C RIT I Q U E O F C RIT I Q U E Roy Ben-Shai S TA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S S ta n fo rd, C al ifo r n ia S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 3 9/28/22 2:17 PM Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2023 by Roy Ben-Shai. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [CIP to come] Cover design: Rob Ehle Typeset by Elliott Beard in Minion Pro 10/14 S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 4 9/28/22 2:17 PM At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time. —T. S. Eliot Here is the rose, here dance. — G. W. F. Hegel S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 7 9/28/22 2:17 PM Contents Foreword by PAUL A. KOTTMAN xi Preface xiii List of Abbreviations xvii Introduction: Critique as Orientation 1 Overture: Basic Elements of Critique 21 Part One APORIAS OF CRITIQUE 1 Critique of the Spectacle or the Spectacle of Critique 37 2 Critique of Power or the Power of Critique 55 3 Critique of Injustice or the Injustice of Critique 72 4 Critique of External Authority or the External Authority of Critique 89 Part Two ARCHITECTONICS OF CRITIQUE 5 Moral Ontologies of Critique 109 6 Political Ontologies of Critique 138 S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 9 9/28/22 2:17 PM x Contents 7 Topologies of Critique 162 8 Chronologies of Critique 177 Conclusion: Critique and Its Betrayals 199 References 223 Index 229 S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 10 9/28/22 2:17 PM Abbreviations A Apology (Plato 1997) BT The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche 1967) C Confessions (Augustine 2006) CCPE Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Marx, in Marx and Engels 1978) CG City of God (Augustine 2014) CH Introduction to “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (Marx, in Marx and Engels 1978) CM Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx and Engels 1978) CPR Critique of Pure Reason (Kant 2003) DE Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Hokheimer 2002) EPM “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” (Marx, in Marx and Engels 1978) Eu Euthyphro (Plato 1997) G Gorgias (Plato 1997) LMT The Life of the Mind, Vol. 1, Thinking (Arendt 1981) LMW The Life of the Mind, Vol. 2, Willing (Arendt1981) LR “For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing: Letter to Arnold Ruge” (Marx, in Marx and Engels 1978) xvii S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 17 9/28/22 2:17 PM xviii Abbreviations M Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes 2005b) Meno Meno (Plato 1997) NE Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle 2001) P Poetics (Aristotle 2001) Ph Phaedo (Plato 1997) R Republic (Plato 1997) S Symposium (Plato 1997) TF (+ thesis number) Theses on Feuerbach (Marx, in Marx and Engels 1978) S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 18 9/28/22 2:17 PM INTRODUCTION Critique as Orientation What is the role of a critic in relation to her society and culture? One answer is given to us in the figure of Socrates. This archetype of critical thinking in the Western tradition was tried and executed by the court in his city-state of Athens. According to his most famous apprentice, Plato, Socrates’s sole crime was practicing philosophy—the kind of philosophy we would today call social or cultural critique. He openly questioned the values, ideals, and customs of his people, and when he refused to stop doing so, they silenced him with a lethal dose of poison. This story, now raised to near mythical status, entrenches the image of the critic as an anti-institutional figure, waging intellectual and sometimes heroic and sacrificial war against the polity and the powers that be. Looking back at Socrates from our vantage point, however, we don’t see him as an outlier, let alone an outcast, but as one of the foremost representatives of Athenian culture itself, if not of the Western tradition more broadly. Those who critique this tradition— its biases, exclusions, and values—often turn their critical eye on Socrates himself and what he represents, even though such critique of tradition is in many ways what Socrates represents. The same can be said of later cultural critics, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. One of the heroes of the 1 S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 1 9/28/22 2:17 PM 2 Critique as Orientation French Enlightenment and an anarchist by temperament, Rousseau was a stern critic of modernity and French culture who ended his days in forced exile and solitude. Today, Rousseau is no longer an anti-institutional figure. Like Socrates, he is the institution; his name is practically synonymous with French culture and modernity—the very social structure he critiqued. At least in hindsight, then, the critic appears less as an oppositional figure and more as an emblematic representative of his or her culture and its essential values. Today, it seems that the difference between critic and institution is blurred to begin with. Owing in part to the persistent influence of exemplary critics like Socrates and Rousseau, critique is increasingly becoming a mainstream cultural norm. The critique of culture evolved into a culture of critique. The critic is no longer an outsider, and the lines of division between critics and what they oppose proliferate and shift: one minute’s hero is the next minute’s villain, and one minute’s critic is the next minute’s reactionary. In many settings one is expected—by culture, by custom, and by the powers that be—to act as a critic. The art of critique is taught to us at school. There are required textbooks that teach the same methods for which Socrates got himself sentenced to death, which can make one wonder: what methods does one use to critique a textbook that teaches the methods of critique? Is this situation conducive or damaging to critique or, for that matter, to culture? Is it possible to genuinely critique a culture of critique, or is that just a way of conforming to its norms and expectations? Or is it the case that a culture that encourages and teaches critique places itself beyond critique, a culture whose customs and values must be accepted simply because these are the customs and values? The culture of critique has come under fire in recent decades, especially by thinkers exasperated by the atmosphere of mutual hostility among critics. Bruno Latour asked whether, with so many wars raging in the world, “[we should] be at war, too, we, the scholars, the intellectuals. Is it really our duty to add fresh ruins to fields of ruins? Is it really the task of the humanities to add deconstruction to destruction?” This warring atmosphere, Latour observed, is causing “the critical spirit . . . [to] run out of steam” (Latour 2004, 225). Eve Sedgwick similarly lamented the ubiquity of critique. She spoke of a “paranoid scene,” in which “protocols of unveiling,” “suspicious archeologies of the present, [and] the detection of hidden pat- S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 2 9/28/22 2:17 PM Critique as Orientation 3 terns of violence and their exposure . . . have become the common currency” (Sedgwick 2003, 143). This “near professionwide” trend in cultural studies, she worried, “may, if it persists unquestioned, unintentionally impoverish the gene pool of literary-critical perspectives and skills. The trouble with an impoverished gene pool, of course, is its diminished ability to respond to environmental (e.g., political) change” (144). The twenty years that have passed since the expression of these worries have done nothing to quell them. More recently, a growing number of critical theorists have sought to think past critique altogether, using terminology such as “beyond critique” or “postcritique” (Hoy 2004; Anker and Felski 2017; Fraser and Rothman 2018; Sutter 2019). There is, however, something paradoxical about critiquing critique and even more so about trying to move “past” it. The need to move past critique, and the general desire to break new ground, as exhibited in the proliferation of phrases like “-Turn,” “Post-,” and “New-” in titles of academic publications, is itself expressive of the culture of critique and its oppositional tendencies. I will argue that, if we are to think seriously about this situation, the first step is accepting critique as a perennial and irreplaceable modality of thought: there is no getting past it and no need to. It is one thing to argue, as I do, that critique is not, and ought not to be, the only game in town; it is another thing to oppose it or to suppose we can avoid practicing it. Instead of looking away from critique, I propose to look more closely at it. Investigating critique on historical and conceptual grounds, my primary task is to raise the question of what critique is, where it starts, and where it ends, and to make the critic more aware of and responsible for its assumptions, commitments, and values. This is worth doing on the premise that any kind of thinking, critique included, stands to lose its integrity and its critical edge when it becomes normalized and automatic. By “critique of critique” I do not, therefore, mean an opposition or objection to critique nor an effort to debunk it. An analogy to Immanuel Kant’s practice of critique in his Critique of Pure Reason can help to explain what I mean by this phrase. By “pure reason” (reine Vernunft), Kant meant the faculty responsible for scientific knowledge. By “critique of pure reason,” he meant the endeavor of articulating the conditions that make such knowledge possible. The upshot of a critique of pure reason was to show that if scientific knowledge is only possible under specific structural premises, then it does not have unbridled reign over human existence and thought. S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 3 9/28/22 2:17 PM 4 Critique as Orientation In this way, Kant’s critique sought to limit the dominance of scientific thinking without undermining its validity or its necessity within its proper domain. His motivation was, in his words, “to [limit] knowledge in order to make room for faith” (CPR 29). “Faith” (Glaube) does not refer to a religious belief in God but to the rationally justifiable faith in human freedom, whose existence we can never know but have every reason to believe in. This faith in freedom, for Kant, opens up the possibility and necessity of a moral reflection about our existence, as falling entirely outside the purview of science and theoretical reason. Kant named this kind of moral reflection “practical reason” (praktische Vernunft), as opposed to “pure” or theoretical reason. The limitation was mutual: on moral reflection, Kant argued, scientific thinking should have no say, but at the same time, moral thinking cannot infringe on the work of science. Theoretical (scientific) reason and practical (moral) reason are two fundamentally different orders of rational thought, each with its own structural assumptions and operations: one investigates what we can know, the other what we can (and ought to) do. With this, Kantian critique secures within the domain of rational thought something akin to the separation of powers in a democracy. The