Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2018
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-1.1.5
Abstract
Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht's short-lived project for a critical theory journal, Krise und Kritik, foundered in 1931 on the shoals of positivism. Since then, a series of anti-foundational challenges to traditional critical theory has fragmented the landscape of critical theory and, especially, critical praxis, leaving us disarmed today, in these unprecedented times. This essay offers a way forward by means of what it calls “counter-critical theory”: a critical method that indexes the original impulse of critical theory, but liberates it from its foundation in order to allow for a more open-ended and permanent re-examination of how power circulates and recirculates throughout society. Counter-critical theory is a pure theory of illusions and calls for a strategic, ecumenical practice of political disobedience, accompanied by an unrelenting and resolute deployment of interpretation and resignification.
Disciplines
Law | Law and Philosophy | Law and Society
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Bernard E. Harcourt,
Counter-Critical Theory: An Intervention in Contemporary Critical Thought and Practice,
1
Critical Times
5
(2018).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/4456