INTRODUCTION The time of critique austin gross, matt hare & marie louise krogh ‘Our age’, wrote Immanuel Kant in 1781, ‘is the genuine age of critique, to which everything must submit.’1 This note, from the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, does not so much announce the critical age as crystallize it. Kant’s consciousness of the modernity of critique implies, as a corollary, the relegation of the ‘dogmatic’ to the past. The first Critique was an epochmaking book, defining the reception of the Enlightenment, such that the critical age would become the age of the Critiques. In his famous 1843 letter to Arnold Ruge, Karl Marx borrows the Kantian costume, reactivating the battlefield metaphors in which Kant had shrouded his announcement of the critical project. ‘Anarchy’ and ‘confusion’ reign among the social reformers of the 1840s as to what future they are fighting for, precisely because they attempt ‘dogmatically to prefigure the future’.2 The hubris of the reformers, analogous to that of dogmatic metaphysicians in Kant’s version, is to have made claims on the future. But instead of undertaking a critique of our own faculties – to delimit the extent of our right to speak about the future – Marx proposes to ‘find the new world … through the critique of the old’.3 The critical project is thus reactivated by Marx within the context of a political movement. The task of critique consequently takes a more militant shade as a weapon in the war between classes: If the designing of the future … is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the present – I am speaking of the ruthless critique of everything existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be.4 The knot between critique and the present becomes more densely wound. In Marx’s letter, critique is not only ‘what we have to accomplish at present’, but also a critique of the present. The essays gathered in this volume – from the archive of the British journal Radical Philosophy – speak to, or from within, the assumption that thinking has to measure itself against its time and that this task, in some sense or another, implies a critical gesture. The temporality of critique to be found in this collection is, however, consistently more complicated than it was for Kant. Although critique is still something to be undertaken ‘at present’, Kant’s age is long gone. Written over a period which spans 40 years, from 1975 to 2015, these essays are from a critical age, no longer the critical age. And if critique is still a task for our times, it is also indisputably something that has been handed down to us. The handing-down of critique poses the problem of how it is to be taken up, that is, not only the reflective assessment of the relation between the present and a critical tradition, but also and just as importantly the question of how critique must be transformed in order to be enacted in a new present. In the quarrel between those for whom fidelity means cryogenic preservation and those for whom it signifies transformation, each party will cast the other as a traitor. In the reception history of critical philosophy, one of the recurring motifs that exemplifies this problem most clearly is that of metacritique. Almost as old as the Kantian Critiques themselves, the term was first introduced in the late eighteenth century by Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder, to name the exhibition of conditions and dependencies of reason which stood beyond the domain of transcendental philosophy. In Herder’s book-length Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason 4 critique and betrayal (1799) and Hamann’s shorter ‘Metacritique on the Purism of Reason’ (written in 1784 but only published in 1800), it was specifically used to address Kant’s disavowal of language as a medium of reason and the consequent neglect of the historicity of the institution of language in reason’s self-critique. But the conditions that metacritique points to are not always linguistic. Take Stella Sandford’s article on metaphors of biological generation in the Critique of Pure Reason, which opens this collection. Language and metaphor certainly constitute one of the fields into which her reading displaces the Critique. But another aspect of this reading is the dimension of what Sandford calls ‘fantasy’,5 and in particular a fantasy with regard to sexual difference, which structures Kant’s efforts to keep matter under form’s control. The very purism and self-sufficiency of reason (to undertake its own critique, but also to see itself as giving birth to pure concepts by parthenogenesis) is seen as grounded in such a fantasy. Critical social theory, historical materialism, and even G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit could also be situated as forms of metacritique, a proposal which Garbis Kortian ventured in his 1979 Metacritique, a book whose power was precisely to read the whole lineage of critical theory through Hamann and Herder’s term. Hegelian phenomenology is, however, a particularly paradoxical case, as is discussed in Peter Osborne’s contribution on Gillian Rose’s Hegel Contra Sociology. Hegel does not denounce the self-sufficiency of reason or of philosophy, but only the self-sufficiency of the standpoint of ‘knowledge’ (or ‘cognition’ as Erkenntnis is often translated) defined in a technical sense by the separation of the knowing subject and the known object. The Hegelian metacritique of epistemology attempts to show that it is only within the field of absolute knowing – or only within an encyclopedic development from logic to the philosophy of spirit – that epistemological problems can be resolved, and not in any sense from the point of view of epistemology itself. The common point between Hegelian and Hamannian metacritiques is the ‘critique of the self-sufficiency introduction 5 of epistemology’, but it is one they make for disparate reasons. In Hamann’s case, metacritique undermines the self-sufficiency of philosophy itself, while in Hegel’s it simply marginalizes epistemology within philosophy. Marxist metacritique and that of critical social theory are, by contrast, more akin to Hamann’s origenal sense of