Description
Book SynopsisDidier Fassin, Axel Honneth, and an assembly of leading thinkers examine how people experience, interpret, and contribute to the making of and the response to critical situations. Featuring analysis from below as well as above, from the inside as well as the outside,
Crisis Under Critique is a singular intervention.
Trade ReviewNeither crisis nor critique can be treated wholly theoretically, abstracted from particular political and economic conditions. The approach of this book, with its highly structured, formal-intellectual organization and its insistent attention to grounded material experience, is thus admirably suited to its aims. There is constant attention to both the theoretical and the empirical. That rich specificity makes each chapter a pleasure to read, for it enables each author to capture the immediacy of crisis and the purpose that animates critique. -- Anne Norton, author of
Leo Strauss and the Politics of American EmpireRich in originality, this collection revisits the classic tropes of critique and crisis, but reorients our relationship to them. In taking the apprehension of crisis and the generation of critique as a topic to be explored, it opens up valuable new horizons of inquiry. -- David Owen, author of
What Do We Owe to Refugees?Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: The Heuristic of Crises: Reclaiming Critical Voices, by Didier Fassin and Axel Honneth
Part I. Social Movements1. Capitalism Contested: Britain in the Aftermath of World War I, by Clara Elisabetta Mattei
2. Striking a Rock with Eggs: Resistance and Repression After Tiananmen, by Rowena Xiaoqing He
3. Undoing the Rule of Market Laws: Social Critique and the Making of Normative Futures, by Rodrigo Cordero
4. “Layoffs Are Murder, but They Are Also Everyday Life”: A Critique of Labor and Living in the Era of Ghost Capital, by Hae Yeon Choo
5. Remaking the Demos “from Below”? Critical Theory, Migrant Struggles, and Epistemic Resistance, by Robin Celikates
Part II. Intellectual Engagements6. Peace, or the Moral Economy of War: Between W. E. B. Du Bois and Sayyid Quṭb, by Murad Idris
7. Personal Pronouns and Political Protest: Henry David Thoreau and Ta-Nehisi Coates as Critics in Times of Crisis, by Dieter Thomä
8. Becoming Anticolonial in Northern Namibia, 1950–1954: The Emergence of Both Crisis and Critique from Everyday Interpretations, by Gregor Dobler
9. How Do Technocrats Address Crises? From Structural to Humanitarian Approaches to Crises in Latin American Developmentalism, by Aldo Marchesi
10. Against Crisis: Violence and Continuity in Manus Island Prison, by Anne McNevin
Part III. Affected Communities11. Love Trumps Hate: Community Caretaking in an Era of Mass Deportation, by Denise Brennan
12. Helping Refugees in Rural Germany: Ambivalences of Compassion, by Greta Wagner
13. Toward a Theory of Climate Praxis: Confronting Climate Change in a World of Struggle, by Daniel Aldana Cohen and David Bond
14. The Discovery of Contamination: Forever Chemicals and the Temporality of Critique, by David Bond
15. Democracy Without Demos: The Disappearance of the Working Class and the Rise of Abstention in French Political Life, by Anne-Claire Defossez
Part IV. Reflexive Perspectives16. New Technologies and the Moral Economy of White Nationalism, by Hector Amaya
17. “The Only Way Out Is Through”: Anthropology as Critical Praxis in Times of Crisis, by Munira Khayyat
18. Social Movements and Social Theory, by Michael Walzer
19. The Invisible Rebellion: Working People Under the New Capitalist Economy, by Axel Honneth
20. Conspiracy Theories as Ambiguous Critique of Crisis, by Didier Fassin
Contributors
Index
