Critical TimesPub Date : 2023-12-18DOI: 10.1215/26410478-11083017
Michael Kelly
{"title":"Adorno's Problematic Entanglement with Blackness","authors":"Michael Kelly","doi":"10.1215/26410478-11083017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-11083017","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Black aesthetics and Adornian aesthetics both articulate and embody what Hortense Spillers calls the “critical edge” of culture and art, and there is a recent history of black aestheticians engaging creatively with Adorno. Today, however, any constructive dialogue between these aesthetic traditions depends on whether Adorno's aesthetics can be decoupled from the anti-black racism in the genealogy of Western aesthetics and whether Adorno's negative dialectics can be reconciled to the transformative force of art, as that force is as central in black aesthetics as is the negative dialectics of art. Critically focusing on Adorno's discussion of “the ideal of blackness” in Aesthetic Theory, this article will argue that such decoupling remains incomplete, that he resolutely did not believe in the transformative force of art, and that these issues are connected, at least in Adorno's case. This article simultaneously demonstrates how black thinkers—Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Angela Y. Davis, Fred Moten, Fumi Okiji, and Spillers—have long offered exemplary accounts of art that combine its negative dialectics, critical edge, and transformative force while defying the anti-black racism in Western aesthetics.","PeriodicalId":432097,"journal":{"name":"Critical Times","volume":"112 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138965066","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Critical TimesPub Date : 2023-12-18DOI: 10.1215/26410478-11083007
Amy Allen
{"title":"“Imperialism Ultimately Works for Us”: Rosa Luxemburg's Theory of History","authors":"Amy Allen","doi":"10.1215/26410478-11083007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-11083007","url":null,"abstract":"Although Rosa Luxemburg is currently enjoying a well-deserved renaissance, much of the current discussion of her work fails to contend with her commitment to a rather orthodox reading of the Marxist theory of history. I argue that all of the features that make Luxemburg's work so attractive to contemporary scholars—her revolutionary radicalism, her accounts of spontaneity and democracy, and her critique of imperialism—are undergirded by her commitment to that theory, along with its commitments to unilinearity, necessity, and progress. This theory provides the systematic backbone for Luxemburg's thought. In the wake of postcolonial, Indigenous, Black, and feminist critiques of the Marxist theory of history, this feature of Luxemburg's work considerably complicates her legacy for contemporary critical theory.","PeriodicalId":432097,"journal":{"name":"Critical Times","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139176340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Critical TimesPub Date : 2023-06-15DOI: 10.1215/26410478-10800341
K. Quigley
{"title":"Concretion: Submarine Growths and Imperial Wrecks","authors":"K. Quigley","doi":"10.1215/26410478-10800341","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-10800341","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The ruins of wrecked ships are often so thoroughly dispersed by their submarine environments as to practically vanish. Sometimes, however, the conditions of a wreck’s submergence create complex modes of material endurance. Concretion, which names both a substance that forms on certain immersed surfaces and the phenomenon of that substance’s formation, is one such mode. Inspired by maritime-archeological objects and practices, this article asks how concretion—from the Latin concrēscĕre for “to grow together”—marks and reworks imperial alongside other presences at the seabed. The article develops a hermeneutics of benthic becoming at intersections in literary studies, critical theory, cultural geography, and recent subsea turns in the oceanic (and more broadly environmental) humanities. Wrecky concretion, I argue, configures the thickening presences of empire’s remains in the course of their underwater lives and in company with seawater, marine organisms, and inanimate beings. In this way, manifestly imperial presences actively coincide with others—and with the agencies, memories, and affects such presences may be understood to express (and not). Pivotally informed by Édouard Glissant’s critical deeps, Derek Walcott’s “The Sea Is History” (1978), and the politics of memory enacted by the Slave Wrecks Project and Diving with a Purpose, I observe a few of the ways that concretion may be punctuating and revising oceanic spaces, memories, and times. If the world ocean has long been unevenly composed by modernity, capitalism, and empire, it has also been reforming the wrecked stuff it receives into unanticipated configurations, growings-together that these pages provisionally ascertain.","PeriodicalId":432097,"journal":{"name":"Critical Times","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116253651","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Critical TimesPub Date : 2023-06-15DOI: 10.1215/26410478-10800331
Philipp Sperner
{"title":"Ambedkar’s Śūnyatā and the Impermanence of the Theologico-Political","authors":"Philipp Sperner","doi":"10.1215/26410478-10800331","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-10800331","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article engages with B. R. Ambedkar as political philosopher and key contributor to debates on global democracy and the genealogy of democratic ideas outside the West. I focus specifically on Ambedkar’s use of Buddhist philosophy and the concept of śūnyatā or emptiness/impermanence, which plays a central role in his search for a non-theological democratic politics. In order to explore the implications of such a politics, the article brings Ambedkar into conversation with Claude Lefort and his theorization of the relationships among politics, religion, and democracy. Through this reading, Ambedkar’s political philosophy becomes legible not only as a profound challenge to what Lefort has called the “permanence of the theologico-political” but also as a radical way of combining everyday political practice with an emphatic notion of negative identity.","PeriodicalId":432097,"journal":{"name":"Critical Times","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128530995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Critical TimesPub Date : 2023-06-15DOI: 10.1215/26410478-10800321
P. Banerjee
