The Politics of Mourning and Melancholia

SPEP Co-director's Address: Progress, Philosophical and Otherwise

There has been a turn toward the figure of the perpetrator in recent historical fiction. More precisely, and as Bernhard Schlink's Der Vorleser (1995, published as The Reader, 1996) and Die Heimkeh...

Judith Butler (b. 1956) is one of the leading theorists working in the field of the humanities in the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries. Having established her international reputation with the publication of Gender Trouble in 1990, she is best known for her work in gender and sexuality studies and is often cited as one of the “founders” of queer theory, but her work extends far beyond these fields, and its influence can be felt within philosophy, literary criticism and critical theory, cultural studies, sociology, art theory and criticism, media and communication studies. After completing her PhD at Yale in 1984, Butler taught at Wesleyan University and at Johns Hopkins University; she is currently Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

This paper provides an overview of the contemporary theories on critique and normativity. By conceptualising the tensions and convergences between critical and normative theory, contemporary scholars argue that critical theory is normative or at least possesses normative content. The focus is placed on the theory of recognition and the theory of subjectivation. The paper asserts that the normative content of critical theory — universal norms of justice — manifests as a critique of inequality and injustice, a perspective prominently articulated in the contemporary theory of recognition developed by Axel Honneth, Franck Fischbach, and Emmanuel Renault. Both Axel Honneth and Judith Butler establish a closer link between Foucauldian critical theory and the objectives of the theory of recognition. Drawing on Foucault’s critique of subjugation, Butler highlights the connection between recognition and subjectivation, emphasising the convergence of self-recognition and the constitution of the self as a subject. Thus, the theory of recognition, as a critical theory with normative content, finds its own foundations in Foucault’s critique of subjugation. In this context, the concept of subjectivation emerges as a central category in the further development of the theory of recognition.

The project of critical social theory shares with progressive (but not classical, free market) liberalism a value-orientation composed of an egalitarian conception of social justice; a positive, developmental view of liberty as self-realization; and a participatory notion of democracy. Differentiating critical theory from all strains of liberalism is the conviction that capitalism cannot support the institutionalization of this value-orientation, and that under modern conditions only some form of democratic socialism can. Given this value-orientation, this paper outlines the mission and structure of the project of critical theory. In its most recent retreat to the academy, practitioners have lost touch not only with its mission but also with the level of historical specificity at which the project can most effectively be practiced. Two proposals are suggested for recovering and executing its mission. The first is to address citizens in particular societies about the moral and political significance of contemporary social change. The second is that theory, description, critique, and vision should proceed at a level of abstraction I call regime analysis. Here the object of analysis is a specific society with its own history, institutional features, and cultural identity. It is suggested that John Dewey's proposals for the revitalization of philosophy are relevant to the recovery of the project of critical social theory. Following Dewey's lead, it is suggested in the conclusion that the execution of the project's mission requires that reflection about the prospects of democratic socialism in the United States build upon a description and critique of the existing regime.