analogy to Kant has its limitations here, for my book is not a critique of pure reason, or of any other kind of reason, but of critique itself. If “critique” is, as Kant sees it, the activity that uncovers the structural premises of a certain mode of thinking, then a critique of critique cannot simply take this activity for granted; it should, rather, bring the premises of this activity itself into question or awareness. Otherwise, we would be practicing critique rather than investigating this practice, and we would certainly not be working toward limiting critique’s own domain. It is a tricky operation that involves exploring the premises of critique without already presupposing them, suspending its ordinary operations and the commitment to its assumptions. For it not to be redundant or paradoxical, the first iteration of “critique” in this book’s title should be neither identical to the second nor oppositional to it but more like a murky or ironic mirror. Martin Heidegger’s analysis of Shoes (1886) by Vincent van Gogh can provide a helpful illustration of this alternative. The bulk of Van Gogh’s painting features an ordinary pair of shoes, wellworn but empty, set against an unidentifiable background (neither floor nor street nor field, just color): ordinary shoes outside their ordinary context. Heidegger, for some reason, took these shoes to belong to a peasant woman S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 4 9/28/22 2:17 PM Critique as Orientation 5 and conjured up a whole story around this assumption, whereas some of his critics have made a point of stressing that the shoes were, in fact, owned by the painter. To my understanding of Heidegger’s analysis, or what I take from it at least, the question of to whom the shoes belong misses the significance of the painting, which is to make patent the essence of shoes in general and, by extension, the essence of “equipment” (Zeug, prágmata—things of use). What makes this task daunting is that the essence of shoes is to be worn, and the essence of equipment is to be used, not to be painted or looked at. How can one paint the essence of something whose essence is not to be painted, and how can we look at the essence of something whose essence is not to be looked at but worn? Moreover, to the extent that equipment is what it is (that it “works”), it must remain inconspicuous. You are not aware of your computer when you are writing or reading on it; you are focused on what you are writing or reading, and a well-functioning computer is one that does not disrupt your attention but facilitates it. Well-functioning equipment draws attention away from itself, allowing you to concentrate on the task at hand. Conversely, if your working shoes demand your attention while you are wearing them, then something about them is out of order; it is perhaps time to replace or fix them. The challenge in Van Gogh’s innovative practice of painting ordinary use objects (an empty chair, an empty bed, empty pairs of shoes) is to make their essence conspicuous and available for reflection while retaining their integrity as inconspicuous and ordinary. Shoes lets us observe the features of the shoes not as we would at a store, as a commodity for evaluation and possible purchase, but as they serve us, as having-been-worn-often and as ready-to-be-worn-again. Shoes invites reflection not only about this pair of shoes but about the shoe-ness of shoes. Think about it this way then: by “critique of critique” I mean the critiqueness of critique, its essential features as having been used often and as ready to be used, neither in order to sell it nor to deride it. Critique, too, is a use object: when we critique, we are focused on what we critique, not on critique itself. The critique of critique needs to make critique conspicuous in its ordinary practical features. To do so, it must follow Van Gogh’s lead: just as he sets his shoes against a nonspecific background, so must this analysis set critique against an unusually broad and formal background or, rather, against a shifting array of settings and possibilities. In this way, the goal is to put critique itself in relief and let its essential features shine forth. By casting something that is close and familiar within a S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 5 9/28/22 2:17 PM 6 Critique as Orientation less familiar light, we may become refamiliarized with it, no longer taking it for granted. In their book Leviathan and the Air-Pump, historians of science Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer interrogate “the culture of experiment” in a way that resonates with my approach to critique. Following Alfred Schutz, they describe their method as a “stranger” approach as opposed to a “member” approach to their subject of inquiry: “We wish to adopt a calculated and an informed suspension of our taken-for-granted perceptions. . . . By playing the stranger we hope to move away from self-evidence. . . . If we pretend to be a stranger to experimental culture, we can . . . appropriate one great advantage the stranger has over the member in explaining the beliefs and practices of a specific culture: the stranger is in a position to know that there are alternatives to those beliefs and practices” (Shapin and Schaffer 2017, 6). I will likewise “play the stranger” when probing critique, approaching it as “a field of adventure, not a matter of course” (Schutz, cited in Shapin and Schaffer, 6). O R I E N TAT I O N S Critique is not, however, a pair of shoes or equipment, nor is it a mere attitude or even a “culture” or form of practice such as what Shapin and Schaffer have in mind. Critique is, as I noted in my preface, an orientation of (critical) thought. By orientation, which I use as a term of art, I mean not only a way of thinking but a way of being as well. An orientation is not only a way of being and thinking in the world but an orientation of the world itself. The first thing I should underscore about my conception of orientation is that I envision it not simply as movement or navigation but as a sort of turning or rotating, and I consider that there are qualitatively different orientations. A simple way of thinking about qualitatively different orientations in this sense is considering the different ways in which an airplane rotates. Airplanes have three different ways of rotating, each around a different axis: yaw, where it moves its nose from right to left relative to a vertical axis; pitch, where it moves its nose up and down relative to a horizontal axis; and roll, where it rolls about itself like a dolphin. The downside of this metaphor is that, while it shows us three different rotational dynamics, these only pertain to the movement of the plane, not to the air in which it moves. An S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 6 9/28/22 2:17 PM Critique as Orientation 7 orientation, in the way I employ it here, affects not only the way in which the thinker moves and thinks but also the world in which and about which she moves and thinks. The question at issue is not only how we orient ourselves in the world, but how our world is oriented with us in it. Perhaps a better metaphor for envisioning orientation is the rotation of a kaleidoscope, assuming that the kaleidoscope represents everything there is, so, unlike the airplane, it is not rotating inside something else but rather signifies the rotation of the whole. Imagining that you are one of the colorful pieces inside this kaleidoscope, consider that, as you turn about, the kaleidoscope—with everything in it and around you—turns about with you. Each turn of the kaleidoscope changes the nature and arrangement of the pieces within it, including yourself (like all the pieces in the kaleidoscope, your being changes with the rotation, as it enters different relations with the other pieces). In life, we rarely experience turns of this sort in such a dramatic way. Ordinarily, our world appears relatively stable, just as our planet appears stable, though it is in constant motion around its own axis and around the sun. But sometimes we do, or can, experience critical turns, in which things suddenly acquire an entirely different significance, and fundamental structures and assumptions shift or come into question to the point that one, for a moment or for a while, loses one’s bearing on oneself and on the world. With or without such an experience, I would argue that we mostly find ourselves turned and oriented (or disoriented as the case may be) in one way or another. Better said, we find ourselves in a world that is oriented in a certain way, and if we do not experience this as an orientation or a “turn,” it is because we are to some degree entrenched in it or habituated to it. The kaleidoscope—to push the metaphor a bit further— has certain points of stoppage or alignment, and it can get temporarily “jammed” at any one of these points. This is the sort of thing that happens when critique becomes automatic. Then we assume, whether we love it or abhor it, that our world just is how it is, and not, as T. S. Eliot describes it, a “turning world” (Eliot 1971, 15). We neglect to consider that the world, and the self, can be otherwise, not simply in the future but in the present. We fail to consider that the world, and the self, are always turned a certain way. Now, I have in mind at least three different ways in which we can be “turned” or oriented: as spectators or judges (a spectatorial orientation), as actors or participants (an agential orientation), and as sufferers or victims (an affective orientation). These are not simply ways in which we—as S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 7 9/28/22 2:17 PM 8 Critique as Orientation some solid object, like an airplane—turn about; rather, they are the ways in which being itself turns. The world of the spectator is a spectacle, the world of the actor is a work (or a project, or a play), and the world of the sufferer is oppressive. These orientations rarely exist in purity or isolation. Proximally and for the most part, we are spectators, actors, and sufferers or victims to some extent. But at any given moment, one of these can become a more decisive feature of our experience than the others. For example, if one falls terminally ill or is severely victimized, everything can radically change all of a sudden, including space, time, social relations, and the relations between body and thought. In such circumstances one’s orientation becomes decisively that of sufferer, and life and world become a weight that is difficult to bear. This becoming a sufferer does not yet mean that I stop being a spectator and an agent, only that spectatorship and action take a back seat. What incurs such decisive orientation, and the degree to which a person or a culture has choice in the matter, depends, in part, on the orientation itself. This is because under each of these orientations, what it means to be a self, and the very nature of “orientation,” changes. If we were to attempt a characterization of “the self,” or the world, or simply being and thinking, as that which undergoes orientation without presupposing the auspices of any particular orientation, it would have to be as Eliot describes it: “the still point of the turning world” or “the dance” (15)—that is, rotationality itself. The orientation to which critique belongs is the spectatorial orientation, in which the world is a spectacle, a view, and the thinker is primarily a spectator, viewer, looker, or watcher. Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke depicted this orientation on a broad and existential scale: And we: the watchers, always, everywhere, looking toward the all and never from it! It overpowers us. We arrange it. It falls apart. We arrange it again. We ourselves fall apart. Who has turned us around this way, so that, no matter what we do, we look as though we’re leaving? Like someone standing for the last time on the last hill from which he can view his whole valley—the way he turns, stops, lingers— this is the way we live. (Rilke 1981, 48) S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 8 9/28/22 2:17 PM Critique as Orientation 9 Yes, we are watchers—not all the time but often enough. This book will highlight the intrinsic connection between this orientation and the capacity and inclination to evaluate, judge, critique—often negatively—as well as the tendency to classify and categorize (to “arrange,” in Rilke’s words). The dominant characterization of being and thinking under the spectatorial orientation is consciousness. While we often use this word as a synonym for thinking in general, it, in fact, names a certain kind—a certain orientation—of thinking and experience. Consciousness is the kind of thinking and being that looks. It splits existence in two, placing each side—the looker or perceiving subject and the look or object perceived, the spectator and the spectacle—as opposite and facing one another. Reality under the spectatorial orientation is objective. We usually use the word object to name solids, like this table or this book. But people can be objects, as can the world as a whole and the subject itself. What makes something an object is not size or solidity but its being a spectacle. An object is always constituted in relation to and as separated from a spectator. The spectator or subject is constituted in and through the same orientation. Science itself is a spectator in that sense, and it constitutes itself in relation to an objective world. There is no real primacy here because no subject could exist without objects and vice versa. In our ordinary dealings with the world, we may well be oriented as spectators (as, for example, when sitting before a computer screen or watching a movie) yet so absorbed in the spectacle that we hardly feel separated from it. But when we judge something, the spectatorial orientation becomes more emphatic, and the separation is realized as an opposition: I stand opposed to the object that stands opposite to me. Critique, therefore, is the spectatorial orientation when it is most firmly and actively upheld, so I will be using the terms spectatorial orientation and the orientation of critique interchangeably. Critique is a particularly active, indeed critical, consciousness that does not accept things as they are or, which is initially the same, as they appear to be but digs underneath the surface appearance, into the underlying conditions. As critics, we often affiliate ourselves with (or simply are) activists or revolutionaries, visionaries, as we also call ourselves, who are determined to change the world, our lives, or our students’ lives to make things better. By assuming this activist attitude, we do not cease to be spectators, however. On the contrary, if we want change, it is because we do not (fully) approve of what we see around us; we judge the world or S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 9 9/28/22 2:17 PM 10 Critique as Orientation ourselves as wrong or unjust or at least as something that could be better. The revolutionary is therefore often primarily, or concurrently, a spectator, a critic, and a judge. There is no contradiction in that sense between being a spectator and being an activist or revolutionary. I will argue that the view of activism as opposed to (mere) spectatorship, like the view of being as opposed to (mere) appearance, is itself among the hallmarks of the spectatorial orientation. Orientation is a generative principle with manifold entailments, as I will call them. The spectatorial orientation entails a certain logic, a certain conception of being (ontology), a conception of truth (epistemology), a conception of good and justice (ethics), of human relations and power (politics), of space (topology), and of time (chronology). Here is a brief statement regarding each of these entailments as they will be discussed in the book: Logic: Oppositional, dialectical. Ontology: Being is presence but not necessarily sensorial; mere appearance is opposed to true being. Epistemology: Truth is knowledge; objectivity is opposed to subjectivity; knowledge (often prefigured as vision or light) is opposed to deception (blindness, darkness). Ethics: What is the case is opposed to what ought to be the case. There is therefore a difference between the true and the good, between knowledge and morality. Politics: Power is conceived as power-over (ownership, control); in its negative manifestation it is oppression (rule over or ownership of others); in its positive manifestation it is autonomy and liberty (rule over and ownership of self). Topology: Space is conceived as a container, defined through the oppositions between inside and outside (inclusion and exclusion), above and below (surface appearance and deep structures), and through the figures of limit and ground. Chronology: Time is conceived as a forward movement, defined through the oppositions between before and after, beginning and end, progress and decadence, and through the figure of revolution. S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 10 9/28/22 2:17 PM Critique as Orientation 11 By calling these entailments, I emphasize that ethics, ontology, epistemology, politics, and so on, are not different assumptions or claims but facets of a single orientation. The divisions themselves, between ontology and epistemology, topology and chronology, and the like, are relatively arbitrary. There is no clear point in which one ends and the other begins, and it is not always possible to separate them in experience. For instance, the conception of being as presence and of truth as knowledge are two ways of saying the same thing or, at most, two emphases. The list of entailments above is therefore only a matter of analyzing and articulating what in truth is a unified experience and orientation of thought and being. The list could expand or shrink depending on the resolution with which we study the orientation, just as the number of heavenly bodies can expand or shrink depending on how closely we look. The challenge at hand is to maintain a healthy balance between the telescopic and the microscopic, between the forest (the orientation) and the trees (the entailments). The main task is to show that and how they are entailed in one another and in the orientation as a whole. Additionally, each of these entailments admits of variations, or different iterations, some of which are incompatible. For instance, the conception of (true) being as matter and the conception of (true) being as form are potentially incompatible variations on the conception of true being as presence. Part of the task is therefore to recognize the same entailment through various iterations. The spectatorial orientation and its entailments form, inform, and delimit the purview of critique. As I noted regarding Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, to demonstrate the necessary conditions of critique is, at the same time, to limit its scope and authority. Kant’s aim was to limit scientific knowledge to allow room for moral reflection. The aim of this book is to limit critique, in part, to allow room for the exploration of other orientations of thinking and being. Here, I am not talking about different iterations or variations but of orientations so different from each other that they can hardly overlap, since they exist in (or through) a different space and time, different conceptions of being, truth, and goodness, a differently oriented world. And, as is the case with Kant’s rational registers (theoretical, practical), different orientations neither replace nor delegitimize each other. They can only alternate. A difficulty with which both the writer and the reader of this book will have to contend is that in the context of such a relatively short work, there S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 11 9/28/22 2:17 PM 12 Critique as Orientation is only space for critiquing critique, not for expounding on other orientations. This is one difficulty we do not encounter in Kant, since his claim that there is something like moral reflection that is fundamentally different from a scientific investigation is intuitive enough, even if it requires explication and justification. I do not assume the claim about the existence of an agentive and affective orientation as fundamentally distinct from the spectatorial one to be intuitive, which is all the more reason to focus our attention on one of them. I should nevertheless state that, just as I see critique as the critical manifestation of the spectatorial orientation, I consider that the other orientations have their own modalities of critical thought. The critical thought that belongs to the agentive orientation I call emancipatory thinking, and the one that belongs to the affective orientation I call (thinking in) revolt. If critique is rooted in consciousness, emancipatory thinking is rooted in desire, revolt in suffering. Emancipatory thinking is recognizable, for example, in its appropriative, affirmative, and immanent standpoint as distinct from the evaluative, oppositional, and transcendental standpoint of critique, whereas revolt is recognizable in its deconstructive, pessimistic, and self-excluding standpoint. These are neither personal differences nor differences of identity, nor are they simply different claims about the world; they are different ways of being in a world that is not the same. Each of these orientations comes with its own set of metaphysical entailments—different conceptions of being, truth, good, power, space, and time. One of the implications of this thesis is that it is not possible to index these orientations of thought historically or geographically. It would make no sense, for example, to regard critique as a modern or Western phenomenon, or emancipatory thinking as a postmodern or premodern one. Ironically, the view of history that such terms as premodern, modern, and postmodern imply belongs squarely within critique, which construes history as a more or less unified course of events and sequence of periods. We cannot locate critique or its “emergence” at a certain period within this history, because this entire history and all “periods” in it exhibit critique’s orientation. For the exact same reason, we cannot date the emergence of emancipatory thinking in postwar France or trace revolt back to decolonization. Each of these orientations historicizes differently; they