Critical Inquiry and Critical Theory: A Short History of Nonbeing

Abstract

Other board members, I expect, will comment on the state of matters critical in literature and the arts. There is also of course the issue of the status of a critical theory of society. So I wanted to say something about the state and future of critical theory an sich, essentially the Left-Hegelian,Marxist, Frankfurt school tradition, although the notion has become broad enough so that even the likes of Heidegger and his influential legacy and army of epigones are relevant. There are obvious implications for contemporary literary theory, but I won’t try to go into that. This will just be an attempt to identify the still unsolved problem. It will have to be breathless, and I’mnot entirely sure it is relevant. But here goes. The historical dimension first. I understand critical theory (or perhaps even literary criticism once it began to think of itself as informed by philosophical theory of some sort) to be at its core apost-Kantianphenomenon, that is, verymuch a legacy of the originalKantian ideaof criticalphilosophy, a critique by reason of itself. (I don’t mean to place any great historical importance on the individual “great man,” Kant. The “Kantian historical turn” in question is larger than, takes more in than that individual.) The basic claim is that “First Philosophy,” the foundation of all premodernuniversity learning and all science, was not in fact any longer regarded as first. A critical account of the possibility of such, or any other claim to know,was first necessary. (This is all immediately subject to Hegel’s famous objection—that it is like trying to learn to swim before one enters the water— but that to one side.) What then does it mean to see Kant (or the Kantian moment) as the hinge on which something quite new in the history of philosophy and social and perhaps aesthetic theory swings open? Themost important result of the all-destroyingKantwas thedestruction