Reviewed by: The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory Colin Koopman The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory. Amy Allen. New Directions in Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Pp. xi + 230. $34.50 h.c. 0231136226. In this ambitious book Amy Allen proposes nothing less than the integration of two traditions of social-political theory that have generally been taken to be straightforwardly opposed. Foucauldian genealogy and Habermasian critical theory have been at the center of political philosophy and social critique for the [End Page 332] past few decades. The story of their incompatibility is by now so well rehearsed that it is nearly exhausted, in the sense of almost being taken for granted. This speaks to the admirable ambition of Allen’s attempt to develop a frame into which both Foucauldian and Habermasian theory can be fit. What strikes me as important about this book is not, however, its ambition, though I certainly find this impressive (especially within our contemporary climate of professionalized and obligatory overspecialization). What is important about this book, rather, is its successes in realizing its ambitions. This is not to claim that the book is without its argumentative weaknesses and expository gaps. But the successes are what really stand out and impress the reader here (note how rare this is in our contemporary atmosphere of professionalized and obligatory hyperskepticism). The central aim of The Politics of Our Selves is to overcome “the difficulty that we have in thinking through power and autonomy simultaneously” (21). Allen takes on this task by engaging two related disputes at the center of contemporary critical theory: the Foucault–Habermas debates and the debates in feminist theory between Judith Butler and Seyla Benhabib. Allen’s contribution to feminist theory builds admirably on her earlier The Power of Feminist Theory (Westview, 1999) in which she seeks to invest feminism with a rigorous conception of power. In the present book, Allen furthers a critical feminism that is not undone by the old dilemmas between structure and agency, power and autonomy. For these purposes Allen follows Nancy Fraser’s argument that feminists can draw on both Butler and Benhabib without contradiction. Yet she goes further than Fraser in showing just how we might reconstruct Butler’s and Benhabib’s work so that they may be better taken up in tandem: “The overall aim of this book is an attempt to accomplish the ambitious task suggested but left undone by Fraser: to envision subjects as both culturally constructed in and through relations of power and yet capable of critique” (21). Here Allen’s feminist interventions intersect with her contributions to critical theory more broadly. Allen shows how power and autonomy can be complementary in both Foucault and Habermas. In Foucault, this involves showing that he affirms a concept of autonomy that can be integrated with his well-known work on power; in Habermas, this requires showing how sensitivity to the workings of power can help inform his robust conception of autonomy. Allen offers an impressive reinterpretation of Foucault by focusing on his productive relationship to Kant. Foucault, she says, develops “a critique of critique itself, a continuation-through-transformation of that project” (24). Foucault is a Kantian but not in Béatrice Han-Pile’s sense of a thinker wrestling with the philosophical relation between transcendentality and empiricity. Foucault is a Kantian in that he is engaged in an immanent critique, in Kant’s special sense of that word, of our modernity. This rereading of Foucault is both timely and convincing. Yet some readers will worry that Allen goes too far in extending the comparison to Foucault’s and Kant’s conceptions of autonomy. One can accept Allen’s point that “autonomy is central to Foucault’s conception of critique” (64), but a worry [End Page 333] remains that her description of Foucault’s autonomy resuscitates questions about the Kantian transcendental subject that she (unlike Han-Pile) rightly does not want to see Foucault as posing. Allen takes autonomy in Foucault to consist in two capacities, for critical reflection and for deliberate self-transformation (2). I agree that Foucault understands...

The Militant Intellect offers a way of rethinking the relationship between critical theory and politics. How does critical theory become self-conscious of its own relation to politics? How does it contribute to change the world through its reinterpretation of it? These are some of the questions that drive The Militant Intellect. In this book Andrés Fabián Henao Castro argues that critical theory cultivates the militancy of the general intellect by training that intellect to work towards the intersectional and structural death of the colonist and thus to envision at the same time the materialization of that feminist decolonial communist queer marronage world that constitutes its horizon. Henao Castro borrows and expands on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s idea of conceptual persona to qualify the intellectual labor of critical theory as an undisciplined field, that performs its labor through the creation of conceptual personae capable of subjectivizing critical thought. Doing so, The Militant Intellect argues for the indispensable reinterpretation of Plato’s Philosopher Sovereign, Karl Marx’s Communist, Frantz Fanon’s Rebel, Jacques Derrida’s Specter, Gayatri Spivak’s Subaltern, Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Life, Jacques Rancière’s Ignorant Schoolmaster, Judith Butler’s Antigone/Ismene, and Jordy Rosenberg’s Fox as compelling personifications of intellectual militancy for the general intellect to have new scripts capable of cultivating the virtuosity of its more revolutionary performances.

Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Contemporary critical social theories face the question of how to justify the ideas of the good society that guide their critical analyses. Traditionally, these more or less determinate ideas of the good society were held to be independent of their specific sociocultural context and historical epoch. Today, such a concept of context-transcending validity is not easy to defend; the linguistic turn of Western philosophy signals the widespread acceptance of the view that ideas of knowledge and validity are always mediated linguistically and that language is conditioned by history and context. In Re-Presenting the Good Society, Maeve Cooke addresses the justificatory dilemma facing critical social theories: how to maintain an idea of context-transcending validity without violating anti-authoritarian impulses. In doing so she not only clarifies the issues and positions taken by other theorists--including Richard Rorty, Jurgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Judith Butler--but also offers her own original and thought-provoking analysis of context-transcending validity.Because the tension between an anti-authoritarian impulse and a guiding idea of context-transcending validity is today an integral part of critical social theory, Cooke argues that it should be negotiated rather than eliminated. Her proposal for a concept of context-transcending validity has as its central claim that we should conceive of the good society as re-presented in particular constitutively inadequate representations of it. These re-presentations are, Cooke argues provocatively, regulative ideas that have an imaginary, fictive character.

SUMMARY Jewish feminist and queer engagement in Jewish life and Judaism are transforming the practices and foundational orientations of traditional modes. Jewish feminist, queer ritual innovation in particular is inspired by an array of secular and radical critical theories as much as it is by the historic concrete experiences of a diversity of Jews in different Jewish communities. It is important to hold all of us who are involved in religious ritual innovation responsible to the knowledges we have developed and learned in critical theory or we risk, even with the best of intentions and creativity, re-inscribing some of the very problems of traditional ontological norms that we might have originally sought to disrupt and subvert. This article looks specifically at examples of new “coming out” rituals for Jewish queers explored over time in the Jewish Queer Think Tank: honoring them as well as offering tools from secular critical theory to assist our work in keeping them accountable to our aspirations to both love and fundamentally transform Jewishness. Here I redefine the function of religious ritual itself in political terms as an identity-producing performance. As such I utilize social constructionist queer theories (i.e., Shane Phelan and Judith Butler), anarchists (i.e., Emma Goldman), and those involved in radical theatre (i.e., Augusto Boal) to articulate the revolutionary potential of ritual innovation.

Sociocybernetics is particularly interested in investigating how societies steer their social systems. According to Hornung (2006), sociocybernetic studies have predominantly followed three main strategies: a problem–solution scheme, a structural analysis and a normative proposal. We consider that, to have an integral constructivist foundation, sociocybernetics needs to also take a critical perspective into account. Critical theory used to be circumscribed to the first school of Frankfurt, but now it includes a wide range of approaches —such as Michel Foucault’s genealogical and archaeological project, psychoanalytical perspectives (e.g. Slavoj Žižek), schizoid-analysis (e.g. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari), feminist perspectives (e.g. Judith Butler), and de–colonialist proposals (e.g. Boaventura De Sousa Santos)— offering very diverse notions of power, ethics and transformation. Nevertheless, some key concepts, such as dispositif, event, subject, cultural industry and antagonism, link many of these critical theorists. In this article, we explore how sociocybernetics can develop a critical perspective and some of the challenges of bringing together concepts pertaining to different theories. Specifically, we develop the concept of dispositif originally used by Foucault, Agamben and Deleuze for an analysis of asymmetrical dynamics of power and steering processes between social systems. Thus, we put forth a sociocybernetical understanding of dispositifs as second–order steering mechanisms which intervene strategically between systems and couple them conditionally. Ultimately, we seek to demonstrate that sociocybernetics can benefit from critical theory and vice versa.