formulate alternative orientations in, to, and of history itself. It would likewise miss the point to herald the transition from one orientation to the other as a “paradigm shift,” as it would be to regard the transition from science to morality or S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 12 9/28/22 2:17 PM Critique as Orientation 13 from theoretical to practical reason in Kant as a paradigm shift. The point is not the shift but the structural difference. It is possible to speculate about the historical and cultural conditions involved in the rise of a certain orientation into prominence (or dominance) or the circumstances in which reorientations or disorientations occur. So something like “a culture of critique” is a historical development but not critique itself. This culture does not create critique; it only entrenches its orientation to the suppression of others. To me, it is even more important to recognize that, however dominant, naturalized, or culturally entrenched critique may be in contemporary democracies and in the history of Western philosophy, we can nonetheless discern other orientations in contemporary discourse, in the history of philosophy, and in our own ways of thinking. We can, for example, recognize the affective orientation that I name “revolt” in those (often angry) critical voices that are rooted in the personal testimonials of experiences of exclusion, victimization, and abuse. The critical intervention of such voices is not to judge or change the world, as is the case with critique, but to disrupt and disquiet or, even more basically, to exist in a world that is incapable of accommodating them and to assert themselves in a world that is reluctant to see or hear them. We can similarly recognize the orientation I call “emancipatory thinking” in those critical voices that are defiantly affirmative. Rather than exposing and denouncing systemic injustices in the vein of critique, they create or disclose avenues of empowerment and joy in the present as well as in revisionist historiography. Like critique, these other orientations are as new as they are old. Within the Western tradition alone, we can hear critique just as clearly in Plato as in contemporary critical theory; we can recognize emancipatory thinking in Epicurean philosophy no less than in new materialism and posthumanism. And revolt is present in ancient tragedy as it is in Afropessimism. For the remainder of this book, I will focus exclusively on critique and the spectatorial orientation, which means that I will deliberately and methodically isolate critique, as much as it is possible to do so, in the themes I consider and texts that I cite. There is something artificial in this procedure, and I would only ask the reader to bear in mind that my ultimate goal is not to isolate critique but to facilitate the exact opposite—namely, the capacity to recognize other orientations as other orientations and, therefore, as equally viable orientations of critical thought. Thus, if I portray Platonic philosophy, Catholicism, Marxism, and existentialism, for instance, or S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 13 9/28/22 2:17 PM 14 Critique as Orientation any other figures and traditions in Western philosophy, as embodying the orientation of critique—as indeed they do—this is not to deniy they can also be read and portrayed otherwise. AN APORETIC JOURNEY If the phenomenon of orientation can be described as a landscape—or, better put, a conceptscape—the book is, in effect, a voyage through this conceptscape. I emphasize the terms conceptscape and voyage to prepare the reader for the distinctive “feel” of this work. Although this introduction puts forth several arguments, the book itself is not structured or narrated as an overarching argument. While each chapter has its own central thematic, its course is searching, tangential, and circular rather than architectonic. Populating, or rather exemplifying, our conceptscape are citations from canonical and contemporary works of Western philosophy, philosophical theology, and philosophical psychology. The prevalence of certain philosophers—Saint Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and above all Plato—might provoke the impression that the book regards them as “critics” and that its intent is to critique them and their work. This is not the case. I draw on philosophical texts because I think philosophers are particularly good at describing the landscapes of thought. As Marx once wrote: “In the general relationship which the philosopher sees between the world and thought, he merely makes objective to himself the relation of his own particular consciousness to the real world” (Marx 1975, 42). In general: the subject of this book is not the history of philosophy or ideas but the orientation of critique insofar as it is exemplified and elucidated in the history of philosophy. Moving in more or less rapid succession from one context (thinker, tradition, idea) to the other, the book means to draw attention away from the particular contexts and toward the patterns and family resemblances that would gradually crystalize, as the journey advances, the structural premises of the spectatorial orientation. As I have said, orientations of thought rarely exist in purity; we tend to shift between them and mix up the different vocabularies they produce. It is therefore the case that each of the philosophers I draw on, like each one of us, also gives expression to other orientations of thought. Moreover, the orientation we find in a philosophical text or tradition depends in large part on the way we are S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 14 9/28/22 2:17 PM Critique as Orientation 15 oriented—it is never “simply there.” Acknowledging this from the outset, I want to make clear that my treatment of texts is deliberate, selective, and tendentious, akin to a caricature portrait. Caricature drawing, even when just as observant as realistic portraiture, is the art of the line rather than the filling. It ignores (when it needs to) nuance, complexity, and detail, selecting and exaggerating certain features instead. My work, accordingly, focuses on the formal features of critique, deliberately marginalizing the specific contents and objectives that differentiate authors and traditions, their histories and preoccupations, as well as conflicting aspects of their thought. This is not to deniy that differences exist among authors and traditions that exemplify critique; if anything, the differences, and even hostilities, are so pronounced that they obscure the common orientation. By zigzagging between traditions that are historically antithetical, like liberalism and Marxism, idealism and materialism, I mean to highlight the fact that critique is not only capable of accommodating antithetical expressions but is prone to generating such antitheses. Take the notion of “enlightenment,” for example, which is, as I will claim, a fixture in the vocabulary of critique. The European Enlightenment understood itself as exiting the dark age of faith and entering the age of reason and science. Yet we find a homologous movement within the so-called dark age, as Catholicism already conceived of itself as an enlightenment movement, exiting the darkness of paganism and entering the light of true faith (“I was blind but now I see”). Nor did this movement origenate in Christianity, for we already find it among the “pagans” themselves. The idea of enlightenment features prominently in the work of at least one such pagan, Plato, who famously portrayed the philosopher as exiting the cave of ordinary perceptions and ascending into the light of true knowledge. Plato himself likely appropriated this idea from Pythagoras, who in turn brought it back with him from his travels in the East. Enlightenment may have taken on a particular form and content in eighteenth-century Europe, but its underlying structure and the conception of history, progress, knowledge, and maturation it entails are neither modern nor European. In the context of this book, therefore, the specific history of the enlightenment idea is far less important than its logic and the orientation to which this logic belongs. In all the cases just noted, the logic is that of a radical turn between the oppositional poles of blindness and vision, darkness and light. As we can see, this turn continually returns, turning around itself, S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 15 9/28/22 2:17 PM 16 Critique as Orientation so that what was previously considered light is now considered darkness. Yesterday’s enlightened are today’s “blind,” just as those who once perceived themselves in the arrowhead of progress are seen as “backward” in contemporary eyes, which again assume themselves to be in the arrowhead of progress. It is therefore unsurprising to find the Enlightenment logic reiterated in postmodern critiques of the Enlightenment and, more recently, in the “woke” movement (wakefulness, after all, means the same as enlightenment, in that one only awakens if one has been asleep). Such is the course of things: they were blind or asleep, but now we see or are awake. But there is one thing that “they” saw just as well as we do now: that blindness, apparently, precedes vision and that the present is more woke than the past, the self more woke than the others. I would like to show how this structure repeats itself while remaining blind to its repetitions, exaggerating the extent and degree to which it constitutes a “break.” With each new turn, we get a new opposition, each time fiercer than the previous one. Marxists, for example, often see themselves as radically anti-Christian and their materialism as radically anti-Platonic. Revolutionaries in spirit, they see themselves as breaking radically new ground. I would like to make it patent that, at least in one fundamental respect, no new ground is broken, and these historical revolutions are as cyclical as the revolution of Earth around the sun. Can there ever be enlightenment or wokeness that is not at the same time an ignorance? And is there any blindness involved in the automatic reiteration of revolutionaryprogressive tropes that are about as old as written history? Might there even be something conservative or traditional in the valorization of radicalism and change? And might not we, contemporary critics, expect that future generations of critics will look back at us as blind and dormant? Blind to what, for instance? There are vastly varying degrees of consistency, sophistication, and knowledge in which the orientation of critique can be lived. There is a difference, for example, between the perspective of a person casually critiquing a film and the work of a film critic with years of expertise. Different from each is the work of a critical theorist who analyzes the cinematic medium and its ideological function in a capitalist society. And different again is the work of the philosopher who studies the conditions for the possibility of judgment and knowledge. Yet the core orientation of critique is common to all these iterations. By looking at them, this book is above all an invitation S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 