Immanent Critique

Immanent Critique PDF Author: Titus Stahl
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786601818
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
When we criticize social institutions and practices, what kinds of reasons can we offer for such criticism? Political philosophers often assume that we must rely on universal moral principles that are not necessarily connected to the particular social practices of our communities. Traditionally, continental critical theory has rejected this claim through its endorsement of the method of immanent critique. Immanent critique is a critique of social practices that draws on norms already present within these practices to demand social change, rather than merely conservatively reproducing them. Titus Stahl defends the claim that such a critique is not only possible, but also has politically powerful potential. Taking up recent developments in analytic enquiry into collective intentionality theory and in the philosophy of language, he argues that all social practices rest on structures of mutual recognition between persons that allow social theorists to reconstruct hidden norms present within these practices. Starting from a comprehensive critique of contemporary critical theory, Immanent Critique also spells out the consequences of this line of thought for the practice of social critique, for the social sciences and for political philosophy. The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publisher & Booksellers Association)

Immanent Critique

Immanent Critique PDF Author: Titus Stahl
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786601818
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 357

Get Book Here

Book Description
When we criticize social institutions and practices, what kinds of reasons can we offer for such criticism? Political philosophers often assume that we must rely on universal moral principles that are not necessarily connected to the particular social practices of our communities. Traditionally, continental critical theory has rejected this claim through its endorsement of the method of immanent critique. Immanent critique is a critique of social practices that draws on norms already present within these practices to demand social change, rather than merely conservatively reproducing them. Titus Stahl defends the claim that such a critique is not only possible, but also has politically powerful potential. Taking up recent developments in analytic enquiry into collective intentionality theory and in the philosophy of language, he argues that all social practices rest on structures of mutual recognition between persons that allow social theorists to reconstruct hidden norms present within these practices. Starting from a comprehensive critique of contemporary critical theory, Immanent Critique also spells out the consequences of this line of thought for the practice of social critique, for the social sciences and for political philosophy. The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publisher & Booksellers Association)

Immanent Critiques

Immanent Critiques PDF Author: Martin Jay
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1804292532
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The Frankfurt School’s own legacy is best preserved by exercising an immanent critique of its premises and the conclusions to which they often led. By distinguishing between what is still and what is no longer alive in Critical Theory, these essays seek to demonstrate its continuing relevance in the 21st century. Fifty years after the appearance of The Dialectical Imagination, his pioneering history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay reflects on what may be living and dead in its legacy. Rather than treating it with filial piety as a fortress to be defended, he takes seriously its anti-systematic impulse and sensitivity to changing historical circumstances. Honouring the Frankfurt School's practice of immanent critique, he puts critical pressure on a number of its own ideas by probing their contradictory impulses. Among them are the pathologization of political deviance through stigmatizing "authoritarian personalities," the undefended theological premises of Walter Benjamin's work, and the ambivalence of its members' analyses of anti-Semitism and Zionism. Additional questions are asked about other time-honored Marxist themes: the meaning of alienation, the alleged damages of abstraction, and the advocacy of a politics based on a singular notion of the truth. Rather, however, than allowing these questions to snowball into an unwarranted repudiation of the Frankfurt School legacy as a whole, the essays also acknowledge a number of its still potent arguments. They explore its neglected, but now timely analysis of "racket society," Adorno's dialectical reading of aesthetic sublimation, and the unexpected implications of Benjamin's focus on the corpse for political theory. Jay shows that it is a still evolving theoretical tradition which offers resources for the understanding of–and perhaps even practical betterment–of our increasingly troubled world.

Critique of Forms of Life

Critique of Forms of Life PDF Author: Rahel Jaeggi
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674988698
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
For many liberals, the question “Do others live rightly?” feels inappropriate. Liberalism seems to demand a follow-up question: “Who am I to judge?” Peaceful coexistence, in this view, is predicated on restraint from morally evaluating our peers. But Rahel Jaeggi sees the situation differently. Criticizing is not only valid but also useful, she argues. Moral judgment is no error; the error lies in how we go about judging. One way to judge is external, based on universal standards derived from ideas about God or human nature. The other is internal, relying on standards peculiar to a given society. Both approaches have serious flaws and detractors. In Critique of Forms of Life, Jaeggi offers a third way, which she calls “immanent” critique. Inspired by Hegelian social philosophy and engaged with Anglo-American theorists such as John Dewey, Michael Walzer, and Alasdair MacIntyre, immanent critique begins with the recognition that ways of life are inherently normative because they assert their own goodness and rightness. They also have a consistent purpose: to solve basic social problems and advance social goods, most of which are common across cultures. Jaeggi argues that we can judge the validity of a society’s moral claims by evaluating how well the society adapts to crisis—whether it is able to overcome contradictions that arise from within and continue to fulfill its purpose. Jaeggi enlivens her ideas through concrete, contemporary examples. Against both relativistic and absolutist accounts, she shows that rational social critique is possible.

