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Superweak
Thinking in the 21st Century
Laurent de Sutter (Author), Robert Hughes (Translated by)
9781509566464, Polity Press
Hardback, published 7 November 2025
230 pages
23.1 x 15.5 x 2.5 cm, 0.499 kg
"Sutter’s pungent, bite-sized provocations are best described as a postcritical Minima Moralia: a spanner thrown into the machinery of suspicion and an essential reminder of what the critical spirit is unable to see."
Rita Felski, University of Virginia
"Using the stealth capacities of hermeneutic distrust as his weapon of choice, de Sutter’s writing breaks into unrecovered areas of subtle teachings, shedding light on philosophemes gleaned from Aristotle to punk-led attitude, biojewelry, and the historical buildup of authority billed to the triumph of reason in its many intrusive morphs."
Avital Ronell, New York University
We have become superheroes. Nothing can resist us anymore: not persons, ideas, facts, realities, or beings. We owe our superhuman strength to a tool we have taken up that submits everything to the scrutiny of our judgment: critique. After its first formulation at the end of the sixteenth century, the project of critique spread from one sphere to another until it became almost universal: we have all of us been transformed by our equal capacity to judge, approve, and reject. If modernity is defined as the journey we have taken to move away from the myths and dogmas of the past, then critique, with its emphasis on reason and the autonomy of judgment, has been the lynchpin of modernity. Today, however, the critical project shows signs of exhaustion. We are beginning to realize that being right is useless, now that everyone can lay claim to the same power as we can. The democratization of reason, proceeding alongside the development of critique through modernity, has produced a stalemate: for every judgment that we pronounce, there is another opposing one – with grounds as solid as our own, and the same right to assert itself. Rather than elevating us above the world, critique has mired us in an impasse of claim and counter-claim. The age of critique is now over, argues Laurent de Sutter, and in its place we need to develop a postcritical form of thinking, one he calls “superweak,” a form of thinking based not on establishing grounds, pronouncing judgment, and determining duty, but on welcoming possibility, exploring what the world has to offer, and cultivating a vertiginous appreciation for moving within a world less grounded and less bounded by the terms of critical reason.
List of tables and figures Introduction 1. A brief encounter at Ichij -ji 2. The posture of Musashi 3. A surplus of strength 4. Critique and modernity 5. Reason: being right 6. Virality of critique 7. Five weaknesses 8. We are the detritus 9. Kant fatigue 10. Beyond Book I 11. What is critique? 12. Subjects with an attitude 13. Being, at the limit 14. Modes of life 15. For an ethics of the dandy 16. Incorporating the aesthetic 17. Giudizio and gusto 18. Logic of incarnation 19. The ordeal of judgment 20. Of defiance 21. The time of reflection 22. Two forms of reason 23. Haptics of merit 24. Mirror, mirror, on the wall 25. Epistémè aisthètikè 26. What matters 27. To judge well 28. The form of the limits 29. First antinomy of critique 30. The imperative of reason 31. How to overcome philosophy 32. History of intussusception 33. Hand to hand, body to body 34. Distrust… 35. The life and death of superheroes 36. Every human being is an artist 37. Punk philosophy 38. Beyond place 39. The precarious of all lands 40. Kryptonite hypothesis 41. Censure, my fine care 42. Tetsugaku and bimyôgaku 43. What is kokoro? 44. Critique against critique 45. Too disgusted 46. Portrait of No-Face 47. Chez Panisse 48. Coprology of critique 49. Dancing in your head 50. Proposals for a poetics of excarnation Book II 51. Architectonics of thought 52. A question of principles 53. The right to power 54. What comes from below 55. Cosmic anarchy 56. Surveilling the world 57. Now, dig! 58. One must make distinctions 59. Back to the basement one started from 60. For a decomposed architecture 61. A world of constraints 62. Of deconstruction 63. The shithouse stage of design 64. Functionalism of critique 65. To be and to be duty-bound 66. Phantoms against phantoms 67. Kindly pay in advance 68. Freemasonry & Co. 69. Spirit, are you there? 