Vad var kritiken? Om aktivism, cynism och kritisk teori

Resumé

The article tries to question the premises of the critical subject. Is critique, understood as a subjective judgement, still possible, or have we reached a medial and political situation where this is no longer an option? The article turns to Horkheimer and Adorno and confronts their ideal of a critical theory with the criticism directed to it from Peter Sloterdijk. Somehow the critical thinking which the Frankfurt School inaugurated seems to have taken two directions today: either a cynical, resigned one, or an activist one. The article argues that both may be understood as attempts to preserve the subject, in the same way as Adorno was accused of by Sloterdijk. In that perspective, the possibility of critique may appear to be non-existent. However, if critique is understood, with Luc Boltanski, not as an activity performed by an individual critic, but rather by an institution, by society, the situation appears in a different light. This is, the article argues, the necessary step to take: to liberate criticism from individualism, and understand the individual critic not as the origin of critique, but as its medium.