A Time for Critique

Amy Allen, Bernard E. Harcourt, Didier Fassin

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• ISBN:
  9780231549318
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Kritische Theorie

In a world of political upheaval, rising inequality, catastrophic climate change, and widespread doubt of even the most authoritative sources of information, is there a place for critique? This book calls for a systematic reappraisal of critical thinking—its assumptions, its practices, its genealogy, its predicament—following the principle that critique can only start with self-critique.

In A Time for Critique, Didier Fassin, Bernard E. Harcourt, and a group of eminent political theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and literary and legal scholars reflect on the multiplying contexts and forms of critical discourses and on the social actors and social movements engaged in them. How can one maintain sufficient distance from the eventful present without doing it an injustice? How can one address contemporary issues without repudiating the intellectual legacies of the past? How can one avoid the disconnection between theory and action? How can critique be both public and collective? These provocative questions are addressed by revisiting the works of Foucault and Arendt, Said and Césaire, Benjamin and Du Bois, but they are also given substance through on-the-ground case studies that treat subaltern criticism in Palestine, emancipatory mobilizations in Syria, the antitorture campaigns of Sri Lankan activists, and the abolitionism of the African American critical resistance and undercommons movements in the United States. Examining lucidly the present challenges of critique, A Time for Critique shows how its theoretical reassessment and its emerging forms can illuminate the imaginative modalities to rejuvenate critical praxis.

PART I

CRITIQUE AS PRACTICE

CHAPTER 1

HOW IS CRITIQUE?

DIDIER FASSIN

There is something in critique which is akin to virtue.

—Michel Foucault

On May 27, 1978, Michel Foucault1 delivered before the Société française de philosophie a lecture on critique for which he somewhat affectedly announced that it was without title, nevertheless adding that he had in fact found one but considered it to be “indecent.” In the last words of his conclusion, he revealed that what he had imagined and not dared articulate was “What is the Aufklärung?” Yet, six years later, this is how he actually titled a text that he wrote on the occasion of the two hundredth anniversary of the publication of Kant’s eponymous essay and in which he expanded his earlier analysis. It is not certain, however, that the substitute wording that he ended up adopting for the title of his original lecture—“What is critique?”—was less ambitious or emphatic. To this bold question his answer was famously a series of variations on the theme: the art of not being governed in this way. Beyond this catchy but ultimately not so transparent definition, what Foucault proposed was to apprehend critique as a method combining archeological, genealogical, and strategic analysis to identify how the historical responses to social problems such as madness, illness, crime, or desire have come to be what they are, how they could have been different, and how they could still differ in the future. This is what he called “eventualization,” the advent of realities via interactions between knowledge and power that make the contingent outcomes of these interactions appear to be not only acceptable but even necessary: the asylum, the hospital, the prison, or sexuality, respectively. Such outcomes are regarded as truths, that is, facts deemed true and no more disputed. Critique is therefore “the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its effects on power, and question power on its discourses of truth.” The “critical attitude” consists in challenging the self-evidence of the world as it is.

It is a different, although similarly reckless, interrogation that I want to raise. Rather than “what is critique?” it can be formulated as “how is critique?” Here, “how” means an inquiry into the condition of critique, in the same way as one would ask someone: How are you? In this sense, it is a sort of clinical investigation into the health of critique in the contemporary moment. This medical bulletin is obviously to be taken with a grain of salt since, to be seriously established, such a diagnosis would necessitate a long-term research program in its own right. More modestly, I will offer the outline of a reflection on some of the issues faced by critical thinking. In order to do so, I consider that it is indispensable to contextualize critique both temporally and spatially. Indeed, as a practice, it always exists within a given time and space, and we must account for both dimensions. To that effect, I will mostly concentrate my analysis on two periods—roughly the 1960s–70s and the 2000s–10s—and two countries—France and the United States—not excluding, nevertheless, occasional incursions into other periods and countries. Through this tentative exploration, I want to analyze the transformation of critique in light, on the one hand, of the historical contexts in which it is situated, as emphasized by John Dewey,2 for whom “the most pervasive fallacy of philosophical thinking goes back to neglect of context,” and, on the other hand, of the social fields within which it is inserted, the most obvious being “the intellectual field as a system which is governed by its own laws,” as Pierre Bourdieu3 writes. Both elements are crucial, albeit overlooked, as critique is often discussed only from an internal perspective, that is, within a philosophical or more broadly theoretical framework. While such reading is necessary, it does not exempt from historical and sociological approaches, which account for the conditions of possibility of critique as it is, in a specific time and place. Critique is always, at least in part, a response to a certain state of the world being developed within a certain configuration of power and knowledge in the academic and public spheres.