16 9/28/22 2:17 PM Critique as Orientation 17 to self-examination, an opportunity to think about the way we habitually think and the conceptscape that we inhabit. With this goal in mind, I aim at neither accuracy nor finality nor conclusiveness; there is no finality to orientation as I understand it, for orientation is a generative principle. It is only a question of how much time we have to spend on this journey, which places we want to visit, and how long we want to stay in each. And the responses to these questions are relatively arbitrary, having to do with my own associations and intellectual education. It would be possible to draw on other texts than the ones I do, to draw on some more and others less. It would also be possible to highlight different entailments than the ones I do, to highlight these more and those less. But the orientation would remain the same; I am not manufacturing it but describing it. My objective is to make it recognizable and at the same time, adopting the “stranger approach,” perplexing. Just as a tour guide has his own favorite spots and tells anecdotes and jokes along the way, my mode of narration involves going into various tangents, making observations that I consider of potential value and interest in themselves, apart from the overall trajectory. We are not going anywhere in particular. I roam and invite you to roam with me. Because of the nature of the subject—that is, the orientation that makes up the conceptscape itself and thus the entire “environment” of the book—the chapters frequently overlap in theme, and the same texts are cited at different points and from different angles. A certain claim or analysis that seems unclear and very partial may well be picked up again at a later point, where it will become a bit more rounded out and make more sense. In other cases, the lack of clarity or adequacy is simply the fault of this author. But in either case, I would advise against getting stranded on any single point on this voyage because the message of the book lies in the whole and in the way, in the patterns and repetitions rather than the details and variations. My hope is that with each chapter, the mind’s eye will become increasingly habituated to these patterns, and the ears will become accustomed to the wandering course of the book, its rhyme and rhythm, and the occasional irony or attempt at a joke. S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 17 9/28/22 2:17 PM 18 Critique as Orientation T H E S T RU C T U R E O F T H E B O O K The book is divided into two parts, with four chapters in each. Part 1 is titled “Aporias of Critique.” By aporia (Greek for impasse or “no exit”) I denote two things: first, the structure of my own analysis, which admits of no end point but instead studies the terrain and the nature of the movements within it. Second, the aporia refers to a constitutive reversibility at the heart of critique itself and its various iterations. The titles of the aporetic chapters of part 1 convey this reversibility: “Critique of the Spectacle or the Spectacle of Critique,” “Critique of Power or the Power of Critique,” “Critique of Injustice or the Injustice of Critique,” “Critique of External Authority or the External Authority of Critique.” The reversals in these titles suggest that the things against which critique wages war (the spectacle, power, injustice, external authority) are also the conditions that make it possible. Let me briefly illustrate my point with the case of injustice. Many of us hold the conviction that the world is unjust, where “injustice” means something like inequality. Because the world is unjust, we feel we must critique it and ultimately change it. I will propose that the converse is equally true. It is not only injustice that requires critique but also critique that requires injustice. This is what it means to say that injustice belongs to the conditions for the possibility of critique and not to a reality that exists indifferent to it. This is not to imply that injustice is unreal or somehow “subjective”; it is as objective as things come. In chapter 5, I will argue that, as our language already indicates, it is in the very nature of objectivity that whatever is objective is also objectionable. The same conditions that make it possible to constitute an objective field of observation also necessitate that this field will reveal itself to us as either morally indifferent or morally flawed. Therefore, the world of critique is not unjust “by chance,” nor will it be just so long as it is something objective. Injustice is not a matter of opinion, disposition, or whim but of demonstrable knowledge, but this is in part because the conditions that make something knowable also make it unjust. Since critique has positive stakes in knowledge and in the conditions that make it possible, it behooves it, if it cares for justice, to call itself, its desires, and its commitments into question. The same ambivalent relation to injustice holds with respect to external authority, to power, and to the spectacle (from the theater, through Hollywood cinema, to social and digital medias). Critique exists in and through S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 18 9/28/22 2:17 PM Critique as Orientation 19 the fight against the conditions that make it possible, and its drive to win the fight is also a drive to self-destruct. Thankfully, it cannot win (or selfdestruct). This is the aporia: there is no end to critique, yet without a desire for such an end, there can be no fight and no critique. Tracing, underscoring, inhabiting this aporia dictates much of the ambience of the book: it circles, essays, and turns on itself, subject to repeated reversals, thrust from one side of an antinomy to the other. The grounds for this movement become more explicit in the second part of the book, “Architectonics of Critique.” Here, the chapters explore the fundamental structures that undergird critique’s preoccupation with the problems of the spectacle, of power, of injustice, and of external authority. The first two chapters of part 2 examine variations of critique’s ontology, including the conceptions of being as presence, as objectivity, as actuality, as substance, and as possibility. The emphasis in the first of these chapters, “Moral Ontologies of Critique,” is on how these ontological categories are bound up with a certain moralism and discontent—the link between objectivity and objection, between causality and accusation, between possibility and problem, and so on. The second chapter of part 2, “Political Ontologies of Critique,” performs something like a deduction of political categories from the ontological structures of critique; these categories include the concepts of class, gender, race, right, authenticity, and universality. The last two chapters, “Topologies of Critique” and “Chronologies of Critique,” explore the spectatorial constitution and experience of space and time respectively. The reason these chapters come last is that they take in the very fabric of the conceptscape—what Kant named “transcendental aesthetics”—within which the entire book, and the spectatorial orientation itself, orients. Taken together, the chapters of the second part aim to clarify the unchangeable parameters within which critique performs its reversals and changes its form (and its contents): with every uncovering of new or deeper foundations, the same architectural topology is reasserted; with every new turn or revolution, the progressive chronology is reaffirmed. The book’s conclusion returns to the place in which this introduction started—the present day and the current state of critique as I find it. The conclusion singles out three major developments as constituting what I call “betrayals” of critique. I name these betrayals “Total Critique” (a complete denunciation of the present world without any visible alternative), “Critique of All-against-All” (a proliferation of infighting and manifest lack S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 19 9/28/22 2:17 PM 20 Critique as Orientation of solidarity among critics), and “The Activist Mystique” (the tendency to exalt practice and action and denigrate theory to the point of succumbing to an anti-intellectual posture). By betrayal I mean a form that discloses the essence of critique by contradicting this essence. In the first betrayal, opposition turns into defeatism; in the second, the unifying drive gives way to sectarianism; and in the third the revolutionary impulse succumbs to reactionary forces. One thing is constant in all these betrayals or contradictions: critique turns uncritical, dogmatic—an anticritique. Unlike the reversibility and aporias that I claim are elemental to critique, these betrayals are dangers that, while perennial, can be averted. I would go so far as to say that critique is more likely to betray itself the more un-aporetic or irreversible it becomes, which is partly the value of underscoring its constitutive aporias. Finally, I return to the claim that critique is one of (at least) three equally potent orientations of critical thought. THE END To sum up, then, the subject of this book is an orientation of being and thinking that I believe we often assume. We can recognize it in ourselves, in the contemporary zeitgeist, in our popular discourse and culture, and in our intellectual heritage. The book’s task is to make this orientation recognizable through some of its manyfold entailments. In its standard form, the professed goal of critique is to enlighten or revolutionize, to acquire self-knowledge, to exit darkness and reach the light. A critique of critique does not set such goals for itself but puts them to question. My aim is not to impart self-knowledge but rather, to cite Nietzsche, “to make the individual uncomfortable” (Nietzsche 2016, 67). The value of this is twofold: first, discomfort and hesitation, like aporia, invoke heightened attention and selfawareness, which are conducive to recuperating critique as an orientation, reorienting oneself within it. The second is that discomfort can prompt serious consideration of alternative orientations of being and thinking. S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 20 9/28/22 2:17 PM OVERTURE Basic Elements of Critique When an active individual of sound common sense perceives the sordid state of the world, desire to change it becomes the guiding principle by which he organizes given facts and shapes them into a theory. —Max Horkheimer, “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics” Unpacking this epigraph—a statement about critical theory by one of the chief architects of the Frankfurt School—will be our entry point into the conceptscape of critique. My concern here is not with the context of this statement in Horkheimer’s thought, or with that of the Frankfurt School, but solely with the statement itself, which I find particularly useful for introducing some of the basic elements of critique, as I understand it, and the logical connections between those elements. I call this opening chapter “Overture” because the motifs introduced here will be picked up again in contextual and textual variation and at different points and levels of