Subverted Crisis and Critique (original) (raw)
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On Crisis, Critique and Social Change, in contemporary times
The goal of this essay is threefold: to provide an outline for crisis theory (1), to clarify the concept of critique, and especially of social critique(2) and to reflect on the mutual relation of these concepts and on their significance for the problem of deliberative social change (3). This is part of the theoretical foundation of a bigger work titled: On the crisis of the liberal world. Most of the problems and themes are handled abstractly here and are further elaborated and applied in the main text. Although the text itself is a fragment, and furthermore it may be viewed as excessively fragmented, I still hope that it has unity, consistency, and value.
2013
The high rate of appearance of the words ‘crisis’ in English, ‘crise’ in French and ‘Krise’ in German, has generated an ambiguous attitude among researchers. On the one hand, the growing use of the term since the mid-18th century, particularly in the social and political realms, is too significant to ignore and is deemed to reveal important information on Western European cultural history. On the other hand, ‘crisis’ and its counterparts are often used loosely, they appear in the most varied contexts and do not seem to have a stable signified. In fact, what does ‘crisis’ mean? When we describe our times in terms of crises, what exactly do we want to say? This introductory chapter examines the concept of crisis in Modern Western European thought and its functions in philosophical, scientific and political discourses. Relating to Reinhart Koselleck’s work and many others, it shows how the concept turned into a subject matter in its own right. We argue that “the trouble with crisis”, i.e. the allegedly obscure nature of the word, is the result of several semantic processes of abstraction that the term was subject to. Contrary to the widely accepted view that abstraction equals loss of meaning, we suggest that the trends of abstraction ‘crisis’ went through are strongly meaningful, and merit semiotic, cognitive and epistemic analyses. Finally, these historical trends resulted in a number of major semantic clusters, still active today in Western European languages, rendering the concept most potent and useful for various discursive ends.
Introduction: From Crisis to Critique
2020
Taking the recent omnipresence of crisis rhetoric around the Mediterranean as a starting point, the introduction lays out the main terms of this collection—crisis and critique—in their interrelation, as it emerges through the matrix of various declared crises in the Mediterranean. If today’s crisis rhetoric often works to restrict political choices and the imagination of alternative futures, can the concept crisis still do the work of critique or produce alternative modes of representation that can voice marginalized subjectivities and liminal experiences? Can crisis become part of contrarian or transformative languages by scholars, activists, and artists or should we forge different grammars to understand present realities in the region? Boletsi, Houwen, and Minnaard unpack the concept crisis and its operations alongside the concept of critique in our professed “postcritical times.” Underscoring the diagnostic rigor of critique in approaches to crisis-frameworks, they plead for cri...
Reinhart Koselleck's Work on the Concept of Crisis (2016) {2015}
Le travail célèbre de Reinhart Koselleck sur la crise marque des tendances du milieu intellectuel de son temps et a eu un effet important sur le paysage académique contemporain. Cet article analyse les choix de Koselleck sur l"étude de la «crise» de l"Antiquité au 20 ème siècle et présente des conclusions méthodologiques, disciplinaires et socio-politiques.
Crisis Thought In Social Theory: Reinhart Koselleck and Walter Benjamin
International Theory, Research And Reviews In Social, Human and Administrative Sciences, 2023
Reinhart Koselleck and Walter Benjamin are the two thinkers most emphasized in terms of historical theory today. The two thinkers look at historical events from a cultural and social projection, develop an understanding of culture and conceptual history, have a unique understanding of temporality, use theology creatively in their theories, criticize modernity and enlightenment, and interpret the present as a place and process that reveals history. These are approaches that have been effective in gaining a place in the theory literature. Another important feature of Koselleck and Benjamin is that they give an important place to the concept or thought of crisis in their philosophy of history. Both thinkers deal with the concept of crisis by associating it with the modern. Koselleck and Benjamin crisis; While discussing in the context of temporality, theology, apocalypse, revolution, salvation, the relationship between past-present-future and modernity, they basically point out the necessity of considering the concept or idea of crisis together with social and political history. Unlike Koselleck, Benjamin defends the idea of revolutionary intervention in crisis due to its connection with the idea of the revolutionary subject that will transform history. This study compares the historical theories of Koselleck and Benjamin, both in general terms and with a focus on the concept and thought of crisis. Because Koselleck and Benjamin’s approaches to the concept and thought of crisis can only be understood in the context of the two thinkers’ theories of history. Therefore, the study discusses the fundamental differences and similarities in both the historical theories of the two thinkers and their approaches to the concept and thought of crisis.
Domination and Emancipation, 2021
This article elucidates the reasons behind the retreat from Marxism in contemporary critical theory, and it offers an account of the revolutionary theory that is born of emancipatory struggles as an antidote to this retreat. It begins by briefly elucidating the explanatory power and transformative force of revolutionary theory, as it has been developed in the Marxist tradition, in order to shake it lose from the straw-person depictions, gormless mantras, anti-communist dogmas, historical tommyrot, and vulgarly reductive accounts that petty-bourgeois intellectuals and many others have used to try and discredit it. After clarifying how historical materialism is a collectively produced, transdisciplinary, systemic, radical and fallibilistic science of history rooted in collective struggle, it deploys this framework of analysis to develop a counter-history of critical theory. In this sense, the critique of the Frankfurt School that it advances is not simply an internal or immanent critique but is rather a materialist analysis of its social and historical function in the international political economy of ideas. As the article demonstrates, the type of research promoted under the label ‘critical’ by the global theory industry—which is driven by capitalist interests and policed by their hegemonic enforcers—is work whose critical appearance belies a conformist core.