70. Just anything 71. Who’s to blame 72. Ever more 73. Green cabbage and cabbage green, or, Six of one, half dozen of the other 74. Second antinomy of critique 75. Ergründen and Abgründen 76. Running out of steam 77. Ground zero 78. Factishes of all lands… 79. This is inadmissible 80. Elements of anarchic cosmology 81. To infinitize again 82. Adieu to philosophy 83. The weather takes a turn for the worse 84. Delete as appropriate 85. Method of the madness 86. Quite presumed 87. The Blade 88. Each time unique, the beginning of the world 89. Less than nothing, more than everything 90. Maximalist manifesto Book III 91. I think, therefore I judge 92. From dikazein to krinein 93. Putting order into effect 94. The institution of crisis 95. Politics of philosophy 96. Servants of the nomos 97. To death! 98. Cui bono 99. Inquisition everywhere, justice nowhere 100. On the guarantee 101. Green cabbage and cabbage green, or, Six of one, half dozen of the other (2) 102. Critique of prejudicial reason 103. The Treaty of Osnabrück 104. The origins of geometry 105. Force of rule 106. At the limit 107. Kant surveyor 108. Necessity of the Bestimmung 109. Third antinomy of critique 110. What is necessary is necessary 111. Lethal Weapon 112. Dikaian krisis krinate 113. Listen to the logos 114. Cosmic shortcut 115. Behind the truth 116. The engineering of Creation 117. Onward and upward! 118. After the law 119. One does not know what one can do 120. Ever new 121. Introduction to jurifuturism 122. Protasis and apodosis 123. Post-truth 124. To work! 125. Everything you always wanted to know about modernity, but were afraid to ask 126. How does one evolve in chaos? 127. Kekkai 128. On the other side 129. Cosmopoetics and transnodality 130. Postface to transgression Book IV 131. Alas! 132. Ludology of reality 133. Ow, ow, ow! 134. The madman and the poet 135. From the book to the Book 136. Controversy surrounding faith 137. There is only the outside of text 138. Including the unknowable 139. What one cannot talk about, one talks about all the same 140. The method of detection 141. All culpable 142. Redemption! 143. For an ugly realism 144. Thanatography 145. The shittiness of things 146. Semiology of irenicism 147. All language is fascist 148. There is no outside of text 149. Fourth antinomy of critique 150. To abjure language 151. Cherchez la fiction! Seek the fiction! 152. Silence, it’s talking 153. Weird realism 2.0 154. It’s implausible! 155. From top to bottom 156. Uncertainties and inconsistencies 157. A little further to the east 158. Water Margin 159. A history without end 160. Comic of lucidity 161. Anti-vitalism 162. Toward objectality 163. An encounter 164. To become poem 165. Of life in the fore-worlds 166. Still and always 167. In praise of space opera 168. More than anything 169. Assholes & Co. 170. Infrastructuralism redux Book V 171. Politics of the boudoir 172. Libido sciendi 173. The art of striptease 174. Mehr Licht! 175. Program for a policing of the hole 176. You won’t fool me there 177. Porn rationalism 178. On cretinism as a postulate 179. Algorithmic anthropology 180. The solitude of reason 181. Cherchez la forme! Seek the form! 182. The product of a minus and a minus is a plus 183. What is an argument? 184. Theory of the therefore 185. Introduction to the catu ko i 186. How it works 187. Dialetheic manifesto 188. Fifth antinomy of critique 189. The non-duped err 190. Postcritique 1.0 191. Prolegomena to general semantics 192. For a quantum thought 193. Beyond reality 194. What the gods do 195. May be 196. Brrrr! 197. Menace contra menace 198. Mobilis in mobile 199. Questions of scale 200. Anything goes 201. To stir shit up 202. Il pensiero debole, or, weak thought 203. Return to… 204. In praise of departure 205. What if… ? 206. It’s too easy 207. The coming infrastructuralism 208. Another chaos is possible 209. Who cares 210. Royal flush Epilogue 211. A wooden sword 212. Once critique, always critique 213. In the zone 214. Everything happens 215. Toward a new obscurantism 216. Take a chance, give it a try 217. So that was it! 218. Acceleration! 219. To be done with the assholes 220.... Acknowledgments Notes
Kratè
Phusis
Archè
Nomos
Gramma
Epistémè
Sophia
Subject Areas: Philosophy [HP]
