Don't fight it: the embodiment of critique

Abstract

This article examines the ethic of ‘institutional critique’ as a problem for arts ‘work’ vis-à-vis the political by making links between institutional critique and a Hegelian inspired subjectivity. Moving away from this Hegelian insistence on redemptive knowledge, or knowledge as a process of ‘becoming’, which inscribes the end of institutional critique itself, I examine the conditions of critique without the figure of the institution to predicate action upon, or more pointedly when critique becomes the institutional figure. Central to this is how we are to understand the work of knowledge (critique) within such a configuration, when recognizing either the possibility or the impossibility of absolute knowledge is not a required precursor for agency, but instead we are faced with knowledge without these grounds, as techne.

Keywords:

• institutional critique
• knowledge
• law
• recognition
• subject
• tragic