Experiencing Critique<Superscript>⋆</Superscript>

Over the past two centuries, criticism has assumed an indispensable role in the production of truth in many academic contexts. Furthermore, a dominant conception of critique emerged out of disciplinary truth regimes – evident as much in right wing think tanks as in critical theories. This ‘grammar of critique’ requires critics to judge specific contexts against founded criteria. However, in an epistemological ethos beset by obdurate uncertainty, where disciplinarity is increasingly under attack, a judgmental grammar faces intractable challenges. For one thing, intransigent ambiguities defy the silencing required to achieve certainty, or universal agreement, on ‘founded criteria’. This predicament creates a distinctive semantic disquiet and a unique opportunity to prize critique loose from its previously privileged grammar. Allegorically referring to Derrida’s images of hospitality, this paper offers a different grammar of critique as an experience of imagined prospects, a promise that rallies against ossified thought systems of the now. This experience is structured through the impossible to the extent that it defies absolute definition, finitely encounters infinite possibilities, involves preconceptions, and opens critics up to promises that never fully arrive. As such, critical experiences invite existential anticipations whose contours, paradoxically, are imagined from within, and yet promise an escape from, local historical circumstances.A version of this paper was presented at Birkbeck, University of London, 24th September, 2004. I would like to thank Peter Fitzpatrick, Claire Valier, Ronnie Lippens, Costas Douzinas and Julia Chryssostalis for their helpful comments.     

European Human Rights Law and the Normalisation of the ‘Closed Material Procedure’: Limit or Source?

Once a legal abnormality that was criticised on human rights grounds, the closed material procedure (CMP) has now become the main mechanism for dealing with allegedly sensitive security information in the UK. This article considers the role of European human rights law in that process. It argues that the CMP can be conceptualised as the product of human rights law, which has developed so as to legalise and normalise its use, and that this process is symptomatic of a deeper inter‐relationship between human rights law and the preservation of states' security interests, which renders the former inherently unsuitable for dealing with security phenomena.     

Mythical enjambment in The Hungry Woman: nation,desire, and Cherríe Moraga’s utopic turn

In her play The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (2001), Cherríe Moraga makes use of a technique I call “mythical enjambment”: the insertion of a myth, story, or cultural context into another where it “doesn’t belong,” a willful act of making the unexpected out of the expected. Moraga utilizes mythical enjambment to illuminate how mythologies become entrenched and perpetuate harmful ideologies. Interrupting the traditional aesthetics of Western theater by drawing attention to the ways queer women of color are erased from the narrative, Moraga also challenges the absence of queer women of color from the Chicano movement by embedding her play within some of the most dearly held myths of Chicana/o culture. Ultimately, the use of mythical enjambment gestures toward the utopic and revolutionary potential of theater. The Hungry Woman shatters myths on multiple, intersectional levels: from the critical gaze of interpretive authority to the myths that cohere Chicana/o identity along masculinist and heterosexist lines.     

Multiculturalism,Institutional Law,and Imaginary Justice

Following Le Pen's relative successin the French presidential vote and the BritishNational Party's historic return in our own2002 local elections, the article considers theprospects for the production of morecommunicative race relations in contemporaryBritain. To this end we reassess the media'streatment of the Stephen Lawrence case andexplore the political logic of the Macphersonreport, the policy document which followed theapparent miscarriage of justice that allowedLawrence's alleged killers to walk free. Interms of our analysis of the media we areconcerned to show how the real of Britain'sordinary racism was hidden behind an ideologyof multiculturalism that scapegoated singularindividuals to cover for the structuralinequalities of wider society. The article aimsto show how the media upheld the notion ofobjective justice that institutional law wasapparently unable to secure.But while the media supported the ideology ofthe law, its exposure of the failings ofinstitutional law also led to calls for legalreform to guarantee the realisation ofinstitutional justice. Although we accept thatthe attempt to achieve legal totality isimpossible, our argument is that the critiqueof legal objectivity, which takes in subjectiverights claims, may present the possibility forthe realisation of a novel, inclusive, model ofrace relations. That is to say that althoughthe media supports the ideology of the law, thefact that this support requires a critique ofpractical law forces the law to modernisearound the idealistic demands of its ownideological structure. Akin toDouzinas,¹ who has argued for theendless expansion of rights as post-modernutopianism, we believe that this process ofmodernisation, which is arranged to maintainthe status quo through minimal reform, is thecondition of possibility of a more inclusivesystem of race relations.     