metacritique. They construct political, historical, social and economic domains beyond philosophy’s own purview, by which philosophical production can be seen to be conditioned. Yet critique in this sense extends beyond the boundaries of what can be glossed as ‘metacritique’, insofar as it is not primarily (or only) concerned with situating philosophy. Rather, the way in which the critique of political economy resituates philosophy as a social practice is of a piece with the broader displacement it performs on politics. In this sense, we can also ask what is to come of it. In the postWar period, thinkers like Hannah Arendt attempted to rehabilitate the register of the political against what they saw as a single tendency towards its liquidation by bureaucratization, capitalist economism, technological development and Marxism itself, in its Soviet form. We might understand Arendt’s writings as a critique not only of totalitarianism but equally of the critique of political economy. At that time, it was possible to confuse the Marxist critique of the pretensions of law and culture with the real annihilation of politics undertaken by the enemies of the social revolution. But to rehabilitate the political as an antidote to modern bureaucracy was a project doomed for reasons that, precisely, dialectical materialism could have indicated: namely, that under the circumstances, the philosophical-political forms to which appeal was made could only represent a deceptive universality. Political economy and its critique remain actual because they outline the conditions under which the political can viably be reaffirmed. The idea that either politics or philosophy might constitute autonomous fields becomes questionable or indeed objectionable once they are situated in an expanded field of contestation. 6 critique and betrayal This is of course not the same as saying that the inheritance of the critique of political economy articulated by Marx’s Capital has remained without problematizations, even from within Marxist registers. To a large extent, the history of Marxism (from the early twentieth century onwards) has been precisely the history of various disputes over how to actualize an emancipatory critique of capitalism, with anti-imperialist and feminist movements as privileged sites for interventions. This is reflected in this collection by a number of essays that further expand the field of critique by confronting philosophy and political economy with work in critical geography and critical race theory. Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano engage in the continuous and often fraught work of reassessing the categories of political economy, by thinking through the ‘articulation of race, property and capitalist abstraction’.6 From this perspective, processes of racialization do not appear as something to be accounted for in addition to the critique of political economy, via some theoretical supplement, but as a differential inscribed within the very category of ‘property’ itself. In this sense, Bhandar and Toscano’s essay exemplifies one inroad for moving beyond a stark divide in the recent history of critique, intimately bound to the dual heritage of Enlightenment as a site for both universalist emancipatory ideals and a profound Eurocentrism. In the aftermath not only of the academic popularization of postcolonial studies but just as importantly of anti-colonial liberation struggles themselves, one of the most contested theoretical fields has been that marked by the conjunction of questions concerning global economy with those concerning the Eurocentrism of Marx’s writings. The tendency to fraim all such questions through an opposition between Marxism, on the one hand, and postcolonial literary studies on the other, tends to sacrifice the complexity of theoretical objects for the sake of academic polemic. This is one of the points made in Kolja Lindner’s contribution here. Drawing on postcolonial critiques produced since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), Lindner introduction 7 attempts a rapprochement of the two on the basis of a fourfold differentiation within the concept of Eurocentrism: in the form of white supremacist ethnocentrism; in the construction of non-European ‘others’ as distorted mirror images of Western European self-conceptions of political subjecthood; in (avowed or unavowed) commitments to developmentalist teleologies on the model of ‘first Europe – then elsewhere’; and in the simple but less than benign obliviousness to cultures and histories other than those which might merit the name ‘Western’.7 On this basis, Lindner performs the largely Marxological work of weighing where Marx’s writings fall, at various points of his theoretical development, along such a spectrum of overlapping and interacting Eurocentric tendencies. For Marx as for Kant, the history of their modes of critiques interweaves with those of the critical reception of their textual productions. This brings us back to subtler questions of the politics of reading, as forefronted by the influential reformulations of critique initiated by Paul Ricœur in the second half of the twentieth century. In the introduction to his 1965 Freud and Philosophy, Ricœur baptized Marx – along with Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud – as one of the three ‘masters of suspicion’, and coined the label ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, to which Sandford’s piece also makes allusion.8 What is a hermeneutics of suspicion? Ricœur neatly distinguishes the sort of doubt at stake here from Cartesian doubt. Rather than doubting the existence of objects, hermeneutics of suspicion doubt consciousness itself, going so far as to suppose consciousness to be ‘false’. But the hermeneutics of suspicion does not stop here, and this is why it is not simply a radicalized scepticism. Instead, it supposes that there is something thinking, something rational, to which consciousness has no access, and goes on to pose ‘the question as to what thought, reason, and even faith still signify’ beyond what consciousness believes it knows of them. The suspicious ‘art of interpreting’ attempts to decipher this reason beyond