At this point, four caveats may be necessary. First, this essay must be read as a provisional cartography of a complex landscape; even when its conclusions might sometimes seem assertive, they should be read as hypotheses for future research. Second, the emphasis is mostly on critique as it emerges from the intellectual world and the academic field in connection with the political and economic domains; however, there are other significant forms of critique, coming from society more broadly, through action in particular, which deserve attention. Third, the focus is limited to the two countries I am more familiar with but can be construed as epitomizing in distinct ways some of the challenges facing critique; this is obviously a bias, which I have tried to partially correct by inserting these cases in their global background and occasionally comparing them with other parts of the world. Fourth, revisiting the past is at risk of appearing to be nostalgic of a golden age, which I do not think ever existed; indeed, any temptation to idealize better times for critique and to heroicize earlier critics runs the risk of ignoring new forms and new actors.

These cautionary words being formulated, the general argument developed here is that the public presence of critical thinking has been considerably transformed during the past half century. In particular, it has lost much of its radical edge and academic legitimacy, while being increasingly confined to marginal circles. However, this is neither a linear nor an unequivocal process, and there exist important differences across time and place, but also significant emergences of novel expressions of critique. I will show how this process has operated by examining first historical contexts, second social fields, third disciplinary variations. I will conclude by showing that the reconfiguration has not led to the disappearance of critique and has even rendered possible interesting emerging forms. Critique may have lost some of its momentum, but even in the present unfavorable environment (and perhaps because of it) there are multiple signs of its being alive and well, provided that we be able to recognize them.

Contexts

France, 1961. Jean-Paul Sartre,4 who is undoubtedly the most prominent French philosopher of his time, and for that matter one of the world’s most famous public intellectuals, writes the preface to The Wretched of the Earth. Reflecting on the uprisings in the colonies analyzed and defended by Frantz Fanon in his book, he comments: “This irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating himself.… The native cures himself of colonial neurosis by thrusting out the settler through force of arms.… In the first days of the revolt you must kill. To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time. There remain a dead man and a free man.” Violence is not only a means for political liberation but also a means for ethical subjectivation—the self-realization of the individual as a free man. He is, indeed, so free that he is even liberated from the fear of dying: “This new man begins his life as a man at the end of it; he considers himself as a potential corpse. He will be killed; not only does he accept this risk, he is sure of it.… He prefers victory to survival; others, not he, will have the fruits of victory.… We find our humanity on this side of death and despair; he finds it beyond torture and death.” To realize how powerful this analysis of violence is, let us imagine substituting today “Palestinian” for “native” and “Israeli” for “European” in a similar text accounting for the attacks of the former against the latter as a response to the occupation of his land and the oppression of his people: it is easy to fancy the uproar. In the contemporary world, Sartre would be accused of anti-Semitism, notwithstanding his “reflections on the Jewish question,” and prosecuted for “expressing support for terrorism,” under French legislation recently voted. Half a century ago, he was awarded the Nobel Prize—only three years after the publication of his preface to Fanon’s book.

United States, 1964. As the Civil Rights movement is at its height and the anti–Vietnam War movement is just starting, a student protest, which has come to be known as the free speech movement, erupts at the University of California, Berkeley, in response to the repression of various initiatives taken on campus to generate debate about political issues and support for antiracist causes. During the ensuing civil disobedience campaign, Mario Savio5 delivers a famous speech in which he criticizes the president of the university for having compared the institution to a firm: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part.… And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.” After months of demonstrations and confrontations with the police, the students finally obtain significant achievements in terms of freedom of speech in universities, opening the way to years of leftist activism. Five decades later, in September 2017, it is on the historic site of these protests, Sproul Plaza, which has since then become the symbol of the defense of the First Amendment in academia, that alt-right and white supremacist speakers, such as the former senior editor of Breitbart News Milo Yiannopoulos, are invited. The ironically named Free Speech Week gives rise to mostly peaceful but occasionally violent student demonstrations, leading the bankrupt university to spend more than $100,000 to ensure the security of the events through a massive presence of the police on campus. As conservative and far-right pundits multiply their public interventions in higher-education institutions all over the country, some of the latter decide and implement new policies aiming at punishing protests against such speakers, in reference to the First Amendment of the Constitution and in the name of civility.

For critique, contexts thus matter. And contexts change. The 1960s and 1970s were a time of radical transformations and radical thinking worldwide. From the 1980s on, a reaction occurs, increasingly marginalizing leftist positions and mobilizations, and leaving a growing public space to not only neoliberal discourse but also, in the 2000s, right-wing radicalism. To understand this rem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Critique as Practice
• Part II: Critique in Practice
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Series List