Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2020.1790750
E. Renault
ABSTRACT While the first generation of the so-called Frankfurt School has promoted a strong interconnection between social critique and knowledge of the social world, contemporary critical theory seems to consider that epistemological issues don’t deserve anymore consideration. Is it really possible to elaborate a convincing theory of social critique without taking seriously the various links between social critique and knowledge? This article argues that the answer is no. In a first step, it recalls the ways in which the philosophical debate about social critique is currently articulated and how it disconnects social critique and knowledge. One of the reasons for such a disconnection relates to a vision of politics as consisting mainly in a conflict between normative principles, notably between conceptions of social justice. This vision of politics is criticized in the second step of this paper. A second reason, examined in the third part of the paper, relates to the risk of epistemic violence. The shared but questionable assumption is that any sociological or philosophical attempt to produce knowledge would necessarily lead to epistemic violence rather than to epistemic empowerment.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2020.1790753
M. T'Jampens, J. Versieren
ABSTRACT In “Il faut défendre la société”, Foucault attempted to historicize and criticize Nietzsche’s equating of the social with struggle. In order to do so, Foucault produced a descriptive discursive history of his genealogical project by deploying the method of the critical archaeology. Foucault realized thereinafter that his archaeological exposition of the genealogical discourse in fact laid bare a close historical and conceptual bond between genealogy and modern racial discourses. In the first lectures, Foucault, unearthed the genealogical discourse hidden in the literature written by the nobility as they attempted to resist the centralisation of royal power. In the latter part of his lectures, he described a discursive interplay between genealogy-as-struggle and the biopolitical practices of the modern state. As such, he gave a tentatively description how the modern state inherited and extensively applied the notion of struggle in its biopolitical control on its populations. The immoral and historical consequences of this affinity, resulting in the biopolitics of genocide, warranted Foucault to distance himself from Nietzsche’s concept, which in effect resulted in rethinking the social within the framework of gouvernmentalité, in which struggle was a modality rather than the prime mover of society.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2020.1790751
Odin Lysaker
ABSTRACT What is “critical” about critical theory? I claim that, to be “critical enough”, critical theory’s future depends on being able to handle today’s planetary climate crisis, which presupposes a philosophy of nature. Here, I argue that Axel Honneth’s vision of critical theory represents a nature denial and is thus unable to criticize humans’ instrumentalization as well as capitalism’s exploitation of nature. However, I recover what I take to be a missed opportunity of what I term as the early Honneth’s original ecological insight, which I reconstruct precisely as a philosophy of nature. Consequently, I identify what I describe as an ecological sensibility in Honneth. This refers to a bodily capability through which humans sensuously can resonate, communicate, and interact – and through that morally engage – with nature in its entire complexity. Furthermore, by virtue of this ecological sensibility, humans can recognize nature’s inherent moral value as a sensuously affected party. Then, the early Honneth’s original insight is recovered as a critical political ecology, which is needed facing today’s climate crisis.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2020.1790754
P. Giladi
ABSTRACT My aim in this paper is to articulate a Foucauldian critique of scientific naturalism as well as a Foucauldian critique of the nomothetic framework underlying the Placement Problem. My Foucauldian post-structuralist critique of scientific naturalism questions the relations between our society’s imbrication of economic-political power structures and knowledge in a way that also effects some constructive critical alignment between Foucault and Habermas, helping to undermine the traditional view of their respective social critiques as incompatible. First, I will outline a brief genealogical backstory for the rise of scientific naturalism, and I will then reconstruct the Placement Problem. In the second part of the paper, I introduce Foucault’s notion of pouvoir-savoir (“power-knowledge”), namely his account of the interconnection between power and knowledge. I then go on to articulate the Foucauldian critique of scientific naturalism by arguing that the levelling nature of nomothetic rationality and its conservative naturalistic vocabulary involves regulative discourse: anything that resists placeability/locatability is labelled “odd”. By being thus visibly marked, “odd” phenomena become “queer” phenomena, which then become “problematic” phenomena. They are, thereby, construed in need of discipline (and even punishment). Understood in this Foucauldian way, scientific naturalist disciplinarity produces subjected and practised minds, “docile” minds.
