
Contents
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Overview Overview
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Reflective indocility Reflective indocility
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Incredulity and debt Incredulity and debt
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The criterion of life The criterion of life
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Criticism and critique Criticism and critique
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Notes Notes
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1 What is Critique?: Three Types of Indocility
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Published:December 2022
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Abstract
The keyword of this chapter is “critique.” The inquiry takes its cue from Judith Butler’s 2000 Raymond Williams lecture, “What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue.” Butler returns to and repeats the question that Michel Foucault asked in his own 1978 lecture “What is Critique?” to suggest that returning to the question is in itself part of critique. The repetition places the reader on the trail of a muse: the imago of a movement, a slight turning or gentle indocility, linked across time to humanity’s emancipation from immaturity. More than a method or a field, critique exemplifies an attitude. The three types of indocility of the title refer to Foucault, Theodor W. Adorno, and Walter Benjamin. Together, the three thinkers help illustrate the critical attitude, which is associated with the capacity to connect the particular—single text or event – to a larger pattern. This capacity decides the transition from criticism as fault-finding to critique, and involves a defamiliarization from the present, especially from the ways in which it suppresses life. The chapter ends by suggesting that today’s proponents of non-anthropocentric ontologies, like Bruno Latour, are on the trail of the same muse of their modernist and poststructuralist predecessors.
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