One of Hegel's main contributions to critical theory is his concept of recognition and the related concepts of master and slave. For these have become central to any account of oppression, marginal ization, and communicative freedom or liberation. Hegel's analysis of desire, the need to raise parochial self-- certainty to public, intersubjective truth, the life and death struggle for recognition, the constitution of the slave as the one who fears death and who works off his fear, and the final self-subversion of mastery are important themes for critical theory from Marx through Habermas and Honneth.1 However to take up the themes of recognition and master/slave is to find oneself confronted with an alternative, possibly incompatible interpretation of master and slave, namely Nietzsche's. But is Nietzsche's account of master morality and slave morality opposed to Hegel? After all, both see master and slave as posing fundamental obstacles and problems for the realization of autonomous freedom. Moreover, both Hegel and Nietzsche agree that the slave is successful in rebelling against the master, although they interpret this success quite differently. For Hegel it constitutes a potential, if not actual, liberation, whereas for Nietzsche it is an historical and cultural catastrophe that has produced the herd morality. Recently Gilles Deleuze has claimed that Nietzsche's genealogy of morals undermines Hegel's account and provides the true critical theory of domination.2 Thanks to Deleuze we are thus plunged into the middle of what Daniel Breazeale has aptly called "The Hegel-Nietzsche Problem."3 The "Hegel-Nietzsche problem" was identified long ago by Karl Joel, who wrote: "Hegel and Nietzsche! Here lies a problem yet to be solved."4 Joel's "problem" has received some attention, but the relation between Hegel's thought and Nietzsche's has never been adequately sorted out, much less resolved. The question is whether Hegel and Nietzsche are mutually exclusive, or whether, in spite of obvious and important differences, there are also significant convergences.5 According to the conventional "wisdom" of much contemporary philosophy, Nietzsche and Hegel are opposites. For example, critical theorists like Habermas and deconstructionists like Derrida, who otherwise disagree, both affirm that Hegel and Nietzsche are opposites. Deleuze also belongs to this camp. On the other hand, Walter Kaufmann represents what Breazeale has called the rapprochement thesis. Kaufmann claims that between Hegel and Nietzsche there is "a truly amazing parallel."6 According to Kaufmann, both are dialectical monists who conceive of free self realization as a process developing through opposition and the overcoming of opposition. Both share a common term for self-overcoming, namely, aufheben, sublimieren. Although not everyone agrees with Kaufmann's interpretation, several philosophers accept the rapprochement thesis, including Daniel Breazeale, Judith Butler, Stephen Houlgate, Eliot Jurist, Philip J. Kain, Richard Rorty, Stanley Rosen, Robert Solomon, and Alan White.7 Rosen's acerbic comment sums up this unorganized camp: "those who insist on a sharp juxtaposition between Hegel and Nietzsche have understood neither one nor the other."8 But of this group, only two-Houlgate and Jurist-have produced book length studies, the former on Hegel and Nietzsche as critics of metaphysics, and the latter on their theories of agency and culture. Meanwhile, Philosopher's Index shows fewer than five journal articles on Hegel's and Nietzsche's accounts of master and slave. Deleuze's study of master/slave remains the most extensive to date; it presents a Nietzschean critique of Hegel that has shaped the current consensus. I shall examine Deleuze's account, which contends that recognition is inherently servile, and that Hegel's master, who depends on the slave's recognition, is for this reason likewise a slave. I shall offer criticisms of Deleuze's reading of Hegel's dialectic, recognition and master/slave. …

This volume aims to create—in Walter Benjamin’s terms—dialectical images from early Christian texts and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It blasts the past and the present into one another, creating new constellations of thought, ones connected with tensions and mediated by theory (mediation being what Theodor Adorno adds to Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image). Our ancient images derive from the Gospels, the Apostle Paul, Revelation, Irenaeus, Origen, and Augustine. Our modern images and theories derive from Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Judith Butler. Together these images and theories challenge the way we think about gentrification, progress, early Christianity, revolutionary movements, history, the body of Christ, canonicity, language, gender, and bodies, both human and non-human. Eleven international scholars contribute to this volume. These scholars are experts in the fields of Biblical Studies, Early Christian Studies, Philosophy, and Critical Theory.

