|
March 4, 2008
Wendy Brown's first chapter in Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics is concerned with the role of critique in dark times. The dark times--- a reference to Hannah Arendt---is interpreted by me as the constellation of a neo-liberal mode of governance, social conservatism and the conservative denunciation of critique. Brown's response is that:
The rebuff of critical theory as untimely provides the core matter of the affirmative case for it. Critical theory is essential in dark times not for the sake of sustaining utopian hopes, making flamboyant interventions,or staging irreverent protests, but rather to contest the very senses of time invoked to declare critique untimely. If the charge of untimeliness inevitably also fixes time, then disrupting this fixity is crucial
to keeping the times from closing in on us. It is a way of reclaiming the present from the conservative hold on it that is borne by the charge of untimeliness.
She adds that to insist on the value of untimely political critique is not to refuse the problem of time or timing in politics, but rather to contest settled accounts of what time it is, what the times are, and what political
tempo and temporality we should hew to in political life.
Critique presupposes a critical condition, for when we call a political moment in time critical, Brown says:
we signal the need for accurate assessment and effective strategies of action, all in a context designated as urgent. A critical condition is thus a particular kind of call: an urgent call for knowledge, deliberation, judgment, and action to stave off catastrophe.
critique as political
Krisis promises to restore continuity by repairing or renewing the justice that gives an order the prospect of continuity, that indeed makes it continuous.
|
