A Genuine Refutation? A Response to Gabriel Rockhill’s “Foucault: The Faux Radical“

Abstract

The last decade has witnessed a steady increase in scholarly work within the Anglophone context that takes as its point of departure a reappraisal of the institutionalized set of intellectual practices that are codified and unified by the capacious category of “critical theory.” Grounded in large part on Bruno Latour’s essay “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” this reappraisal has focused on the limits of critique and its legacies as instantiated in the works of mostly German and French thinkers of the interwar and postwar period.2 Some academics have called for a rethinking of the responsibility and purview of critical thinking, whereas others have argued for the necessity of situating critique within a broader set of intellectual orientations—as simply one mode of thinking within a vast array of other modes.3