The concept of performativity is foundational to the study of gender, but arguably no concept within gender studies has been more misunderstood and misapplied. A journey through the development of performativity as a critical tool from its beginnings in linguistics and philosophy, to its foundational work in poststructuralism and then its general acceptance within the study of gender shows how and why the concept of performativity is at once obvious and difficult to grasp, connected as it is to ordinary life and speech and to abstract theories of identification, all at once. J. L. Austin proposed performatives as utterances that were not constative, in that they were not verifiable, famously arguing that performatives are illocutionary, because they “do” an action as they are said or written. Austin’s focus included the environment or scene of the utterance, where speakers and situation had to match the intent of the performative in order for it to work. From then on, performatives became the subject of linguistics and speech act theory, and then were important to many critical theorists, notably Shoshana Felman, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, all of whom developed postmodern and poststructural approaches to language and representation which saw that performatives offered an alternative route to thinking about how meaning is produced. Poststructuralists interested in the work of language and politics found performatives helpful for thinking about the impact and force of statements. Judith Butler, who in particular is associated with poststructural thinking about performatives, developed a theory of performativity which linked it to ways of doing gender. In her rethinking of performativity and gender, discourse and repetition construct a sense of what gender identity is. Performativity in Butler’s view explains how gender identity constructs subjects and then is connected (often falsely or painfully) to ideas about sex assignment, bodies and sexuality, although the constant repetition of gender norms can result in new and unexpected ways of being gendered. Performativity in Butler’s work is not performance, although it has been widely interpreted that way, because performativity does not assume that a subject pre-exists its discursive construction. The repetition and reiteration of gender norms provides a fiction of interiority and identity for subjects, although Butler leaves open the possibility of the remainder, or excess, that has political potential to make other kinds of gender identities. Performativity was hotly debated within feminist theory, queer theory, and trans theory because Butler’s version of the concept critiqued the work of agency while still insisting on the importance of politics. Eventually, the concept became central to non-essentialist approaches to identity formation.

Over the last decade, Nancy Fraser has been developing a comprehensive and incisive critical social theory, one that, to use Marx's phrase, can further the "the work of our time to clarify to itself (critical philosophy) the meaning of its own struggles and its own desires"1 or, to use Max Horkheimer's conception, would count as an adequate interdisciplinary social theory with emancipatory intent.2 What then are the requirements for an interdisciplinary social theory, one critically oriented towards emancipation? First and foremost it must offer a theory of society, that is, some description and/or explanation of why social and institutional structures, cultural understandings, personality structures and the like have taken the particular shape they have today. More than a mere sociology or social psychology or combination of their results, however, a critical social theory also needs some kind of account of what emancipation means. Or, at the very least, some kind of account of the normative standards it evokes in denouncing various institutional formations, social expectations, cultural understandings, and the rest as non-emancipatory, oppressive, repressive, subordinating or whatever terms of negative assessment are going to be used. Finally, of course, as anyone who is familiar with reading critical social theory from Germany in the last thirty years will be well aware, a critical social theory also requires a fair amount of philosophical reflexivity about the standards of evidence it uses, the procedures it uses to investigate contemporary society, the ways it goes about justifying its normative standpoints, and so on. In other words, an interdisciplinary theory with emancipatory intent is supported by at least three kinds of reflection. First, is the more or less comprehensive social theory that gives us an empirically accurate picture of our contemporary situation, of "the meaning of our time's struggles," as it were. second, is some account of why certain of "our time's desires" are worthwhile desires, desires that point us toward the right struggles-we need an account of the normative standards employed in comprehending contemporary society. Third are the requirements of "critical philosophy clarifying our time to itself: critical social theory needs a philosophically reflective account of its own methodological procedures and standards of rationality. There is however a fourth desideratum any critical social theory must meet. We might call this, for lack of a better word, "perspicacity." That is to say, the struggles and wishes of the age that the theory picks out as important, the way in which it analyzes contemporary social formations, its particular analytic lens on the present, have to somehow insightfully illuminate the important social conditions, social changes, and social actors that we ought to be attending to. To put the perspicacity requirement in another way, the social-theoretic, normative, and methodological tasks of critical social theory can't become so overwhelming and hyper-reflexive that they overshadow, in the end, the question of whether that critical social theory picks out important practical issues. No matter how accurate the empirical social theory, no matter how unassailable the normative framework, no matter how cogent the methodological self-understanding of the theory, if, at the end of the day, that critical social theory doesn't tell us something insightful and practically useful about the actual struggles and wishes of our actual age, then it has missed its target. I believe that Nancy Eraser's critical social theory fulfills the first three tasks as well as other contemporary social theories, and I would contend that it better fulfills the requirement for perspicacity than others, giving a more insightful theory of the social world we find ourselves in and of the prospects and avenues for progressive change of that world. However, rather than try to vindicate that judgment here, I will leave that task to you, the reader of her recently co-authored book with Axel Honneth. …