Critical Stances - Böcker

Critique is a form of thinking and acting. Since the end of the 18th century, there has been a dynamization and fluidization of the understanding of form, as concepts such as the break, marginalization, tearing, and opening indicate. As a philosophical problem, the question of form arises in critical theory from Marx to Adorno. Since the 1960s, literary practices have proliferated that generate critical statements less through traditional argument and more through the programmatic use of formal means. At the same time, the writing self, along with its attitudes, reflections, affects, and instruments, visibly enters the critical scene. This volume examines how the interdependence of critique, object, and form translates into critical stances, understood as learnable, reproducible gestures, which bear witness to changing conditions and media of critical practice.

Erich Hörl, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, and Lotte Warnsholdt gather diverse perspectives on one agreed-upon condition: that the computational power of today’s world has fundamentally transformed all aspects of it. The contributors investigate and question not only the possible sites of critique but also of the concept of critique. If there used to be a critical subject constituted in the cultural techniques of modernity, and if digitality indicates itself as a product of modernity while at the same time somehow being its very ending, what are the ramifications? Digitality severely alters the critical subject and its spatio-temporal relations, and it therefore interferes with its potential to be a critical subject. The contributors of this volume ask what critique in the digital age might look like and offer specific examples of critique and critical practices.

Once considered a stepchild of social theory, legal criticism has recently received a great deal of attention, perpetuating what has always been an ambivalent relationship. On the one hand, law is praised for being a cultural achievement, on the other, it is criticized for being an instrument of state oppression. Legal criticism’s strategies to deal with this ambivalence differ greatly. While some seek to transcend the institution of law altogether, others advocate a transformation of the form of law or try to employ strategies to change the content of law, deconstruct its basis, or invent rights. By presenting a variety of approaches to legal criticism, What’s Legit? highlights transitions and exhibits irreconcilable differences of these approaches. Ultimately, What’s Legit? broadens debates that are all too often conducted only within the boundaries of separate theoretical currents.

A multidisciplinary examination of the forms taken by withdrawal.What forms does withdrawal—meaning either that which withdraws itself or which is being withdrawn—take in artistic and cultural practices? What movements does it create or follow in specific contexts, and with what theoretical, material, and political consequences? The contributors to this book address these questions in a variety of writing practices, each focusing on specific scenes.  Through interviews, artistic and literary texts, visual contributions, and academic texts, On Withdrawal explores various modalities of withdrawal, ranging from a silencing of critical voices to a political and aesthetic strategy of refusal.Contributors: Arnika Ahldag, Sofia Bempeza, Lauren Berlant, Kathrin Busch, Helen Cammock, Knut Ebeling, Sebastián Eduardo Dávila, Mutlu Ergün-Hamaz, Stefanie Graefe, Rebecca Hanna John, Ulrike Jordan, Pinar Ögrenci, Pallavi Paul, Thorsten Schneider, Judith Sieber, Diana Taylor, Deniz Utlu, Marivi Véliz, Nele Wulff, and Akram Zaatari

An intersectional approach to the radicality of desire.Despite a historically rich tradition of thinking about the relation between sexuality, desire, and revolution, there is little engagement with desire’s radicality today. This volume attends to the radicality of desire as a starting point for overcoming heteropatriarchal capitalism by turning to the specific radical homosexual critique as it was first formulated in France in the 1970s in the writings of the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes and the Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire, as well as in the conceptions of their most important protagonists, Monique Wittig and Guy Hocquenghem. Radical Desires seeks to emphasize the anti-identitarian character of the French gay liberation movement, as well as its implicit and explicit critique of gender and sexual binaries. At the same time, the volume is also interested in intersectionally expanding this critique by confronting it with anticolonial and queer of color perspectives. As French gay liberation activists’ relations to North African men were often problematic, several contributions engage with the latent orientalist and racist tropes that appear in the movement’s writings. By aiming to go beyond a mere historicization of these ambivalences and exploring which contemporary problems appear in a different light as a result, Radical Desires highlights the (dis-)continuous relationship between current debates and those in 1970s France. To explore the multiplicity of forms with or in which these critiques were expressed, this volume places theoretical perspectives in conversation with artistic perspectives on queer liberation in a transnational context. Contributors include Friederike Beier, Antoine Idier, Émilie Notéris, Lukas Betzler, Mohammad Shawky Hassan, Sido Lansari, Todd Shepard, and Julian Volz.