Key Concepts Archives - Critical Legal Thinking (original) (raw)

Foucault: Power

by | 27 Aug 2024 | Key Concepts

If there are a number of terms in the lexicon of contemporary critical social, political, and legal thought that one cannot go about without invoking the name of Michel Foucault, “power” is definitely one of them—despite Foucault’s later protestations that the...

Elimination in Settler Colonialism

by Faisal Al-Asaad | 1 Jul 2024 | Key Concepts

Since October, the world has watched in real time the transformation of Gaza from a concentration camp into a killing field. Besieged by land, air, and sea, Palestinian men, women, and children are now subject to a historically unprecedented program of mass...

Édouard Glissant: The Right to Opacity

by Benjamin Davis | 21 Nov 2023 | Key Concepts

The Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant called for a “right to opacity” throughout his work. Speaking about small countries in the Caribbean in his 1981 Caribbean Discourse, he said, “We demand the right to opacity.” He would reiterate this claim in his...

Metaracial: Notes on the Thought of Rei Terada

by Mackenzie Smith | 11 Sep 2023 | Key Concepts

Rei Terada’s concept metaracial emerges from her 2023 book, Metaracial: Hegel, Antiblackness, and Political Identity, the result of a sustained engagement with Hegel’s enduring influence on how we think about race — or rather, how race structures our thinking. In this...

Sociodicy: Notes on the thought of Pierre Bourdieu

by Victor Shammas | 6 Sep 2023 | Key Concepts

A sociodicy is a structured attempt to justify the social order in spite of its manifold injustices. Its conceptual lineage can be traced back to the notion of theodicy, or the justification of God despite the existence of evil and suffering, a...

Mimetic Desire & the Scapegoat: Notes on the Thought of René Girard

by Bernard Keenan | 4 Sep 2023 | Key Concepts

René Girard (1923-2015) was a synthetic theorist with a singular idée fixe, a grand pattern that he could not help but see inscribed and repeated everywhere in human culture. The key elements of Girard’s philosophical anthropology are mimetic desire, mimetic...