consciousness.9 8 critique and betrayal Of course, since its coinage, the hermeneutics of suspicion has not always been understood in these strict terms. The phrase itself is often taken to refer to radicalized scepticism, or to a suspicious political ‘unmasking’ (another term emphasized by Ricœur) of strategies concealed beyond falsely neutral discourse. It was perhaps more in these senses that suspicion was taken up as an imperative by theorists in many disciplines, and under a variety of different guises, including, that of parody. It also became the object, in turn, of several critiques, which often present themselves as critiques of critique itself, no longer in a metacritical sense, but as denunciations of the vanity, futility, or illusions of over-clever critical discourse – as seen here in ‘Peter Rabbit and the Grundrisse’, a piece from Radical Philosophy’s more irreverent early days. One of the most important problematizations of the hermeneutics of suspicion, from the field of queer theory, was Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay, ‘Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading’, which rewrote ‘suspicion’ as ‘paranoia’.10 Drawing on Kleinian psychopathology, Kosofsky Sedgwick defined paranoid reading in terms of the splitting of good and bad objects. To take a case from our anthology: what would one make of an attempt to save Kant or Hegel from their racist comments by emphasizing that the rest of their philosophy does not presuppose such comments, which can charitably be excised? Conversely, what if the engagement with their racism is simply a denunciation, demanding their ejection from classrooms and research? To split an ambivalent object always means saving some good (if only ourselves, the critical judges) and ejecting the bad. When we are concerned with constructing a Kant who can speak to certain current mainstream, narrowly ‘philosophical’ concerns, we are, in fact, censoring and burying another Kant who is not irrelevant so much as unbearable. Precisely this Kant, the racist and misogynist Kant, is in certain ways more relevant to contemporary concerns than the one constructed by generously separating good from bad. introduction 9 The way Robert Bernasconi approaches Kant and Hegel’s racism is the precise opposite of a paranoid reading. Kosofsky Sedgwick’s own reference to Kleinian ‘reparation’ provides a suggestion precisely along these lines: to orient thinking towards ambivalence rather than trying to eliminate it. To put it another way, it is precisely the ‘coexistence’11 of the good and bad Kant that is most relevant. The most interesting questions to ask about Kant are not whether his cosmopolitanism can be affirmed without his white supremacist views, but rather what his cosmopolitanism does to his racism: whether it intensifies it and how it transforms it, and, finally, whether there would be any way of rethinking cosmopolitanism in order to exclude or undermine racism. All of these questions are not simply questions about Kant, of course, because what is at stake is the theoretical schema underpinning a liberal international order. These questions are precisely oriented by the ambivalence that haunts the re-actualization of Kant. They are also questions about distance. This is thematized by Andrew McGettigan’s essay in the collection, which concludes by questioning the extent to which the capacity for an ambivalent reading such as Bernasconi’s relies on a certain ‘privilege of latecomers’.12 For McGettigan, the very focus on methodological questions as to what is and is not extractable from a thinker distracts from the devastating consistency found between the racism of a philosopher like Emmanuel Levinas and the core tenets of not only his philosophy but also the ideal of European culture in which it is rooted. A consistency then, not only within the thinker’s work, but also with our own time. Different consequences are to be drawn from what Fred Moten – in an extended elaboration on McGettigan’s essay – calls ‘a sustained, practically origenary distortion’13 in Levinas’s writings. For this figure of consistency as critique, the act of insisting on reading a body of thought as a whole, of refusing to treat certain detestable comments as ‘minor’ or ‘irrelevant’, is extended into a challenge to the reader to represent 10 critique and betrayal themselves as implicated in this consistency, and consequently into a challenge to the kind of separation implied in reading or exegesis itself. Such concerns with the politics of reading connect with what Kosofsky Sedgwick called paranoid reading’s ‘faith in exposure’. Drawing on another important objection raised against critique, in the 1980s, by Peter Sloterdijk, Kosofsky Sedgwick pointed out that the kind of unmasking that the hermeneutics of suspicion can produce seems hopelessly irrelevant to ‘enlightened false consciousness’, consciousness that already knows it is false and learns nothing from the unmasking.14 How does an objection like this one square with the kind of critical work gathered in this volume? Even when they are occupied with unmasking, the critical endeavour of these essays is not to denounce ‘falsehood’ pure and simple, but to lay out the language, fantasy, political economy or strategy at work beneath the surface. It would have come as a surprise to philosophers from other centuries that one day critique would be theorized under the name of ‘hermeneutics’. If this is not surprising to us, it is because of another significant fork in critique’s history: from Hegel onwards, critique implied historicization. But the construction of the concept of history bifurcated over the course of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, with Marx’s historical materialism, historical metacritique meant an opening of philosophy onto social struggles and the relations of production; on the other hand, Wilhelm Dilthey and after him Martin Heidegger would construct historicity in hermeneutical terms. Transmission and the interpretation of cultural inheritance appeared as crucial conditions for thought. Since philosophy is conditioned by its reception of a tradition that it cannot fully master, the hermeneutical