Categories Of Critique Research Articles

Meaning and fate of critique in the Ontological Turn

Abstract: The paper explores the meaning and fate of the category of critique within the so-called “ontological” or “speculative turn”. First, the article addresses the question of knowing what could give consistency to the very concept of a contemporary ontological turn, in order to present, in a second moment, the tension that, since Kant, constitutes the relationship between critique and ontology. Finally, the paper explores - particularly in the work of Quentin Meillassoux - the possibility of a new ontology that claims to be both non-dogmatic and immune to the neutralization of ontology carried out by critique.

Decolonizing Critical Theory?

AbstractTheorists working within the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory have not been immune to calls to “decolonize” that have been circulating in and beyond the academic world. This article asks what it means to seek to decolonize a tradition of thought that has never explicitly acknowledged colonial histories. What is needed, instead, this article suggests, is consideration of the very implications of the “colonial modern”—that is, an acknowledgement of the colonial constitution of modernity—for Frankfurt School critical theory's idea of historical progress. The issue is more extensive than simply acknowledging the substantive neglect of colonialism within the tradition; rather, this article suggests that its categories of critique and their associated normative claims are also necessarily implicated by this neglect and require transformation. Acknowledgment of colonial histories requires material reparations for the substantive inequalities bequeathed as legacies of the past, but these reparations also require a transformation of understandings and a recognition of “epistemological justice.”

Trobar clus in the Early Italian Lyric: Textual Enclosure, Social Space, and the Poetry of Guittone d’Arezzo

Stylistic difference has long been a useful category of critique in troubadour studies, but, for thirteenth-century Italian poetry, has traditionally been subsumed by considerations of Dante’s ‘inspired’ poetics. This essay recuperates trobar clus, the rhetorically complex style of composition in troubadour song, for the Italian context by exploring the implications of textual closure in the poetry of Guittone d’Arezzo. Following the precedent established by Marcabru, Guittone excludes potential readers (the ‘Gente noiosa e villana’ of Arezzo) by composing obscure and parodic poems, but also opens a textual enclosure that protects virtue from the moral and economic degradation of Italy’s urban centres. His cleaving of signifier from signified runs contrary, however, to the Comedy’s metaphysics of language and thus guarantees his poor treatment in Dantean liteary history.

Connaissance et critique. Marx et la critique de la raison au sein de la modernité

In contemporary political philosophy the category of critique has become deeply ambiguous. This article proposes to relaunch the debate about the meaning of “critique” in the work of Marx. I argue that Marx belongs to a tradition of thought whose objective is to highlight simultaneously the nature of the object studied (capitalist relations of production) and the categories in which the object is thought (classical political economy). Philosophy is radically critical inasmuch as it assumes no presupposition, either concerning the object or the categories in which the object is to be thought. This might sound like the approach of a contemporary philosopher like Michel Foucault. This is the direction in which this study aims to situate Marx in a tradition of thought starting with Hegel and reaching into our times

