Columbia University

Center for Contemporary Critical Thought

Fall 2015 Seminar

The Idea of a Critical Political Theory

Professor Linda Zerilli

Monday Through Friday, October 19-23, 2015

Seminar Description

Anyone who goes beyond procedural questions of a discourse theory of morality

and ethics and, in a normative attitude . . . embarks on a theory of the well-

ordered, or even emancipated, society will quickly run up against the limits of his

own historical situation.

--Habermas

For some time now, a certain strand of contemporary critical theory has understood its

task not in terms of providing a substantive critique of real world power relations, let

alone an alternative normative conception of what social relations might be, but of how to

justify critique as such: how to “justify those elements which critique owes to its

philosophical origins” (Habermas), albeit in a nonfoundationalist manner. This focus

on—if not obsession with—the theoretical problem of how to ground one’s own critique

arose largely as an intervention into the now longstanding debate over positivism and

scientism in figurations of the relation between theory and practice. As important as this

intervention has been for exposing the dangers of, and social/political philosophy’s

implication in, a purely technocratic order, it has not been without costs to the very idea

of critique itself: namely the crucial connection between critique and social/political

transformation.

Seyla Benhabib has usefully characterized the two tasks of critical theory as

“explanatory-diagnostic” and “anticipatory-utopian.” In this seminar we aim to explore

what each of these tasks might be and how they are connected. Central to our discussions

will be an examination of how the loss of the second of these tasks, that is, of providing

an anticipatory-utopian vision of what might supersede our current social and political

predicament, results in a failure to adequately fulfill the first task of critically analyzing

that very predicament. To speak with Cornelius Castoriadis, how might we refigure

theory as “critical” (of what exists) by means of its capacity to posit “new forms/figures

of the thinkable”?

Schedule

(Please read in the order listed.)

In preparation for the seminar, it will be useful to consult the following texts:

Amy Allen, The Politics of Ourselves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary

Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).

Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical

Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas

Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).

_______, Theory and Practice, trans. John Veirtel (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1973).

Nikolas Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and

Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).

Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of

Modern Society, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).

Reinhart Koselleck and Michaela W. Richter, “Crisis,” Journal of the History of Ideas

67, no. 2 (April 2006): 357-400.

Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?: From Matters of Fact to Matters

of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 225-248.

(October 19)

I. Critique as a Creative World-Building Practice of Freedom The first session sets out two visions of critique and of a critical political theory’s role

and purpose in the world. “On the one side is a vision… that, in recognition of the value

pluralism and social complexity of modernity, restricts itself to the normative

clarification of the procedures by which moral and political questions should be settled;

on the other, a vision … that, in recognition of the various ways in which conditions of

modernity obscure or foreclose our possibilities, conceives itself as a possibility-

disclosing practice” (Kompridis). Rather than see critique in terms of a proceduralist

practice of normative justification (Habermas), how might we rethink it as an array of

imaginative practices of freedom that disclose new ways of living and acting politically?

In our current climate of political despair, can we rethink critique in terms other than

those of the corrosive skepticism that attends its idealization as the total unmasking of our

current socio-political relations? How might we break closure through practices of

critique that neither seek the external standpoint nor begin with radical doubt but work

from within our forms of life and employ radical imagination to posit “new forms/figures

of the thinkable”?

Readings:

Nikolas Kompridis, “Disclosing Possibility: The Past and Future of Critical Theory,”

International Journal of Philosophical Studies 13, no. 3: 325-351.

Cornelius Castoriadis, “Marxism and Revolutionary Theory,” “The Social Imaginary

and Institution,” and “Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary,”

in The Castoriadis Reader, ed. David Ames Curtis (Malden, MA: Blackwell,

1997), 139-217, 319-337.

Cornelius Castoriadis, “Logic, Imagination, Reflection,” in World in Fragments:

Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and Imagination (Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press, 1997), 246-272.

Hannah Arendt, “Freedom and Politics: A Lecture,” Chicago Review 14, no. 1 (Spring

1960): 28-46

Recommended:

Jacques Derrida, “The Last of the Rogue States: The ‘Democracy to Come’, Opening in

Two Turns” in Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascal Anne-Brault and

Michael Nass (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 78-94.

(October 20)

II. Critique and the Art of Governance

The second session will explore the emergence of the modern idea of critique and its

relation to governance, crisis, judgment, and ethics. What does it mean to think (with

Foucault) of critique as “the suspension of judgment” and as inaugurating “a new practice

of values based on that very suspension,” as Judith Butler puts it. How can we think of

critique as practiced from within relations of knowledge/power rather than from a

supposedly objective because external standpoint? How can we move from an

intellectualist and individualistic idea of critique to one that is based in modes of both

self-transformation and collective practice?

Readings:

Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?,” and “What is Enlightenment?,” in The Politics of

Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 1997), 41-82,

97-120.

Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in

Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Vol. I, ed.

Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1994), 281-302.

Judith Butler, “What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue,”

http//eipcp.net/transversal/0806/butler/en

Gerald Raunig, “What is Critique: Suspension and Recomposition in Textual and

Social Machines,” http://eipcp.net/transversal/0808/raunig/en

Recommended:

Raymond Williams, “Criticism,” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society

(New York: Oxford University Press, 84-86.

