On Happiness and Critique. From Bouquet V to ´possible elsewheres´

The paper explores the relationship of happiness and critique. It is a reflection on a decade of being trained in and practicing philosophical critique. It is a reflection on experiences I had during teaching on social justice, inclusion and diversity; and it is a reflection on the on-going debate on negative vs. affirmative forms of critique within feminist philosophy. It is also an exercise in imagining a transformation of our critical practices, where the embrace of more affirmative (rather than destructive-negative) modes of critique does not entail overlooking or turning a blind eye to the barriers that unjustly restrain some movements and allow for others' privileges to persist. I suggest that a diffractive approach to critique would allow for joyfully interchanging and alternating appropriate modes of debunking, of being the killjoy against sedimentations that weigh some of us down, with other modes of critique which allow us to augment and lift up examples of already on-going structural change

The Transvaluation of Critique in the Anthropocene

This article considers the transvaluation of critique through the lens of the new affirmative critical approaches of the Anthropocene. The first section introduces the problematic of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch and also as symptomatic of the end of modernist ontological and epistemological assumptions of the divide between culture and nature. The second section then highlights how the Anthropocene thesis poses a problem for critique through fundamentally decentring the human as subject and challenging the temporal claims of Enlightenment progress. The third section analyses the implications of this closure for critical approaches and the shift towards a more positive view of the present: no longer seeking to imagine alternative futures but rather drawing out alternative possibilities that already exist. Critique thus becomes additive, affirmative and constructive. The final section expands on this point and concludes with a consideration of how contemporary theoretical approaches articulate the transvaluation of critique

Open Marxism and critical theory:negative critique and class as critical concept

The chapter reflects upon the Open Marxist tradition as critical social theory and identifies its distinctive character as negative critique of capitalist society. It argues that Open Marxism continues to advance the critical purpose of the early Frankfurt School, and of critical theory, in the direction of critical confrontation with traditional theory, and with the prevailing positivism and scientificism in the Marxist tradition of the second and third internationals. The chapter, first, discusses the historical background and theoretical development of Open Marxism from Axelos’s original use of the term (1950s), to the work of Agnoli (1980s), and that of Clarke, Bonefeld, Gunn and Holloway— developed within the framework of the Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE) — since the 1990s. The second section defines the distinctiveness of Open Marxism and argues that there is a discernable common foundation to the work of Open Marxist authors that relates to their radical rethinking and use of critique not as normative and constructive, but as negative and destructive. Finally, the chapter discusses Open Marxism`s distinctive conception of social practice as a critique of the notion of class. For Open Marxists, class is not an affirmative category, but is essentially both a critical concept, and a negative category

Affirmative critique and strange race-things: Experimenting with art-ing as analysis

This is an open access article originally published in RERM. The article can be found on publisher's webpage by following this link: http://158.36.161.173/index.php/rerm/article/view/2702The focus of this article is affirmative critique, its ontological grounding, and a record of an attempt to perform an affirmative critical analysis with documented strange race-things. It is inspired by the debate on limitations of Enlightened critical practice, and writings on a proposed alternative; affirmative critique (Braidotti, 2011, 2013). Grounded in an ontology of difference, affirmative critique suggests to affirm and create other ways of speaking and living to ‘push power a little’ (Bunz, Kaiser, & Thiele, 2017a, p. 16). Further, it is argued that this might be a more transformative mode than the traditional Enlightened critique informing decades of multitudes of politics, perspectives and practices offered to work against how race is stubbornly becoming in unjust ways. The affirmative critical analysis performed is an experimentation with a print of a photographic image; an art-ing with data.publishedVersio

(WP 2012-01) Samuels on Methodological Pluralism in Economics

Warren Samuels was an influential proponent of methodological pluralism in economics. This short paper discusses his understanding of methodological pluralism, and argues that it is based on three distinct components: (1) his critique of the idea that theories have epistemic foundations and his \u27matrix approach to meaningfulness,\u27 (2) his belief that the absence of meta-principles for science combined with our human psychology create an existential dilemma for theorists and policy-makers, and (3) his understanding of relativism, social constructivism, and \u27limited but affirmative\u27 defense of nihilism against the charge of skepticism. The paper closes with a brief discussion of what Samuels\u27 methodological pluralism might tell us about historiography and the history of economics

Reply. Notes on Post-critique

This essay argues that a useful grammar for doing post-critique has emerged from a trans-, inter- disciplinary dialogue on post-critique. The author further makes three propositions in the essay. First, he suggests that postcritique is an additive critical practice where resources for cultivating thinking, reasoning and evaluating draws on a constellation of approaches that combines this and that and reinvigorates critique in new directions. Second, postcritique repairs a \u27negative\u27 enterprise of critique that has become a culture of teaching in academia and schools. Third, more affirmative pedagogies of postcritique could be more welcoming and considered to be more constructive in authoritarian context. (DIPF/Orig.

Bringing hope to crisis: critical thinking, ethical action and social change

INTRODUCTION This paper departs from this point to consider whether and how crisis thinking contributes to practices of affirmative critique and transformative social action in late-capitalist societies. I argue that different deployments of crisis thinking have different ‘affect-effects’ and consequences for ethical and political practice. Some work to mobilize political action through articulating a politics of fear, assuming that people take most responsibility for the future when they fear the alternatives. Other forms of crisis thinking work to heighten critical awareness by disrupting existential certainty, asserting an ‘ethics of ambiguity’ which assumes that the continuous production of uncertain futures is a fundamental part of the human condition (de Beauvoir, 2000). In this paper, I hope to illustrate that the first deployment of crisis thinking can easily justify the closing down of political debate, discouraging radical experimentation and critique for the sake of resolving problems in a timely and decisive way. The second approach to crisis thinking, on the other hand, has greater potential to enable intellectual and political alterity in everyday life—but one that poses considerable challenges for our understandings of and responses to climate change..

Hopwood v. Texas: Strict in Theory or Fatal in Fact

This article will examine the Hopwood decisions. Part II will review the factual and legal history behind the case. Part III will discuss the District, Circuit, and Supreme Court decisions. Finally, Part IV will critique these decisions and offer a view into the future for affirmative action admissions policies

To Believe in Historical Progress: On Axel Honneth’s Normative Grounding of Critique

One of the most ambitious contributions Axel Honneth has made to critical theory consists in his attempt to ground the normativity of critique beyond communicative reason—the normative ground of critique that had been proposed by Honneth’s predecessor at the Institut für Sozialforschung, Jürgen Habermas. Defending an affirmative stance toward historical progress is critical to Honneth’s project, which attempts to pursue the aspiration of the Frankfurt School to practice a robust form of immanent critique: for preserving the idea of progress allows Honneth to derive the validity of the underlying normative presuppositions of the existing social order, thereby securing the normative grounds of critique without relying on transcendent or transhistorical principles. Through a consideration of an aspect of the relation between universality and particularity that remains undertheorized in Honneth’s account, this essay attempts to question the success of his strategy for grounding the normativity of critique