{"title":"A Foucauldian Critique of Scientific Naturalism: “Docile Minds”","authors":"P. Giladi","doi":"10.1080/14409917.2020.1790754","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14409917.2020.1790754","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT My aim in this paper is to articulate a Foucauldian critique of scientific naturalism as well as a Foucauldian critique of the nomothetic framework underlying the Placement Problem. My Foucauldian post-structuralist critique of scientific naturalism questions the relations between our society’s imbrication of economic-political power structures and knowledge in a way that also effects some constructive critical alignment between Foucault and Habermas, helping to undermine the traditional view of their respective social critiques as incompatible. First, I will outline a brief genealogical backstory for the rise of scientific naturalism, and I will then reconstruct the Placement Problem. In the second part of the paper, I introduce Foucault’s notion of pouvoir-savoir (“power-knowledge”), namely his account of the interconnection between power and knowledge. I then go on to articulate the Foucauldian critique of scientific naturalism by arguing that the levelling nature of nomothetic rationality and its conservative naturalistic vocabulary involves regulative discourse: anything that resists placeability/locatability is labelled “odd”. By being thus visibly marked, “odd” phenomena become “queer” phenomena, which then become “problematic” phenomena. They are, thereby, construed in need of discipline (and even punishment). Understood in this Foucauldian way, scientific naturalist disciplinarity produces subjected and practised minds, “docile” minds.","PeriodicalId":51905,"journal":{"name":"Critical Horizons","volume":"21 1","pages":"264 - 286"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14409917.2020.1790754","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49524610","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2020.1790752
Arvi Särkelä
ABSTRACT This article articulates the idea of a disclosing critique of society. It starts from the assumption that the curiously organicistic undertones of Adorno’s negative social ontology is part and parcel of a disclosing gesture in his social criticism. It then traces Adorno’s debate with social organicists to the point where the critical theorist’s own concept of society emerges with a claim to be critical in itself. It is argued that this critical claim is enforced by a disclosing gesture. To articulate what is at stake in this gesture of critical disclosure a parallel is drawn, and contrast made, to Emerson’s conception of disclosure as “drawing a circle around a circle”. The relationship between Adorno’s and Emerson’s conceptions of critical disclosure is complex. However, their juxtaposition allows for a distinction between two directions of critical disclosure. It will be argued that disclosing critique of society can be understood as an exemplary dissociation from alienated society by means of a creative association of empirical knowledge, poetic description and philosophical speculation by a critic standing, as it were, with one foot inside and the other outside our form of life.
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Pub Date : 2020-04-02DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2020.1759281
John F. Rundell
ABSTRACT Kant is concerned to give meaning, depth and veracity to the notion of the subject, which he does on transcendental grounds, and also to shift it beyond purely cognitivist formulations. He opens the subject up to other dimensions of the world that he or she establishes – not only the cognitive, but also the political – ethical and the aesthetic. He does this by constructing and denoting different faculties and their principles that ought to be employed in the distinct domains – the understanding, reason in its pure and practical orientations, and the imagination. Whilst practical reason is Kant’s main focus, the imagination is Kant’s unfinished business and is not limited to the issue of aesthetics. It is both reason’s “other”, and “an indispensable dimension of the human soul”, equal in power and capacity to the other faculties.
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Pub Date : 2020-04-02DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2020.1759280
M. Jay
ABSTRACT No longer capable of serving as a nodal point of a single coherent narrative or as a marker for parallel events across national borders, “1968” is best understood in a tense relation to “1967”. Juxtaposed rather than reconciled, they can only be brought together in a dynamic field of conflicting forces still in play even after a half century has passed. Such an approach alerts us to the relativization of what seems to be a punctual moment in a single historical space–time continuum. To understand the role of the Frankfurt School in the German “1968” is therefore to situate its history in the expanded field that includes the very different events of “1967”, which resist incorporation into a unified narrative. It is to register the importance of 1967 in generating its negative relationship to aspects of the German 1968, and in colouring its attitude towards post-colonial struggles and the discourse they have spawned. By expanding the field in this way, we will avoid turning 1968 into an isolated monument on a pedestal that masks its connection to the multiple historical contexts that can set it into motion and help us understand its importance today.