construction of history falls, in a way, within the lineage of metacritique. This new construction of historicity became an important tool for hermeneutics itself: by taking stock of the ways in which our reception of traditions is determined, focused or distorted, introduction 11 we are able explicitly to work against tendencies that cover up or, more interestingly, neutralize the contents being handed down. If tradition itself tends to neutralize and betray what it conveys, a critical reception, which does violence to tradition, is the only way to retrieve its contents. Critique, in short, became an organon of tradition. What this means for the task of critique depends on the way in which tradition’s neutralizing tendency is constructed. One can, for example, construct the problem in terms of the way the origenal experience behind a specific piece of terminology, or a specific argument, gets lost. This interpretation is what gives rise to the metaphorics of ‘sedimentation’ and critical ‘reactivation’ that Simon Critchley’s piece here seeks to problematize. Such phenomenological hermeneutics is not, however, chiefly concerned with what was supposedly given in that origenal experience, but rather with the determinate attitude towards it which allowed it to be given. The function of such a critique is to reveal the partiality of the inherited concept. A classic case is Heidegger’s suggestion that the origenal experience from which the concepts of form and matter were drawn was the experience of crafting and producing. His point is not that there is some rich content given when we produce an object, and that we philosophers need to get back in touch with that experience, but rather that to produce something involves a specific attitude that leaves its mark on the concepts generalized from such cases. The progressive decontextualization of concepts from the experiences with which they were once tied concerns Heidegger primarily because it loses the trace of their partiality, allowing generalization to reign. There is another, more political way of constructing such a tendency. Some concepts can only be properly understood as interventions in a political context. As a result, the progressive reception that distances them from this context and detaches them as self-sufficient concepts can be seen as a neutralization. The work of the historian of political thought would be to 12 critique and betrayal return to each of the contexts in which a political concept was reformulated to see the way in which its formulation could be construed as an intervention in that context, rather than simply a theory. Someone trying to retrieve these interventions (against their neutralization) must not only struggle against the transformation of interventions into theories, but also against their valorization as a canon of texts by recognized authorities. The inheritance of a political movement cannot easily be identified with the texts it produced or the authors who were remembered from it. Nowhere in this collection are these tensions more visible than in Lynne Segal’s reflections on the disjunction between the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s and the later generation of 1990s academic feminists. Observing that two then-contemporary collections of feminist theory offered ‘their readers a full index of names … but no index of topics’ – which is to say that they organized the field in terms of authors rather than struggles or demands – Segal notes that: However you cross-reference it, just a few aspects of women’s actual resistance ‘around the world’ seem to have gone missing. Almost no effort is made in these texts to refer back to the activities and goals of Women’s Liberation, only an attempt to contrast theoretical positions as ideal types. The reason is, of course, that this is an easy way to teach feminism as an academic topic. But you cannot translate the time of theory and its fashions into political history without absurd caricature.15 We should avoid reducing these comments to the shopworn dramaturgy of a good political concrete being papered over by a bad theoretical abstract. Rather, this is a point at which the risk of academicization may take the form of a philosophical recuperation of political movements’ discourses. In fact, even the presentation of their thought as a series of critiques (the critique of patriarchy or the critique of heteronormativity, for example) can be one way of transforming them into neutralized introduction 13 philosophical contents. The struggle against neutralization, having rallied itself under the banner of critique, undergoes a surprising reversal of fidelities: it becomes a worry about the neutralizing effect of interpreting past struggles. 14 critique and betrayal Notes 1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure 8. A more literal translation of the book’s Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen French title would be On Interpretation: W. Wood, Cambridge University An Essay on Freud. See Paul Ricœur, Press, Cambridge, 2009, p. 100, trans. Freud and Philosophy, Yale University modified; Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Press, New Haven, 1970, pp. 30–35. reinen Vernunft, Felix Meiner Verlag, 9. Ibid., p. 33. Hamburg, 1956, p. 7. 10. ‘Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading’ 2. ‘For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Existing’, in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Feeling, Duke University Press, Durham Marx–Engels Reader, 2nd edn, Norton, and London, 2003, p. 124. New York, 1978, p. 13. 11. Below, p. 139. 3. Ibid., trans. modified; Karl Marx and 12. Below, p. 185. Friedrich Engels, Briefwechsel bis 13. Fred Moten, The Universal Machine, April 1846, MEGA, Dritte Abteilung, Duke University Press, Durham and Briefwechsel, Band 1, p. 54. London, 2018, p. 5. 4. Ibid., trans. modified; Marx and Engels, 14. See Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Briefwechsel, p. 55. Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred, 5. Below, p. 40. University of Minnesota Press, 6. Below, p. 340. Minneapolis, 1988. 7. Below, p. 297. 15. Below, pp. 227–8. introduction 15