Rudi Visker, Michel Foucault, Genealogy as Critique, trans. Chris Turner (New York:

Verso, 1995).

Ella Myers, “Crafting a Democratic Subject?: The Foucauldian Ethics of Self-Care,

Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 2013), 21-52.

(October 21)

III. Critique and Judgment

The third session explores Kant’s idea of the distinctively public use of reason and

critique as elaborated by Hannah Arendt. We seek to complicate the idea of critique as

the suspension of rule-governed (determinative) judgment (as it was introduced by

Foucault and developed by Butler and Raunig) by turning to Arendt’s political

refiguration of “common sense” and Kant’s reflective aesthetic judgments of taste in the

third Critique. How might critique be understood as part of a practice of reflective

judgment, that is, judgment without the mediation of a concept? How might this

understanding of critique allow us to practice critique from within our forms of life rather

than from what we have now seen to be an illusory external standpoint?

Required Reading:

Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner, (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1989), 1-85.

Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” Social Research 38, no. 3

(Autumn 1971): 417-446.

Recommended:

Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer

and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 1-230.

Hannah Arendt, “”Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding)”, in

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism

(New York: Schocken1994), 307-327.

Linda M. G. Zerilli, “We Feel Our Freedom: Imagination and Judgment in the Thought

of Hannah Arendt,” Political Theory 33, no. 2 (April 2005): 158-188.

(October 22)

IV. Critique and the Ordinary

The fourth session will explore further the question of whether context-transcendence is

the sine qua non of critique and how a rule-based conception of normativity makes it

difficult to imagine critique as originating from within rather than outside our forms of

life. What resources are there in our current practices and in what Stanley Cavell calls

“the ordinary” for developing new ways of going on and relating to ourselves and to

others in collective and public space?

Stanley Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy” and “Knowing and

Acknowledging” in Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1976), 44-72, 238-266.

------, “Excursus on Wittgenstein’s Vision of Language,” in The Claim of

Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1999), 168-190.

Steven G. Affeldt, “The Ground of Mutuality: Criteria, Judgment, and Intelligibility in

Stephen Mulhall and Stanley Cavell, European Journal of Philosophy 6, no. 1

(1998): 1-31.

-----, “The Normativity of the Natural,” in Varieties of Skepticism: Essays after Kant,

Wittgenstein, and Cavell, eds. James Conant and Andrea Kern (De Gruyter,

2014), 311-361.

Recommended:

Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy

(Oxford, 1999)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe,

German-English 4th

Edition (Blackwell, 2009), §185-242.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. Wright (Harper,

1972).

Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford:

Oxford UP, 1999); “The Givenness of Grammar: A Reply to Steven Affeldt,”

European Journal of Philosophy 6, no. 1 (1998): 32-44; “Stanley Cavell’s Vision

of the Normativity of Language: Grammar, Criteria, and Rules,” in Richard T.

Eldridge, ed., Stanley Cavell (Cambridge UP, 2003), 79-106; “Inner Constancy,

Outer Variation: Stanley Cavell on Grammar, Criteria, and Rules,” in Varieties of

Skepticism: Essays after Kant, Wittgenstein, and Cavell, eds. James Conant and

Andrea Kern (De Gruyter, 2014), 289-308.

James Conant, “Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use,” Philosophical Investigations 21, no.

3 (July 1998): 222-250.

(October 23)

V. Critique and Collective Political Practice

In the final seminar we turn to the Occupy Movement(s) as a recent political example of

critique understood as (1) the resistance to being governed in this way (Foucault), (2) the

public practice of action and judgment (Arendt), (3) the capacity to project a word into

new contexts (Cavell), and/or (3) the work of radical imagination and its positing of

forms/figures of the newly thinkable (Castoriadis). To what extent do these various ways

of thinking about critique capture what you take Occupy to be about? To what extent do

they support, contest, or mutually exclude each other? Which of these approaches to

critique better grasps the events now gathered under the sign “Occupy”? Can we revisit

more distant political protests (e.g., not just those that culminated in world-historical

revolutions but also those associated with, say, 1968) and felicitously rethink them with

one or more of these conceptions of critique?

Readings:

W. J. T. Mitchell, Preface to ‘Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience’,” Critical

Inquiry 39, no. 1 (Autumn 2012): 1-7.

W. J. T. Mitchell, “Image, Space, Revolution: The Arts of Occupation,” Critical Inquiry

39, no. 1 (Autumn 2012): 8-32.

Bernard Harcourt, “Political Disobedience,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 1 (Autumn 2012):

33-55.

Michael Taussig, “I’m So Angry I Made a Sign,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 1 (Autumn

2012): 56-88.

Recommended:

Hannah Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt

Brace, 1972), 49-102.

Todd Gitlin, Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall

Street (New York: Harper Collins, 2012).

What is Occupy? Inside the Global Movement (New York: Times Books, 2011).

David Horowitz and John Perazzo, Occupy Wall Street: The Communist Movement

Reborn (Sherman Oaks, CA: David Horowitz Freedom Center, 2012).

Sarah van Gelder, ed., This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99%

Movement (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2011).