Abstract
Is critique a machine invented in the seventeenth century, an instrument among many others designed to destroy the remains of a feudalist and theological worldview? Is it a machine that during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries constantly adapted itself to new challenges, feeding itself on targets produced by the very modernity from which it issued? Is critique a machine that today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, has finally run out of steam, as Bruno Latour has recently suggested?1 And if critique may seem to have come to a standstill, is this because it does not find new targets anymore or rather because it has torn to pieces the very possibility of distinguishing between a truth grasped by the critic, a set of norms to be criticised and masses in need of enlightenment? Has critique thereby devoured its very condition of possibility?
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Notes
B. Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry, 30/2, 2004, 225–248.
A. Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minneapolis Press, 1999), 45–46.
Of the few books devoted to philosophical and theoretical forms of critique only Kurt Röttgers’ Kritik und Praxis: Zur Geschichte des Kritikbegriffs von Kant bis Marx (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1975) adopts a historical perspective. Röttgers covers one of the most productive eras of critical philosophy, but hardly relates his findings to contemporary questions. Two recent collections of essays, on the other hand, focus on contemporary challenges to philosophical theories of critique:
R. Sinnerbrink et al. (eds), Critique Today (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2006); and
R. Jaeggi and T. Wesche (eds), Was ist Kritik? (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009). A third volume defends the political impact of contemporary theoretical accounts of critique:
B. Mennel, S. Nowotny and G. Raunig (eds), Kunst der Kritik (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2010). Contrary to these works, the present volume is based on the view that discussions about the contemporary relevance of particular forms of critique cannot be divorced from investigations into their history.
See the transcripts of Foucault’s last courses at the Collège de France for an account of the strong affinity between modern critical philosophy and its precursors in antiquity: M. Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the College de France, 1982–1983 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and
M. Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the College de France, 1983–1984 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
This passage is taken from Kant’s critical response to the review of the Critique of Pure Reason by Garve and Feder, which he presented as an appendix to the Prolegomena. See I. Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science, translated by G. Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 133–134, translation modified. Kant’s conception of critique is in line with the meaning of the Greek krinein, which means to separate, discriminate, discern or judge. Cf.
R. Sonderegger, ‘Kritik’, in S. Gosepath, W. Hinsch and B. Rössler (eds), Handbuch der politischen Philosophie und Sozialphilosophie (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2008), 669–674.
By no means does this amount to claiming that critique is an exclusively Western practice. See, for instance, A. Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2005).
Ricoeur famously referred to Marx, Nietzsche and Freud as ‘masters of suspicion’. P. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, translated by D. Savage (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1970), 32–33.
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© 2012 Karin de Boer and Ruth Sonderegger
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de Boer, K., Sonderegger, R. (2012). Introduction. In: de Boer, K., Sonderegger, R. (eds) Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230357006_1
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