Technologies of Critique

Willy Thayer (Author), John Kraniauskas (Translated by)

9780823286744

Hardback, published 7 January 2020

208 pages, 5
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.448 kg

Critique—a program of thought as well as a disposition toward the world—is a crucial resource for politics and thought today, yet it is again and again instrumentalized by institutional frames and captured by market logics. Technologies of Critique elaborates a critical practice that eludes such capture. Building on Chile's history of dissident artists and the central entangling of politics and aesthetics, Thayer engages continental philosophical traditions, from Aristotle, Descartes and Heidegger through Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, and in implicit conversation with the Judith Butler, Roberto Esposito, and Bruno Latour, to help pinpoint the technologies and media through which art intervenes critically in socio-political life.

Translation Has Always Already Begun: Translator's Introduction vii
1 Critique and Life 1
2 Critique and Work 5
3 The Kríno Constellation 8
4 Technologies of Critique 10
5 The Word "Critique" 14
6 Marx's Critical Turn 18
7 Crisis and Avant-Garde 19
8 Critical Attitude 24
9 Sovereign Critique I 25
10 Hyperbole 28
11 Sovereign Critique II 31
12 The Epoch of Critique 33
13 Critique within the Frame, Critique of the Frame 35
14 Manet: The Kant of Painting 38
15 Heidegger's Demand 40
16 Critique and Figure 44
17 Thought and Figure 46
18 The Leveling of the Pit 49
19 The Clash of Film and Theater 51
20 Critique's Loss of Aura 54
21 Critique and Mass 55
22 Nihil and Philosophy 60
23 Jenny 62
24 The Epoch of Nihilism. Nihil as Epoch. 66
25 The Exhausted Age 70
26 The Coexistence of Technologies: Marx 73
27 Referential Illusion 75
28 Critique and Installation 76
29 Critique as the Unworking of Theater 82
30 Destruction 86
31 Sovereign Exception, Destructive Exception 87
32 The Absolute Drought of Critique 95
33 Sorel: Sovereign Critique 97
34 Benjamin: Pure Strike and Critique 104
35 The Destruction of Theater 107
36 Thought Is Inseparable from a Critique 111
Notes 115
Index 171