K&K - Kultur og Klasse

Det kritiske subjekt

Mikkel Bolt — 2024-05-28

Kritik efter postkolonialiteten

David Scott — 2024-05-28

How can we best forge a theoretical practice that directly addresses the struggles of once-colonized countries, many of which face the collapse of both state and society in today’s era of economic reform? David Scott argues that recent cultural theories aimed at “deconstructing” Western representations of the non-West have been successful to a point, but that changing realities in these countries require a new approach. In Refashioning Futures, he proposes a strategic practice of criticism that brings the political more clearly into view in areas of the world where the very coherence of a secular-modern project can no longer be taken for granted.

Et kritisk posthumant subjekt?

Birgitte Thorsen Vilslev — 2024-05-28

This paper studies a discussion about posthumanism between the two influential feminist philosophers Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway in the journal, Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 7-8 in 2006. In the journal Braidotti describes Haraway’s thinking as “high posthumanism”, while Haraway, interviewed in the journal, on the other hand is very critical of the term. She prefers thinking with other terms such as cyborgs, companion species or the Chthulucene. With the starting point in this historical discussion, the paper traces it into Braidotti’s recent book Posthuman Feminism (2021) and Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016). A central concern in the discussion is the critical subject: How can the critical subject be understood and operate in a posthumanist framework? Can there be critical potentials in more-than-human positions and perspectives? How to think critical subjectivity as relational with other species and the material world? Based on these questions, the paper investigates posthuman feminism through more-than-human perspectives on the critical subject.

Carla Lonzi och krisens kritik 1969-1970

Frida Sandström — 2024-05-28

Departing from the Italian critic, art historian, and feminist Carla Lonzi’s essay ”La critica è potere” (Critique is power) from 1970, this article discusses a crisis immanent to the concepts of art and history that dominated the late 1960s Italy. In line with Lonzi’s argumentation, this crisis resulted in what the communist Massimo Cacciari described as ”negative thinking” in 1969, and what Lonzi in her essay describes as a ”critique of the crisis”. Beyond a universal consciousness and its presupposed identities, as they were reproduced within the party form and at academic institutions during this period, artists, workers, and intellectuals turned away from formal organization, and to informal, collective practices. The separatist, decentralized and anti-authoritarian network Rivolta Femminile, founded by Lonzi in 1970, show how the subjects of crisis and critique emerge from a patriarchal and colonial regime of sexual repression.

”Jag är bara här”

Sven Anders Johansson — 2024-05-28

The article takes as its starting point Leo Tolstoy’s character Pierre Bezukhov. His passive presence at the battle of Borodino, in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, is contrasted with today’s climate activism, exemplified by the Swedish human ecologist Andreas Malm. In his book How to Blow up a Pipeline, Malm argues that global warming forces scientists and scholars to become activists, and activists to turn to violence. This analysis, the article argues, is based on a simplistic notion of action (”one acts or one does not”) and a strong conviction of being right. If this certitude is problematic, it is also typical of our time. Where, then, does this tendency to simplify the complicated, and replace all uncertainty with sureness, come from? One answer is that activism requires determination, which in its turn presupposes access to the truth. Another explanation lies in the binary operations of the digital media we all rely upon. At the most basic level, these operations exclude all approximation, all nuances, all doubt: the options are one or zero. Against this background, it becomes crucial to defend a research practice that refrains from simplifications. In Sloterdijk, the article finds an argument for interrupting the affective impulses that reach us constantly. From Popper, it fetches an understanding of research as an event. Via Marx’s well-known formulation that philosophers must change the world, not just interpret it, the text then moves to Adorno’s defense of theoretical thinking. The question is, however, whether critical theory has any edge left. Has it not just become a part of the academic apparatus it once reacted against? The article finds an answer in Lyotard, and his idea of a theoretical apathy. This idea reminds a lot of the starting point of the article: Pierre Bezukhov’s comic but clear-sighted passivity on the battlefield.

Efter det kritiske subjekt

Mikkel Bolt — 2024-05-28

The article revisits the question of the critical subject through a reading of Jacques Rancière and Fred Moten. It starts out by giving an account of a longer historical trajectory where the notions of critique and revolution have run into the ground. David Scott’s nuanced analysis of the shift from an anticolonial romantic revolutionary perspective to a tragic postcolonial stance is both affirmed and challenged. Affirmed in so far as Scott’s analysis is embedded in a broader historical context, challenged by the presentation of two attempts to think the notion of a critical subject after the disappearance of a previous notion of an antisystemic subject. The second half of the article is a discussion of Rancière’s notion of a political subjectivation that is not based on pre-existing identities but is a break with the logic of a functionalist society. Followed by a discussion of Moten’s concept of Blackness that follows the Afro-Pessimist reading of the radical dispossession of Blacks but turn it into a possibility for a different kind of community.

Et anti-fascistisk manifest

Dag Heede — 2024-05-28

Anmeldelse af:

Judith Butler:
Who’s afraid of gender?

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024