An ensemble of essays on the multifarious forms of the critique, showing how these forms are determined by their study object, and how it translates into critical stances.
Critique is a form of thinking and acting. It is determined by its
objects, yet never accesses them immediately but is always mediated
through its own forms of (re)presentation. Since the end of the 18th
century, there has been a dynamization and fluidization of the
understanding of form, as topoi such as the break, the marginalization,
the tearing and opening indicate. However, these multifarious attempts to
“build on the structure through demolition” (Benjamin) testify to the
dependence of all articulation on the forms of (re)presentation
[“Darstellung”]. As a
philosophical
problem, the question of form arises in critical theory from Marx to
Adorno. Since the 1960s,
literary
practices have proliferated which generate their critical statements
less argumentatively than 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—whereas the
theatrical scene as a stage of critique has been contested intensively
during the 20th century. 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.
