"What Am I To Do?" Review of Critique & Praxis: A Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Action by Bernard E. Harcourt

Abstract

"What Am I To Do?" Review of Critique & Praxis:A Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Action by Bernard E. Harcourt Joan Cocks (bio) Bernard E. Harcourt. Critique & Praxis: A Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Action. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. 684 pp. $40.00 (hc). ISBN: 9780231195720. Bernard E. Harcourt's aim in this hefty work is to recover the emphasis on praxis that he argues once animated critical philosophy but was occluded over time. He intends to "imagine a new critical praxis theory for the twenty-first century" (15) that is oriented to "intellectual emancipation and social change" (19). While he recuperates Karl Marx to urge critical theorists to "move on to praxis," (279), the author jettisons Marx's progressive trajectory of history, division of capitalist society into two opposed classes, and call for a workers' revolution. Recognizing the more fractured landscape of power and resistance across the globe today, he takes his analytical lead instead from Michel Foucault and newer strands of critical philosophy. Unlike Foucault, however, Harcourt identifies "compassion, equality, solidarity, autonomy, and social justice" as the constitutive core of all critical philosophy, and he charges critics with acting to "infuse the world" with these values (1). At the same time, he insists that the proper praxis question is not the objectivist, "What is to be done?" but the subjectivist, "What am I to do?" The author details the split between a critical sensibility that endorses scientific knowledge and rationality, the surface/depth distinction, historical necessity, dialectical materialism, and/or universal norms of democratic [End Page 877] discourse; and a sensibility that purports truth is produced in the service of power and emphasizes historical contingency, social constructivism, and the idea that interpretations go all the way down instead of hitting a bedrock reality. In charting the debates both within and between these opposed sensibilities, Harcourt contends that neo-Marxists and left neo-Hegelians on the one side, and poststructuralists and anti-foundationalists on the other, succumbed to an "epistemological detour" that left them "disarmed" before the crises of our times (157). Just when the author appears to have succumbed to that detour as well, he takes a left turn to the heart of his project. He paints, first of all, an unvarnished portrait of the human condition as "a relentless contest over resources, possessions, ideals and identity, and existence itself" (269), with no universal recipe for victory and "no "utopian landing strip" (322). This constant battle is unavoidably violent, as its participants either already impose or seek to impose values on their adversaries; radical critics can only try to inhibit the use of physical force and ensure that the painful weight of social change falls on everyone equitably. It is also a battle fought and won on the basis of emotionally potent illusions. Puncturing illusions that "can satisfy wishes or desires without benefiting people materially" (211) is critical theory's intellectual task, which never ends, as "all efforts to unveil illusions will ultimately create new illusions that will have to be unveiled later in a relentless logic" (45). Critical theory's practical task—to push "existing social and political arrangements in an egalitarian and socially just direction" (321)—is also unending. No neutral rule of law or set of rights or procedural mechanisms for deliberation can protect us from this action imperative; no historical telos or abstract revolutionary guidebook can guarantee liberation and justice once and for all. Harcourt surveys the repertoires of praxis favored by the two theoretical sensibilities described above. The first champions—or rather championed—a centralized revolutionary party, intellectual vanguardism, and the emancipation of labor through a workers' revolution that begins on the factory floor. The second, with which Harcourt aligns himself, celebrates eclectic forms and sites of resistance against a multiplicity of ills, including legal and electoral fights to dismantle racial, sexual, and colonial hierarchies; leaderless insurrections, occupations, and riots; whistle-blowing and hacking to expose the pernicious power of the state, the creation of autonomous zones outside the reach of the state, and subversion "to shatter the institutions that reproduce privilege" (424); prefigurative democratic assemblages in public spaces; and even the weaponization of life by suicide bombers, hunger...