{"title":"1968 in an Expanded Field: The Frankfurt School and the Uneven Course of History","authors":"M. Jay","doi":"10.1080/14409917.2020.1759280","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14409917.2020.1759280","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT No longer capable of serving as a nodal point of a single coherent narrative or as a marker for parallel events across national borders, “1968” is best understood in a tense relation to “1967”. Juxtaposed rather than reconciled, they can only be brought together in a dynamic field of conflicting forces still in play even after a half century has passed. Such an approach alerts us to the relativization of what seems to be a punctual moment in a single historical space–time continuum. To understand the role of the Frankfurt School in the German “1968” is therefore to situate its history in the expanded field that includes the very different events of “1967”, which resist incorporation into a unified narrative. It is to register the importance of 1967 in generating its negative relationship to aspects of the German 1968, and in colouring its attitude towards post-colonial struggles and the discourse they have spawned. By expanding the field in this way, we will avoid turning 1968 into an isolated monument on a pedestal that masks its connection to the multiple historical contexts that can set it into motion and help us understand its importance today.","PeriodicalId":51905,"journal":{"name":"Critical Horizons","volume":"21 1","pages":"105 - 89"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14409917.2020.1759280","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60389033","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-02DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2020.1759282
F. Baghai
ABSTRACT Kant does not completely work out his philosophical conception of enlightenment. The definition of enlightenment that he offers in his well-known essay on the topic does not seem to completely match the definition that he puts forward later in his essay on the pantheism controversy and in the third Critique. It remains unclear how the two definitions relate to each other and whether and how they rest on the same principle. The lack of clarity in Kant's conception of enlightenment is left mostly unaddressed in the secondary literature on the topic. This paper suggests that Kant's philosophical conception of enlightenment rests on the discipline of pure reason. The self-disciplinary principle of reason, which is laid out in the Doctrine of Method of the first Critique, underlies both of Kant's definitions of enlightenment, although he himself does not clearly demonstrate how it does so.
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Pub Date : 2020-04-02DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2020.1759284
M. Sharpe
ABSTRACT In Part 1, we situate Dugin’s interpretation of Heidegger in relation to the better known, broadly left-liberal approaches to interpreting Heidegger’s thought, stressing Dugin’s unusual focus on the German thinker’s “middle” or Nazi-era texts, and showing how this periodizing optic affects Dugin’s culminating reading of Sein und Zeit and its key axiological notion of authenticity (Part 1). Part 2 examines Dugin’s appropriation of Heidegger’s radically pessimistic, trans-epochal critique of Western thought, centring around his striking reading of the esoteric notion of the “fourfold” or Gewiert. In this account, the essence of reality itself, the “crosshairs” of the fourfold, is provocatively depicted by Dugin as war, Polemos, Kampf, or Krieg, following the Heidegger of 1933–1936. In a move which echoes Heidegger’s own post-1938 relativizations of all distinctions between Nazism, liberalism and socialism – as well as the Shoah and mechanized agriculture – the Russian thinker hence ends by obviating any distinctions between liberal or democratic and totalitarian regimes, war and peace, and genocide and consumerism. All must be overcome in the “another beginning” destined for the new Russia, if it has the ears to hear.
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Pub Date : 2020-04-02DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2020.1759283
Alexandra Cain
ABSTRACT Through a reading of Kant’s essay, “An Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?”, I argue that Kant’s political philosophy fails to adequately engage with the political event in itself, and that Kant’s so-called political writings only provide a theory of the social sphere. First, I present the Kantian political subject as an antinomy between the metaphysically grounded spectator and the physically situated actor. Second, I show that Kant tries to solve the antinomy between the actor and the spectator by attributing primacy to the judgement of the spectator. Third, I show that this move fails because it removes from political judgment what ultimately defines the political, i.e. plurality, spontaneity, and action. I conclude that rather than a theory of the sphere of political life, what Kant achieves is the thinking out of a theory of society (Gesellschaft).
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