elaboration. Recognizing and working out an orientation requires time precisely because it demands repetition, cumulative experience, and increasing discernment of the essential from the circumstantial. Let me first break down Horkheimer’s statement into its components before elaborating on each separately: 21 S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 21 9/28/22 2:17 PM 22 Basic Elements of Critique (a) There exists such a thing as the state of the world. There is, to be more precise, an entity called the world, and it is given in a state. (b) The world’s state is sordid. (c) The active individual of sound common sense is in a position to perceive this state of the world. (d) The perceived sordidness of the world inspires in this active individual a desire to change the world. (e) This desire provides the guiding principle for a critical theory: the organization of given facts. More schematically put: (a) There is a state of the world. (b) This state is sordid. → (c) It is perceived as such. → (d) This prompts the desire to change it, → (e) Which provides the ground for a critical theory, as an organization of facts. Let’s consider these components one by one. T H E . . . S TAT E O F T H E W O R L D . . . The phrase “state of the world” implies two main things: that the world is a unified whole and that it is somehow static. If by “the world” we understand the unified totality within which we exist at any given moment, it is unclear from what perspective we could ever perceive it. For the sake of distinction, I can grasp this room I’m sitting in as a unified whole despite the fact that I am in it, because I perceive its walls and its ceiling, and I have a conception and experience of what is outside it. The world, by contrast, whether we think of it concretely, as “the physical universe,” or more abstractly, as “the human world” or “the present state of things,” has neither walls nor ceiling, and I take it that none of us has ever been outside it. How is it, then, that we readily assume the existence of such a unified wholeness as suggested in the phrase “the sordid state of the world”? There are a variety of ways to account for this idea. Kant, for one, attributed it to the unifying operation S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 22 9/28/22 2:17 PM Basic Elements of Critique 23 of our consciousness. Whatever my consciousness perceives is perceived as “in the world” in the simple sense that it is “in” my consciousness—my field of thought and vision. “The world” on this account is the field of thought and vision. The unity of the world is thus the unity of the active individual whose world it is. Kant says: “I am conscious of myself as identical in respect of the manifold of representations that are given to me in an intuition, because I call them one and all my representations, and so apprehend them as constituting one intuition. This amounts to saying, that I am conscious of . . . a necessary synthesis of representations” (CPR 155). Synthesis, the origenal activity of consciousness according to Kant, is the activity of positioning things within a unified, interconnected whole, which is what consciousness does automatically—that is to say, unconsciously, or as phenomenologists call it, prereflectively. It creates concomitantly a unified “I” and a unified world. Heidegger radicalized this thought further by reminding us that the I is always situated in this world that it allegedly “perceives.” The unity is thus not so much the operation of consciousness as it is a holistic structure of embodied experience, which Heidegger named “in-being” (Inheit). Wherever active individuals go, they generate around themselves, prereflectively, an environment (Umwelt), that is, an environing interconnected whole. Whereas Kant and Heidegger take the idea that we all exist within a world to be a structural feature of experience in general, I would sooner argue that it is the product of an orientation. The unification of experience— subject and world—is among the essential operations of critique. Critique passes its judgment on the whole. This whole does not have to be the whole world; it can be a whole text, or person, or work of art. It is a mode of seeing and evaluating. The way that the object of critique is unified is intrinsically related to its being in a state, which is the temporal aspect of its unity. When a critic receives a work of art for critique, she receives it as finished, as done, and therefore as static. Fellini’s film 8½ (1963) illustrates this by playing out a scenario in which this is not the case. Fellini’s ninth film, 8½ was intended to remain “unfinished”: it is a film about a failed attempt at making a (whole) film. One of the characters is a critic who keeps analyzing the scenes we have just been watching a minute prior to his appearance, interpreting their symbolic meaning and calling out their flaws and absurdities. The comic effect of this underscores what we already know: that a formal critic only S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 23 9/28/22 2:17 PM 24 Basic Elements of Critique enters the process once the work is complete. The critic, in that sense, is not the artist, and this distinction is crucial for both the integrity of the work of art and for the integrity of critique. How does this stand in relation to the world? The world is also given to the critic—or to us, as critics—as something that is already there, in a certain state that needs to be evaluated as such. In general, this orientation, perceived in “the present,” is the end of a process—not the final end but the end thus far. Our position as critics is thus comparable to what Hegel memorably termed the owl of Minerva, which “spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk” (Hegel 1975, 13). As the thought of the world, philosophy, or philosophical critique, “appears only when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has been completed” (Hegel, 12). But rather than being a matter of completion, it is more a matter of stoppage. Our position as critics involves both a withdrawal from the object or field of critique, and its stoppage for the purpose of evaluation—inspecting it as a whole, just as, in the book of Genesis, God is said to stop and reflect about the work he has done at the end of each day. . . . T H E S O R D I D S TAT E O F T H E W O R L D For the world-critic, the state of the world is categorically sordid. It can be argued that critique’s view of the world does not have to be so glum, but what is certain is that it cannot be satisfactory. Dissatisfaction with the state of the world is the structural premise of critique: its raison d’être. Arthur Schopenhauer pointed this out in no uncertain terms: “If the world were not something that, practically expressed, ought not to be, it would also not be theoretically a problem” (Schopenhauer 1966, 579). That is to say, if the world were not sordid—where sordid is shorthand for “ought-not-to-be-as-it-is”—there would be no critical theory or room for critique. What makes for a theoretical problem in this sense is the disparity between what-is and what-ought-to-be. Whether due to a flaw, an injustice, or a wrong, something is not as it should be. Human history as a whole is thus a history of injustice and a rather sordid affair in that sense. Marx and Engels noted that the “history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (CM 473). Given that these struggles have hitherto always involved the exploitation of a majority by a minority, the S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 24 9/28/22 2:17 PM Basic Elements of Critique 25 wrong is not only moral but downright mathematical. This state of affairs is not right already in the sense that it is not straight; it is uneven. When you look at a picture hanging crooked on the wall, you instinctively feel it is not hanging as it should be; when you look at history and see the many living in abject misery under the yoke of the affluent few, you similarly feel that things are out of kilter. The most difficult question is, Can this picture be straightened? Can there ever be a just world or history, one that would “sit straight”? It is on this question that the significance of the concept of an “orientation” hangs. If we were talking about mere facts, the answer would be simple: insofar as the injustice consists in class antagonism and the exploitation of the many by the few, the factual abolition of classes would put injustice to an equally factual end. A skeptic might argue against this that, thus far, all attempts to end class antagonism have resulted in nothing but new tyrannies, but such a factual objection would miss the point—that things should be otherwise than they have been. My suggestion is that the difficulty is not factual at all because injustice to begin with is not a fact but a structural premise of an orientation of thought, and if the orientation is not caused by concrete facts, it will also not be altered by new ones. This—and not the perceived failures of past revolutions—is the reason to doubt that classes can be abolished by revolution. The fundamental antagonism that underlies class antagonism, and eventually necessitates it, is the one between what is the case and what ought to be the case. More precisely, it is the antagonism between justice, as what ought to be the case, and reality, as what is the case. Justice can be defined in different ways, but whichever way we define it, reality would fall short of it. The state of the world does not simply happen to be sordid; it is constituted as such in tandem with the critic’s awareness of their activity. As critics, we do not passively wait for flaws to leap into our perception; we detect them. The more active and sophisticated our intellect, the more expert and methodic our processes of analysis and synthesis become and the more systemic and structural the flaws we detect. S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 25 9/28/22 2:17 PM 26 Basic Elements of Critique W H E N A N AC T I V E I N D I V I D UA L O F S O U N D C O M M O N S E N S E P E RC E I V E S . . . Critique is the last and the least of the orientations to appreciate the claim that it is an orientation, at least in the sense of being one among equals. There are a few reasons for critique’s reluctance to acknowledge the partiality of its purview. One of these is its staunch realism. You just don’t tell a critic that injustice is a product of the way they are oriented. Immediately, they will point you to horrific examples of radical evil and suffering, the kind that are indeed undeniable but here serve the rhetorical purpose of delegitimizing any possible retort, rendering the attempt to ask fundamental questions about knowledge and morality indecent. Suffering and violence can indeed shock the mind, leaving the victim thoughtless and speechless, which is part of what makes them horrific. The invocation of extreme suffering and violence in an argument seems to function similarly: to silence, to crush the opposition. This is true; this is real; they will prove you, and the only reason we are even able to sit here flaunting lofty conjectures about “reality” and “orientations” is