What is Critique? Critical Turns in the Age of Criticism

Since the Enlightenment, critique has played an overarching role in how Western society understands itself and its basic institutions. However, opinions differ widely concerning the understanding and evaluation of critique. To understand such differences and clarify a viable understanding of critique, the article turns to Kant’s critical philosophy, inaugurating the “age of criticism”. While generalizing and making critique unavoidable, Kant coins an unambiguously positive understanding of critique as an affirmative, immanent activity. Not only does this positive conception prevail in the critique of pure and practical reason and the critique of judgment; these modalities of critique set the agenda for three major strands of critique in contemporary thought, culminating in among others Husserl, Popper, Habermas, Honneth, and Foucault. Critique affirms and challenges cognition and its rationality, formulates ethical ideals that regulate social interaction, and further articulates normative guidelines underway in the ongoing experimentations of a post-natural history of human nature.In contradistinction to esoteric Platonic theory, philosophy at the threshold of modernity becomes closely linked to an outward-looking critique that examines and pictures what human forms of life are in the process of making of themselves and challenges them, by reflecting upon what they can and what they should make of themselves. As a very widely diffused practice, however, critique may also become a self-affirming overarching end in itself

Ansvarlighedens og samvittighedens herkomst - ifølge Nietzsche

Artiklen sætter sig for at skitsere Nietzsches tanker om ansvarlighedens herkomst i sin signifikante forhistoriske sammenhæng, således som disse udkrystalliserer sig i værket Moralens genealogi. Det kortlægges hvorledes denne ansvarlighed er beslægtet med centrale fænomener som straf, ret og skyld. Samtidig eftervises den transformation som ansvarligheden undergår fra at være en udadrettet og ekstern størrelse til en internalisering i mennesket i form af samvittigheden, der endda har udviklet sig til en dårlig samvittighed, og ganske vist under nye former gør sig gældende i vores nuværende kultur

Editorial

Sverre Raffnsøe, Alain Beaulieu, Barbara Cruikshank, Bregham Dalgliesh, Knut Ove Eliassen, Verena Erlenbusch, Alex Feldman, Marius Gudmand-Høyer, Thomas Götselius, Robert Harvey, Robin Holt, Leonard Richard Lawlor, Daniele Lorenzini, Edward McGushin, Hernan Camilo Pulido Martinez, Giovanni Mascaretti, Johanna Oksala, Clare O’Farrell, Rodrigo Castro Orellana, Eva Bendix Petersen, Alan Rosenberg, Annika Skoglund, Dianna Taylor, Martina Tazzioli, Andreas Dahl Jakobsen & Rachel Raffnsøe

Terror and Wellbeing

Currently, terrorism provokes a widespread feeling of insecurity and global reactions to the terrorist attacks. This is not simply because it poses a substantial threat to society and to the lives of individual citizens. The relatively rare incidents of terrorism cause emotional overreaction because they challenge and intensify the contract that supersaturates today’s society. In the welfare society one can observe the existence of a diffuse but widespread social contract, which has become the single most cohesive element in the social fabric. According the terms of this contract, we agree to care for all and everyone and improve our wellbeing at an individual and collective level. Through its concrete institutions and organizations, the welfare society provides its citizens with a whole range of offers that he or she is unable to refuse. The agreement on perpetual self-improvement and mutual amelioration pervades an organisation and work culture in both the public and private sectors which encompasses our entire existence. The common aim of the furtherance of humanity has enabled us develop in multi-faceted ways. But at the very same time it establishes a logic of mutual self-sacrifice. We agree to cure one another to death

Les implications d’événement

L’événement joue un rôle central peut-être un peu sous-estimé chez Michel Foucault. Dans cet article on essaierait de combler cette lacune, en rendant compte du rôle de l’événement dans la pensée de Foucault pour jeter un jour nouveau sur les traits de l’événement en général et le rôle de l’événement dans le livre The Music of Chance de Paul Auster en particulier