Immanent Materialisms

Immanent Materialisms PDF Author: Charlie Blake
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351400975
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Must a philosophy of life be materialist, and if so, must it also be a philosophy of immanence? In the last twenty years or so there has been a growing trend in continental thought and philosophy and critical theory that has seen a return to the category of immanence. Through consideration of the work of thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Catherine Malabou, Francois Laruelle, Gilles Deleuze and others, this collection aims to examine the interplay between the concepts of immanence, materialism and life, particularly as this interplay can highlight new directions for political inquiry. Furthermore, critical reflection on this constellation of concepts could also be instructive for continental philosophy of religion, in which ideas about the divine, embodiment, sexual difference, desire, creation and incarnation are refigured in provocative new ways. The way of immanence, however, is not without its dangers. Indeed, it may be that with its affirmation something of importance is lost to material life. Could it be that the integrity of material things requires a transcendent origin? Precisely what are the metaphysical, political and theological consequences of pursuing a philosophy of immanence in relation to a philosophy of life? This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

Deleuze's Kantian Ethos

Deleuze's Kantian Ethos PDF Author: Carr Cheri Lynne Carr
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474407730
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Among the philosophical traditions that seem most at odds with Gilles Deleuze's project, two stand out: Kantianism and normative ethics. Both of these traditions represent forms of moralism that Deleuze explicitly rejects. In this book, Cheri Lynne Carr explores the very real potential of Deleuze's clandestine use of Kantian critique for developing a new ethical practice. This new practice is built on an idea implicit in much of Deleuzian thought: the idea of critique as a way of life. This new concept of a critical ethos is a powerful form of moral pedagogy directed at developing in us the wisdom to perceive unanticipated features of moral salience, evaluate our presupposed principles, affirm the limits imposed by those presuppositions and create concepts that capture new ways of thinking about moral problems.

Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition

Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition PDF Author: John McCole
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501728679
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Few modern thinkers have been as convinced of the necessity of recovering the past in order to redeem the present as Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). Benjamin at once mourned and celebrated what he took to be an inevitable liquidation of traditional culture, and his determination to think both of these attitudes through to their conclusions lends his work its peculiar honesty, along with its paradoxical, antinomial coherence. In a landmark interpretation of the whole of Benjamin's career, John McCole demonstrates a way of understanding Benjamin that both contextualizes and addresses the complexities and ambiguities of his texts. Working with Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the "intellectual field," McCole traces Benjamin's deep ambivalence about cultural tradition through the longterm project-an immanent critique of German idealist and romantic aesthetics-which unites his writings. McCole builds a sustained reading of Benjamin's intellectual development which sheds new light on the formative role of early influences—particularly his participation in the pre-World War I German youth movement and the orthodox discourse of German intellectual culture—and shows how Benjamin later extended the strategies he learned within these contexts during key encounters with Weimar modernism, surrealism, and the fiction of Proust. The fullest account of Benjamin available in English, this lucid and penetrating book will be welcomed by intellectual historians, literary theorists and critics, historians of German literature, and Continental philosophers.

The Political Unconscious

The Political Unconscious PDF Author: Fredric Jameson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801471575
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Fredric Jameson, in The Political Unconscious, opposes the view that literary creation can take place in isolation from its political context. He asserts the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts, claiming it to be at the center of all reading and understanding, not just a supplement or auxiliary to other methods current today. Jameson supports his thesis by looking closely at the nature of interpretation. Our understanding, he says, is colored by the concepts and categories that we inherit from our culture's interpretive tradition and that we use to comprehend what we read. How then can the literature of other ages be understood by readers from a present that is culturally so different from the past? Marxism lies at the foundation of Jameson's answer, because it conceives of history as a single collective narrative that links past and present; Marxist literary criticism reveals the unity of that uninterrupted narrative. Jameson applies his interpretive theory to nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts, including the works of Balzac, Gissing, and Conrad. Throughout, he considers other interpretive approaches to the works he discusses, assessing the importance and limitations of methods as different as Lacanian psychoanalysis, semiotics, dialectical analysis, and allegorical readings. The book as a whole raises directly issues that have been only implicit in Jameson's earlier work, namely the relationship between dialectics and structuralism, and the tension between the German and the French aesthetic traditions. The Political Unconscious is a masterly introduction to both the method and the practice of Marxist criticism. Defining a mode of criticism and applying it successfully to individual works, it bridges the gap between theoretical speculation and textual analysis.

Hegel and the Frankfurt School

Hegel and the Frankfurt School PDF Author: Paul Giladi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351602403
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
This collection of original essays discusses the relationship between Hegel and the Frankfurt School Critical Theory tradition. The book’s aim is to take stock of this fascinating, complex, and complicated relationship. The volume is divided into five parts: Part I focuses on dialectics and antagonisms. Part II is concerned with ethical life and intersubjectivity. Part III is devoted to the logico-metaphysical discourse surrounding emancipation. Part IV analyses social freedom in relation to emancipation. Part V discusses classical and contemporary political philosophy in relation to Hegel and the Frankfurt School, as well as radical-democratic models and the outline and functions of economic institutions.

The Value of Critique

The Value of Critique PDF Author: Isabelle Graw
Publisher: Campus Verlag
ISBN: 3593510103
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
Viele Theoretikerinnen und Theoretiker haben sich von einer Praxis der Kritik verabschiedet und sich für alternative Einstellungen des Urteils ausgesprochen, die als Praktiken der Wertschätzung bezeichnet werden können. Der Sammelband untersucht, wie eine Opposition dieser beiden Denkweisen verstanden wird, und fragt danach, ob und wie sie sich überwinden lässt. Dabei spielen die Praktiken der Urteilens im Feld der Kunst eine paradigmatische Rolle. Mit Beiträgen u.a. von Luc Boltanski, Eva Geulen, Rahel Jaeggi und Bruno Latour

Adorno

Adorno PDF Author: Simon Jarvis
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415920575
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
This new introduction offers a comprehensive and accessible account of Adorno's work. Jarvis discusses the intellectual and institutional contexts for Adorno's thought and, in a broad-ranging study, examines his contributions to social theory, cultural theory, aesthetics, and philosophy. He shows how a re-examination of Adorno's work from the perspective of classical German philosophy allows us to see him from a new and illuminating angle, and ultimately to achieve a fuller understanding of all his thought.