{"title":"The Modern, the Untimely, and the Planetary: 100 Years of Ranajit Guha","authors":"P. Banerjee","doi":"10.1215/26410478-10800321","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-10800321","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay is a critical homage to Ranajit Guha, who passed away recently in his hundredth year. Through a rereading of Guha's bilingual oeuvre—including his later writings in Bengali—the essay explores Guha’s rethinking of time as he moved from Marxism to a critique of historicism to a disavowal of history to postcolonial criticism and ultimately to a cosmopolitical stance. It suggests that Guha’s most important contribution to global critical theory is not his historiographical achievements but his unique phenomenology of time. Mobilizing both modern and non-modern semiotic, grammatological, and aesthetic traditions, Guha reconceived time as a function of the limits and possibilities of human language and argued that common lives and subaltern subjects could not be accessed without admitting to the heterogenous temporal constitution—\"time-knots” as he would call them—of the contemporary. Thinking with Guha helps us make the general argument that emancipatory politics demands a radical reopening of the question of time and a stepping aside of the framework of modernity—an argument that other erstwhile Subaltern Studies authors such as Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee have recently made. The essay understands Guha's century-long political and intellectual journey as a metonym for our times, marked by an agonistic and unpredictable interplay of multiple pasts, losses, emergences, and futures.","PeriodicalId":432097,"journal":{"name":"Critical Times","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125102048","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Critical TimesPub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1215/26410478-10235943
Amirah Silmi
{"title":"Voice and Silence in Assia Djebar and Adania Shibli","authors":"Amirah Silmi","doi":"10.1215/26410478-10235943","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-10235943","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay considers the works of two Arab writers, Assia Djebar and Adania Shibli, to examine how silences in their texts are signs of both oppression and of resistance and rebellion. It seeks to show how the silences as well as the cries and incomprehensible voices of the colonized defy colonial and hegemonic narratives by resisting incorporation into the order of the intelligible and recognizable. Both writers believe in the power of words, but their words, liberated from the function of signification, release silences as they release the voices of the colonized in their multiplicity. Djebar's texts present no binary opposition between silence and voice; in the continuous search for the voices of colonized women, voice and silence are inextricably intertwined. In Shibli's Minor Detail, as in many of Djebar's texts, the search for voices takes the form of a journey backward, but the voices of the colonized are not retrieved, and we are left with only their silence. Moreover, whatever audible voices there are in Shibli's text become markers of silence; it is thus silence that speaks in Shibli's text. By virtue of their very lack of discursive power, the silences and voices released in these writers' works retain the freedom that comes with transgression and remind us of the flight that writing can be.","PeriodicalId":432097,"journal":{"name":"Critical Times","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133035351","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Critical TimesPub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1215/26410478-10235953
M. Kesrouany
{"title":"Critical Hope","authors":"M. Kesrouany","doi":"10.1215/26410478-10235953","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-10235953","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article explores the theory and practice of critique in the works of the Lebanese Communist intellectual Husayn Muruwwa (1910–1987) and his grandson Rabih Mroué (b. 1967). Husayn Muruwwa, one of the most important Arab intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century, reinvented literary criticism and cultural critique in the 1950s and '60s. His grandson, one of the most prominent Arab visual artists, has been redefining the critical approach to visual representation since the Lebanese civil war. The article pits Husayn Muruwwa's critique based on collective hope and emancipation against his grandson's vision of an individualistic critique based on desire. It considers the critical and political writings of Husayn Muruwwa and Rabih Mroué's performances, video lectures, and interviews to explore specifically how they represent hope in relation to critique, and it ultimately suggests a participatory aesthetics that is common to both and that transcends their autobiographical statements and establishes resonances between their thought. Their approaches to critique, the article illustrates, play out as revised inheritances of both the Arab renaissance (nahda) and the national liberation movements in the 1970s. These revisions create a continuity that is critical to understanding the relationship between critique and hope in the Arab intellectual tradition.","PeriodicalId":432097,"journal":{"name":"Critical Times","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125927321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Critical TimesPub Date : 2023-01-25DOI: 10.1215/26410478-10437027
Marc Nichanian, Philip Gerard
{"title":"The Sovereign, the Survivor, the Last Man","authors":"Marc Nichanian, Philip Gerard","doi":"10.1215/26410478-10437027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-10437027","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The sovereignty that Georges Bataille wanted to implement and to theorize obeys a strange logic. He tried twice: first in 1942, next in the impossible book that was meant to serve as the final volume of his second, projected summa, The Accursed Share. Sovereignty implies an experience, but the experience it implies is one that cannot bear witness to itself. Sovereignty must leave an institutional record; at the same time, sovereignty calls for apocalyptic thinking. In each case, sovereignty can only pronounce itself through a “catastrophe,” and, likewise in each case, sovereignty is obliged to summon the figure of the “last man.” This logic needs to be reconstructed. We need to go back to where Bataille left off. We must understand the terrible obstacle that he ran into along the way. Bataille was on the brink of entering virgin territory, that of the survivor. And, because Bataille stopped precisely where he proposed to write about Franz Kafka, the present article announces and introduces an attempt to situate Kafka in the (European) history of sovereignty.","PeriodicalId":432097,"journal":{"name":"Critical Times","volume":"61 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116642613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Critical TimesPub Date : 2023-01-25DOI: 10.1215/26410478-10437077
Milad Odabaei
{"title":"Sickness of the Revolution: Loss, Fetishism, and the Impossibility of Politics","authors":"Milad Odabaei","doi":"10.1215/26410478-10437077","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-10437077","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Conventional accounts of the 1979 Iranian revolution emphasize the loss of the revolution’s “true” spirit in the violence of the Islamic state. In contrast, this essay foregrounds a recurring dream of parricide in the generation of children of revolutionaries, to explore the fetishization of the revolution in such accounts. This dream refracts the violence and loss emphasized in the narratives of the revolution. In dethroning the fetish of the revolution, it enables a confrontation with the losses and limits of earlier theological and political paradigms indexed by the event of revolution. As a form of anthropological defamiliarization, the dream thus offers an opportunity for a speculative encounter with loss as a political-theological horizon of renewal.","PeriodicalId":432097,"journal":{"name":"Critical Times","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121183931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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