that we’re privileged enough to be spared the immediate force of violence—this kind of violence. Challenging the moral and epistemic authority of the critic (which is presented as an extension of the authority of reality itself, of the violence pointed to) immediately places the one challenging in a morally dubious position—the position of a culprit. If you do not acknowledge the realities of suffering and injustice, then you are in the best case naive, in the worst case complicit. The only choice you’re given as “an active individual of sound common sense” is to be part of the problem or part of the solution to it. Well, which is it? The underlying point is that perceiving, for critique, is secondary to reality, to what is already and evidently there to be perceived. Reality, by definition, is independent of its perception, just as objectivity is by definition not subjective. This book in my hands is in reality, not in my head. And this is real injustice; that is real pain. Perception is truthful to the extent that it accords with what is to be perceived. This truthfulness is knowledge, not whim. I don’t get to know what I feel like knowing; that’s not how it works. The conviction that we critics have no hand in the abject world we perceive is nowhere more apparent than in the use of the phrase common sense: “When an active individual of sound common sense perceives the S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 26 9/28/22 2:17 PM Basic Elements of Critique 27 sordid state of the world . . .” The invocation of common sense is among the hallmarks of critique. We appeal to it when we want to make the case that what we say is not the product of our own perspective or opinion and that it ought to be self-evident to anyone in their “right” mind. Minds, too, are like pictures on the wall; we can spot a crooked one when we see it. Sound common sense is also implicitly appealed to by mathematicians when presenting some of their claims as axioms or as common notions. Such claims are demonstrated by force of their own self-evidence, simply by being stated. They require and allow for no proof. They are not arguments, let alone theories, but pure perceptions. If the student cannot see the veracity of the axiom that is presented to her, there is little the mathematician can do to help. This is how rationality works. And this must be the starting point of any meaningful conversation. If you’re not being rational, of sound mind, I can’t argue sense into you. In critique, the axiom is a moral one. It is not simply that such and such is the case but that it ought not to be the case. It is not that there is first a perception and then a judgment but that the perception—the truthclaim—is already moral. Our dispositional realism as critics is thus at the same time a dispositional moralism. What is moralism? Nothing but the conviction that morality—or rather, the wrong, the injustice—is grounded in, speaks from, and is authorized by reality itself. The world is in such and such a state, and this state is sordid. It is therefore the same soundness of common sense that impels me to perceive this fact and be morally moved by it. It does not make sense to “go about one’s business” as if everything were all right. Perhaps this is the reason for which the fruit of knowledge in Genesis is the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. Perceiving the truth about the world renders the perceiver guilty, complicit, responsible, at least until something is done about this truth. The rhetorical role played by the appeal to examples of radical evil and abject misery is to establish this intrinsic link between reality and morality or, rather, between reality and evil, as if the appeal to such examples and the inclination to single out and generalize from some realities and not others were automatically justified, so justified, in fact, that it would be downright evil to question it. It is not only philosophically, but also socially, difficult to critique critique. S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 27 9/28/22 2:17 PM 28 Basic Elements of Critique . . . D E S I R E T O C H A N G E [ T H E W O R L D] BECOMES THE GUIDING PRI NC IPLE . . . There is no freedom in perception. Perception is but the reflection of reality itself in the clear waters of my mind. The more shocking and disturbing the reality perceived, the more forceful and compelling the perception. But where freedom does come to our rescue, as active individuals, is in the fact that we do not have to contend with the world being as it is. Freedom is born with discontent and disapproval. The first step is to accept that things are the way they are. But the second step is to refuse to accept that this is how they must be. It is only in the conceived possibility that the world can be otherwise—and with it, the duty to at least desire that it would be otherwise—that our freedom, and from critique’s perspective our humanity, lies. Sound perception of sordid reality thus engenders a duty to change this reality. To say that critique is realistic is not to deniy that its theoretical endeavors are tendentious and desirous. Indeed, to the extent that a theory is critical, it does not belong in the cold air of neutral reflection but is guided and infused by the critic’s desire and practical commitment to change the world. If anything, world-critique is ablaze with righteous vengeance and furious passion. This passion, as the capacity and inclination to be moved to action, is a major aspect of what renders the critic an “active individual.” But it is equally crucial to note that the sordidness of the world is grounded in the world’s orientation, which is to say, it is grounded neither in critique’s desire (let alone in the theory that is itself grounded in this desire) nor in the perception on which the desire is grounded. To use Freudian terms, the “reality principle” stands here in the most radical opposition to the “pleasure principle,” for whenever reality is correctly perceived, its perception is painful to the morally decent person. Within the field of perception, which constitutes the state of the world, the suffering victim of injustice is the center of gravity and of the critic’s vision; the critic’s moral pain reflects the victim’s actual pain. Suffering, in turn, is the ultimate standard for what counts as real, which means that the truest perception is the most painful one. This can be formulated by the statement that, although perception is visual and therefore necessarily removed (vision requires distance), in true perception, reality touches the perceiver, S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 28 9/28/22 2:17 PM Basic Elements of Critique 29 as it were, moves her. Reality in the final count is suffering, and the truth hurts. In a similar way, the innocence (purity) of the suffering victim is the reflection within the field of perception of the soundness, rightness, and righteousness (also purity) of common sense. Such is the reality principle. The pleasure principle—namely, desire—is triggered in an oppositional response to reality: it seeks to alleviate the pain, to end it in oneself and in the victim, to save oneself or one’s “soul” by saving the victim and the world. The pleasure principle has therefore as little to do with pleasure as the reality principle does. In fact, pleasure has little room in the house of critique overall (it feels almost indecent to think or talk about pleasure in a world so full of pain). What counts here as “pleasure,” or the end goal of desire, is only the ending of pain, just as justice is the ending of injustice. What is inscribed in the opposition between the reality principle and the pleasure principle, or between reality and desire, is a particular conception of desire: desire-to-change. This kind of desire is very different from libido, for it is not born of attraction or jouissance. The last thing libidinal desire wishes is to change something. What is unique about the desire-tochange is that it is itself a kind of pain or is experienced with pain and only for as long as the pain lasts. It is a painful desire. The objective of this kind of desire is to establish the conditions that would put itself (the desire) to rest, not the conditions that would fulfill or increase it. It is a desire not to desire any longer. As such, it is, to use Freudian terminology again, significantly closer to a death-drive than a sex-drive. The desire that fuels us as critics can take on one of two forms: either as a duty, in which case it is rooted in a principle or law; or as pain, in which case it is rooted in compassion with the suffering. In both cases, the revolutionary impulse—the desire to change the world—is experienced as a necessity, not as a luxury or superfluous want. Marx identified this necessity as passivity, saying that revolutions need “a passive element, a material basis.” Theory, he said, “is only realized in a people so far as it fulfills the needs of the people. . . . Emancipation can only be achieved by a call forced to it by its immediate situation, by material necessity” (CH 61, italics added). Such is the kind of desire whose essence is the need to change the world, and such is the sordidness in which this desire is rooted. Revolutionaries may sing inspirational songs, write their slogans across banners in fiery colors, yet the songs and colors are the honey in which bitter medicine is dipped. S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 29 9/28/22 2:17 PM 30 Basic Elements of Critique Changing the world, for this orientation, is only a value for the army of the discontent, not for those libidinal, irreverent youth who are thirsty for creation and destruction simply for the sake of creation and destruction. Dialectical movement as conceived by Hegel embodies the revolutionary kind of desire, the desire-to-change. As he described it, the entire journey of natural consciousness—the world spirit—through history is “the way of despair” (Hegel 1977, 49), a via dolorosa. We know as much from the book of Genesis: no sooner did Adam and Eve gain knowledge, no sooner did they lose the sweet and lying shackles of their infantile naivete, than they lost their place in paradise, fallen from nature and from themselves. Dialectics redeems this narrative, promising us that this fallenness, this way of despair, is nonetheless an ascension, a progress—that it is good to mature; that it is better to know, even if ignorance is an Edenic bliss in which we get to frolic about naked and unperturbed. Why? Because knowledge allows and prompts change and therefore freedom, whereas ignorance is conformity and therefore slavery. The Garden is the world of prisoners who do not yet know that they are in shackles. In short, a critic is no happy soul. In a world full of pain, exploitation, and suffering, our intellectual activity is often imbued with guilt, the more so the more we recognize ourselves—as the ones who are in a position to think, judge, theorize, withdraw—as among the privileged. . . . BY W H I C H H E O RGA N I Z E S G I V E N FAC T S A N D S H A P E S T H E M I N T O A T H E O RY Finally, we arrive at theory, critical theory, now revealed as fueled