Description
Book SynopsisThe Ends of Critique re-examines the stakes of critique in the 21
st century. In view of increasingly complex socio-political realities and shifts in a fully globalized world, the roles and manners of critique also change. The volume offers an unprecedented re-examination of critique under those conditions of global entanglement and asymmetrical relations from a diversity of scholarly perspectives within the humanities. All contributions move the notion of critique into more diverse traditions than the Eurocentric, Kantian tradition and emphasize the need to attend to a plurality of critical perspectives. The volume’s reflections move critique toward a situated, perspectival, and entangled critical stance, with interventions from decolonial and systemic, deconstructive and (post)human(ist) perspectives. In that way, the volume develops a decidedly different approach to critique than recent considerations of critique as post-critique (Felski) or those endebted to Frankfurt School thought and liberal theories of democracy. It is the first full-length research publication of the interdisciplinary research network Terra Critica.
Table of ContentsIntroduction / Birgit M. Kaiser, Kathrin Thiele, Timothy O’Leary
Part I: Visions of critique
Chapter 1. “After Humanism?” Time and Transformation in Critical Thinking / Kathrin Thiele
Chapter 2. The Most Difficult Task: On the Idea of an Impure Pure Non-Violence in Derrida / Leonard Lawlor
Chapter 3. The Changeability of the World: Utopia and Critique/ Sam McAuliffe
Chapter 4. Seeking Intelligent Life in the Time of COVID-19; Or, Thinking ‘Epicritically’ / Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor
Part II: Critical Reading
Chapter 5. Suspicious Minds: Critique as Symptomatic Reading / Esther Peeren
Chapter 6. The Ends of Critical Intimacy. Spivak, Fanon, and Appropriative Reading / Birgit M. Kaiser
Chapter 7. Critical Vivisection: Transforming Ethical Sensibilities / Timothy O’Leary
Part III: Institutions and Technologies
Chapter 8. Unwinding the Abstraction of Whiteness / Shannon Winnubst
Chapter 9. How Not to be Governed like that by Our Digital Technologies / Mercedes Bunz
Chapter 10. Defective Institutions; Or, Critique / Jacques Lezra
