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ABSTRACT
Critique has been recently accused of not being able to respond to the challenges of our times, such as the climate emergency and the pandemic crisis. The new materialisms, which have posited themselves as a corrective to critique’s alleged overinflation of culture and language by proposing a (re)turn to matter, affirm that ours is a post-critical era. Against this diagnosis, the aim of this paper is to defend both the importance of critique for our current conjuncture and the need to rethink what it involves. Drawing from the work of Foucault, Deleuze, and Butler, I develop a specific but multidimensional understanding of critique that combats the vagueness and inconsistencies surrounding many post-critical approaches to this notion. Specifically, I suggest that critique entails (1) an enquiry into the conditions that structure, organise, and determine what can and cannot be perceived, experienced, and thought; (2) a clinical diagnosis or symptomatology of our present; (3) a political exercise of freedom; and (4) a practice of care. I conclude by showing how this conception of critique helps us to understand different dimensions of the Covid pandemic that might otherwise be ignored.
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Notes
1 Since the aim of this paper is not to examine in depth the debate between new materialisms and poststructuralism –or critique in general– but to analyse whether our times demand a postcritical thinking rather than a critical one, and therefore whether critique should be abandoned or has something useful to offer, I will not engage any further with the new materialist literature. It is, however, important to mention that, while new materialisms have been criticised for drawing a rigid binary between (negative) critique and (positive) theoretical-practical creativity, for refusing epistemological enquiries and ‘substantive engagement with the formal conditions of thought’s access to the world […], trivially injecting subjective characteristics directly into being’ (Rekret Citation2016, 230), or for ‘ignoring the operation of power and conflict in the constitution of the intelligibility of the social and the ways materiality is understood’ (Bargetz and Sanos Citation2020, 3), there have been a few attempts to reconcile the critical perspective with the new materialist position by proposing a positive or affirmative critique. See for example Jane Bennett’s assertion that ‘we need both critique and positive formulations of alternatives’ (2010, xv), or the call to rethink and reaffirm critique crystallised in the Terra Critica project (Kaiser, Thiele, and Bunz).
2 The vagueness of the critique of critique has been pointed out, for example, by Ahmed (Citation2008) and Butler (Citation1995).
3 For a detailed account of the construction and demonisation of poststructuralism in America, see Kennedy (Citation2021).
4 The program of this conference included illustrious guests of honour: ‘Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, René Girard, Jean Hyppolite, Lucien Goldman, Charles Morazé, Georges Poulet, Tzvetan Todorov, and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Roman Jakobson, Gerard Genette, and Gilles Deleuze had also been invited but were unable to make the trip; they nonetheless took the trouble to send a text or a letter which the organizers communicated to the hundreds of listeners in the audience’ (Cusset Citation2008, 29).
5 ‘To our outer intuitions there corresponds something real in space […]; in this space the real, or the material of all objects of outer intuition is […] really given, independently of all invention’ (Kant Citation1998, A375).
6 This can be traced back, among others, to Bergson (Citation1946) and Bachelard (Citation1949). Althusser (Citation2003, 274–277) also made an important contribution to the notion.
7 See also Bachelard (Citation1949, 51): ‘The scientific object is presented under the perspective of its definition, after the self is already engaged in a particular kind of thought, consequently in a particular kind of existence.’
8 ‘Empiricism thinks that knowledge is an act of vision: it is incapable of explaining the appearance of the objects in the field of ‘the seen’, and thus the fact that these new objects were not ‘seen’ earlier. It does not ‘see’ that the seeing of what one sees in science depends on the apparatus of theoretical vision, and therefore on the history of the transformations of the theory within the process of knowledge’ (Althusser Citation2003, 276–277).
9 On the procedure of petrification, see Botbol-Baum and de Nanteuil (Citation2017).
10 This is Foucault’s translation of the motto of the Enlightenment ‘sapere aude!’ (Foucault Citation2007a, 49).
11 Haraway borrows the notion of ‘matters of care’ from María Puig de la Bellacasa (Citation2017).
12 An interesting work in this direction is that of María Puig de la Bellacasa and her proposal to replace ‘matters of fact’ with ‘matters of care’ –which critically revises Latour’s proposal of ‘matters of concern’ in his ‘Why Critique Has Run Out of Steam?’ (2004). Against the idea that science or nature are depoliticised matters of fact or uncontestable truths, Puig de la Bellacasa (Citation2017, 18) proposes to focus on the assemblages and relations that constitute what in the last stage of the process is contemplated as a fact.
13 I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editor of this special issue, Hannah Richter, for their very helpful suggestions and comments, as well as Gavin Rae for his critical and careful reading.
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Emma Ingala
Emma Ingala is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy and a member of the Institute for Feminist Research at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. She specialises in poststructuralist thought, feminist and gender theory, psychoanalysis, and political anthropology. She is the co-editor (with Gavin Rae) of the volumes Historical Traces and Future Pathways of Poststructuralism: Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics (Routledge, 2021), The Meanings of Violence: From Critical Theory to Biopolitics (Routledge: 2019), and Subjectivity and the Political: Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge: 2018), as well as the author of book chapters published by Beauchesne (France), Bloomsbury, Palgrave Macmillan, and Edinburgh University Press (UK), and numerous articles published in international journals including Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, Literature and Religion, Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía, Daimon, Ideas y Valores, or Isegoría. She has also been an invited Visiting Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, and the University of California, Berkeley, USA.