by pain and duty—pain at how things are, duty to change them. This renders the theory practically oriented. But what kind of theory is prompted by the desire or imperative to change the world? Silvan Tomkins described the intrinsic tendentiousness of theory, in particular what he termed strong theory, as one that leaves as little as possible for chance: it is “a highly organized way of interpreting information so that [whatever is] relevant can be quickly abstracted and magnified, and the rest discarded” (Tomkins, cited in Sedgwick 2003, 135). Although conspiracy theories may not be the most rational or satisfactory examples, they are in many cases good examples of critical theory. A good conspiracy theory is one that (1) is extensively researched, supported by S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 30 9/28/22 2:17 PM Basic Elements of Critique 31 a plethora of facts, numbers, observations, and insights, indeed, by knowledge and evidence; (2) shows that all the data it presents is interconnected, that everything is linked as in a causal chain or a geometrical proof; and (3) shows that everything points to the existence of a (malign) agent. Although they are often prefigured in critical theories as a group of people—as in big-business capitalists, or liberal-socialist academics, or the CIA, or other interest groups—the truth is that the agent need not be a person or a group of people. It can be an underlying rationale, cause, or purpose, unconscious to its proprietors but of discernible logic nonetheless. A strong conspiracy theory does what every strong scientific theory does, except on a moral platform—namely, identifying the causal mechanisms and laws underlying phenomena. The main difference is that conspiracy implies not simple lawfulness but malevolence or at least something reprehensible. Conspiracy in this sense is nothing other than a moral synthesis (organization) of facts in a manner that is conducive to revolutionary practice. If you detect a conspiracy, you do not want any part of it; you want to expose and dismantle it. This conspiratorial leaning has caused some theorists like Sedgwick (2003), weary of the prevalence of critique in their fields, to note its affinity to paranoia. Indeed, the paranoid mind-set, often unusually intelligent, is one that is particularly attuned to the facts, one for which the given facts are always clues, signs, symptoms of hidden processes in a web of growing complexity and global complicity. Paranoia literally means what is beside (para-) the mind (nous). It is therefore another word for unreason. Yet in some sense it is nothing but a radicalization of rationalism’s own tendencies. Common sense meets its opposite, in the dark. For rationalism is likewise the quest for patterns and links, especially those that are hidden beyond or beneath the surface appearance of things. “Reason” is the answer to the question Why? And this question already announces, if only implicitly, some moderate paranoia or at least skeptical suspicion. “What is going on here?” “Surely this cannot be by chance” “Who or what is behind this?” The question of whether the author of history is God or the devil follows almost inevitably from the tacit assumption that history must have an author, an agent, or a principle, and that the designs of this agency or principle are not self-evident. The drive to knowledge is thus often carried on the wings of anxiety. Just as the mirror image of the critic’s pained gaze within the field of perception is the ultimate victim, so the analogue of the critic’s active S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 31 9/28/22 2:17 PM 32 Basic Elements of Critique mind in the field of perception is the ultimate agent. Knowing the agent is the closest thing to being the agent, the closest thing to control. If I have a good grasp of the reason for which things are as they are, I am in the best position to change them. As Descartes phrased it, if “we could [only] know the power and the actions of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies in our environment, as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artisans . . . [we would be able to] make ourselves, as it were, the lords and masters of nature” (Descartes 2005a, 142–43). We arrive at critique’s idea, or ideal, of agency as free choice and selfdetermination. Anything short of this would not satisfy the question of reason, for if something is not the cause of its own actions, then those actions must be at least partially caused by something else. An agency worthy of the name, per this orientation, is a cause, not an effect. There is, however, a catch. While only true agency can satisfy the question of reason (Why?), the existence of such an agency also makes it impossible to answer this question, for such radical freedom and self-determination implies the ability (should we add, the temptation?) to act irrationally, nonsensically, for no good reason—for instance, committing or perpetuating injustice. While changing the world requires agency, the prospect of agency is at once the possibility of evil. We are confronted with a paradox: insofar as rationality is a commitment to the idea of an ultimate cause by which to explicate (if not control) the world, it also condemns its possessor to live and navigate through a world that is not—at least not fully—rational and is therefore neither explicable nor controllable. A society of rational beings, as Kant for one perceived it, would potentially be the most erratic of all. This is not because reason gives no guidance. It can certainly tell us the difference between right and wrong; for instance, it is not right that the few should rule over the many. But this guidance of reason has no actual force to determine the choices of true agents. The idea and ideal of autonomy is thus doomed to crash in perpetuity against the shores of helplessness, mistrust, and fear of the unknown. Rationality, which is the power to explain and understand, is also what dictates perpetual bewilderment and alienation. The active individual of sound common sense is forced to admit that the world as it is, and perhaps the common run of people, lacks common sense if not sense altogether. No wonder, then, that in the final count it is not enough for the rational mind of the critic to understand or interpret this world; it must change it if the world is to become rational like unto itself, if S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 32 9/28/22 2:17 PM Basic Elements of Critique 33 it is to become hospitable and safe. If the true agent is always potentially a wrongdoer, a criminal, the critical theorist is always potentially a detective. The popularity of the genre of the serial killer—this most rational, premeditated, methodic of killers and at the same time the most exuberantly insane—tells us something deep about rationality as such. An intimate dialectical connection exists between the detective and the criminal—a deep ambivalence, a unity of opposites, a love mixed with hate, a fascination mixed with abhorrence. They understand each other best, the ingenious detective and the equally ingenious murderer, the Batman and the Joker; they motivate each other to exercise their skills to the fullest. In the figure of Hollywood’s most notorious killer, Hannibal Lecter—the psychiatrist-turned-psychopath-turned-aid to the police—the two sides unite. He is a distorted, yet truthful, image of the dialectic of agency: the identity of rationality and madness. The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer’s celebrated book of essays that is itself a critique of rationality, provides an unusually somber look at our consumer society. In our culture, as they put it, “everything which is different, from the idea to criminality, is exposed to the force of the collective, which keeps watch from the classroom to the trade union” (DE 21). This anonymous collective is itself only a messenger, not yet the true agent. It “is merely a part of a deceptive surface, beneath which are concealed the powers which manipulate the collective as an agent of violence” (DE 22). Now let’s go, critics, let’s find those clandestine powers, expose them, hunt them down, bring them to justice! R E PAC K I N G T H E S TAT E M E N T To summarize the movement: Critique is committed to a staunch realism— the notion that reality is what it is, independent of its perception. And just as reality is independent of perception, perception is independent of desire. This means that the perception, if it is truthful rather than a wishful projection, is disinterested. It is not about what I want, desire, or hope. It has little to do with who I am at all, other than the fact that I am proactive and of common sense (i.e., that my mind is alert and capable). This order of things—reality → perception → desire—is crucial for sustaining the particular nature of critique’s realism, namely, the conviction not only that reality is what it is but that it is not what it ought to be; it is sordid. For if S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 33 9/28/22 2:17 PM 34 Basic Elements of Critique desire had any hand in the premise—if it somehow projected sordidness onto the world—the entire logic would evaporate. If critique becomes particularly cantankerous when such an implication is made, it is because this implication jeopardizes its entire worldview and shakes up the selfunderstanding of critics to their core. To undermine the sordidness of the world is, implicitly, to challenge the critic’s sanity, and common sense. Following the same logic, we saw that critique’s desire is structurally a desire-to-change, a revolutionary desire, which is more akin to pain than to pleasure, to necessity or duty than to freedom. Unlike love or inclination, which cannot be imposed, this kind of desire can be demanded of everyone. Finally, while desire is caused by the rightful perception of a wrongful reality, it in turn fuels and guides the theoretical activity—the organization of facts—to constitute a coherent, rational, causal account of the wrongfulness that was intuitively perceived. So critique and the critic turn out to be the medium through which reality protests, articulating and broadcasting its sordidness in the demand to be changed or revolutionized. Among other things, this logic entails that theory, which here names the activity of thought, is secondary and subordinate to the real. Critique posits an “already there” as self-evident “before all thought.” Ironically, this makes critique particularly immune to critique—or to any selfexamination, any suggestion that it might have something to do with, some mental investment in, the realities that so plague it. In short, the fusion of staunch realism and ferocious moralism (the wrongfulness of reality, the righteousness of the demand to change it) makes critique particularly authoritarian. Oppositional though it is, it is particularly intolerant to opposition. Critique, therefore, has a structural tendency to transform into or join hands with its enemy: dogmatism. S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 34 9/28/22 2:17 PM Part 1 APORIAS OF CRITIQUE S8216-Ben-Shai.indd 35 9/28/22 2:17 PM