcendence, Latour and Butler show how critique can infuse the humanities with a buoyant sense of immanence born of the question “what difference the present moment makes” (Foucault, “Enlightenment”).
Presenters
Patrizia Mc BrideProfessor, Senior Associate Dean for Social Sciences, German Studies, Cornell University, New York, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Critique, Criticism, Hermeneutics, Kant, Nietzsche, Foucault, Butler, Latour