Indispensable Labor: The Worker as a Category of Critique in China Men

Indispensable Labor: The Worker as a Category of Critique in China Men Caroline H. Yang (bio) In his influential history of Chinese labor in California at the turn of the twentieth century, Alexander Saxton chronicles the ways in which Chinese workers were cast as the “indispensable enemy,” maligned by white workers of the period as “the most dangerous enemy that has yet threatened the interests of the working man” (75). Saxton explains that the antagonism against the Chinese was indispensable not only to the labor organization of the white workers but also, as David Roediger’s study on the construction of whiteness and the category of the “free worker” in the United States indicates, for the European immigrants to articulate themselves as free white workers against the category of the non-white others.1 In particular, as Robert Lee argues, this enabled white immigrant workers to forge the national identity of the “American worker” as that which was not Chinese. Saxton, Roediger, and Lee all point to the ways in which race—and racism—has worked constitutively with labor in the US. Specifically, Saxton claims that because the anti-Chinese propaganda in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War was not “tain[t]ed politically” (260) as it was with the anti-black campaign, the racism against the Chinese workers, which was sanctioned by their ostensible foreignness that justified the notion of an “enemy,” was then rearticulated as racism against African American workers as well (105). Historian Moon-Ho Jung’s recent work extends this line [End Page 63] of analysis by explaining how the racialization of Chinese workers in the South as coolies held together the shifting color line during the age of emancipation, as the racialization of the Chinese workers as neoslave coolies was crucial in upholding the meaning of racial categories (divided along a black-white binary) left over from slavery in the post-emancipation US. In the vein of Evelyn Hu-DeHart’s pioneering work, Lisa Yun calls for viewing the racialized Chinese workers in a transnational and transhemispheric framework, just as Lisa Lowe has argued for viewing what she calls the “intimacies” of Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas through the figure of the coolie to help us rethink notions of freedom, modernity, and the very category of the human under the organizing logic of empire.2 These theorizations on the Chinese worker as a category of analysis in history point to something beyond the obvious but sometimes ignored fact that Chinese labor was one of the indispensable components in the development of capital and empire in the US and world wide. More importantly, they highlight the ways in which the category of the racialized Chinese worker prompts a comparative and transnational analytical model of critique that interrogates the intersections of the discourses of race, labor, and freedom in empire that might be unrecognizable in historical narratives viewed exclusively in a national framework. As a discursive category, the racialized Chinese worker calls attention to subjugated epistemological formations, as it reveals the work that it has carried and can carry out in attributing meaning to racialized bodies. In this essay, I think about the representations of those racialized bodies by reading the Asian worker as a category of critique.3 In particular, informed by Victor Bascara’s argument that the workings of empire are showcased in twentieth-century Asian American literary texts, I argue for a way of reading Asian American literature that draws on the history of labor migration under capital and empire. If, as Bascara contends, the state-sanctioned institution of liberal multiculturalism of the late twentieth century—whose ontological rationale was predicated on the disappearance of empire in US culture—carved out a space for Asian American literature in the American literary canon, I argue that the task at hand is not to naturalize and legitimize that inclusion by underscoring a rightful belonging, but to tease out the linkage between the persistent erasure of racialized labor in the dominant historiography and literature and the “disappearing act” of empire in multiculturalism. In my examination of the Asian worker as a historical category through which we can engage in a transnationalist and comparativist reading of...

Critical Trends in the Study of Hunter-Gatherers

Hunter-gatherer were authorized in anthropology by Lee & De Vore's imaginative combination of evolutionary and ecological adaptationist concerns in the Man the Hunter volume (108). While recent reviews of hunter-gatherer studies (16, 23) have explored significant substantive issues, they have not considered the importance of the category itself in the formulation of anthropological research and theory. A major theme of this review is that the questioning of the category hunter-gatherer-rooted in varied responses to the evolutionary/ecological paradigm that constituted it-has been central to much contemporary work. Current writing about hunter-gatherers can be understand in terms of four categories of critique (or attack) on the original paradigm of hunter­ ways of life. I characterize the four broad theoretical orientations as (a) optimal foraging theory (or socioecology); (b) historicist (or ethnohistori­ cal) approaches; (c) sociology in the Marxist and structuralist tradition; and (d) humanistic approaches. In the latter, grab-bag category, I include those emphasizing hermeneutic and meaningful interpretation of in­ sider's views, reflexive works, and the advocacy research of political engage­ ment often undertaken on behalf of hunter-gatherers. Given good reviews of optimal foraging theory (23, 52, 112, 159, 181), I focus on categories b, c, and d. Their joint critical stance towards single archetypes for hunter-gatherer society suggests that the comparative method be considered an enduring problem in anthropology, a problem particularly marked in the very constituting of the category hunter-gatherer. For archeologists and social anthropologists, the category hunter­ gatherer as an evolutionary/ecological type had defined a shared area of