周予同主编《中国历史文选》校注商略

周予同先生主编的《中国历史选》在各高校历史系中已使用多年，但在校注方面还存在诸多问题，如古今地名对照多有差错，标点亦有误点，少量字还存在讹误，许多清代人物的资料出处亦与事实不符，本对书中的有关问题予以考证。     

论休谟对康德的影响

从康德哲学的思想来源看,休谟对康德哲学的产生起了至关重要的作用。休谟哲学是康德哲学的出发点,休谟的因果经验是康德哲学的星星之火,休谟哲学的提示打破了康德的教条主义迷梦,使康德走向批判哲学的成功之路。     

Weak States,State Failure,and Terrorism

It is common to hear the assertion that weak or failed states are fertile ground for terrorism. Yet terrorist groups have emerged from, and operated within, countries which have strong, stable states and a variety of systems of government. Terrorist organizations operate in weak and failed states but it is not necessarily the condition of weak or failed statehood which explains their presence. Moreover, it is not necessarily the weakest states which do host such groups. Therefore, this condition is not a sufficient explanation for their presence. While weak or failed states might provide an enabling environment for certain types of terrorist groups to operate, additional explanatory variables need to be identified.     

Adapting Techniques of Studio Critique for Arts Management Pedagogy

Many students in the field of arts management have a background as practicing artists. In that light, it seems promising to explore fine arts pedagogies for the delivery of elements of arts management curricula. Studio critiques are a central pedagogic tool in arts education, allowing for systemic self-reflexivity that emerges from a shared interest in the terms of the conversation itself—critique as a creative technique. Since 2009, the Department of Arts Administration and Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago has integrated critique. Feedback from the first generations of students is assessed in this article.     

The (im)possibility of development studies

Abstract

Development studies is commonly understood to be committed both to a principle of difference (the Third World is different, hence the need for a separate field of studies) and a principle of similarity (it is the job of development policy to make ‘them’ more like ‘us’). This double commitment has led to important challenges to the intellectual standing of the discipline and/or its object of study, development. This paper begins by reviewing five theorems which pronounce the impossibility of development studies. It then offers a more sympathetic account of the field. While recognizing the urgent need for development studies to be critical and at times oppositional, the paper suggests that an allied commitment to public policy-making can be taken as a sign of maturity. Development, and development studies, should be understood as sets of social practices, or technologies of rule, the organization and effects of which need to be (and in key respects are) contested and subjected to political and scholarly review.     

The decontamination of German history: Jürgen Habermas and the ‘Historikerstreit’ in West Germany

The ‘Historikerstreit’ in West Germany was opened by the non-historian Habermas who sought to expose what he saw as a ‘scandalous’ revision of aspects of the history of German fascism on the part of leading conservative historians like Nolte, Hillgruber and Stürmer. Habermas sees this revisionism in the wider context of the perceived need to foster a new German nationalism as a means of legitimation. The attempt to decontaminate German history would seem to derive from the need to resist the demands for political realignment in West Germany and to establish a strong pedigree of German anti-communism which takes in National Socialism and its membership of the Anti-Comintern Pact as well as West Germany's membership of NATO. Habermas's critique of conservative historians and the non-rational assumptions of their philosophy of history is essentially linked to his critique of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault and his identification of a common paralyzing influence on discourse.