by Thomas Theodor HeineConcepts of Critique
The discussion about different the concept of critique is central to critical theory as well as political philosophy. My interest mostly lies in the specific knowledge critique produces and how theories of critique themselves reflecct on it. While participating in the French-German ANR-DFG-Projects “Critique Actualité Société” I have developed these questions in a number of talks: on the ‘pictures of critique’, on the connection of critique and emancipation and on the relation between critique and necessity. In them, I pursue the following questions: How do we picture the activity of criticising, and how does this influence our theoretical activity of explicating the concept of critique? What does it mean to understand practice as an emancipatory practice? And is critique necessarily opposed to any form of necessity because critique presupposes the possibility of change, or is the relation more complex?
Publications
My contribution to the 100th anniversary of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt considers the necessary yet unrealisable expectations towards an institutionalisation of critical theory.
![Situated, Not Located: The Institute for Social Research as Impossible Place for Critical Theory [in German]](/public/publication/2023_10_ifs_100/featured_westend_cover.jpg)
Kritische Theorie soll die Gesellschaft emanzipieren, statt sie wie herkömmliche Forschung nur zu erfassen. Die Grundzüge dieser engagierten Wissenschaft skizziert Max Horkheimer in seinem berühmten Aufsatz von 1937 in der Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Das Nachwort hilft, die schwierigen Konsequenzen dieser einfachen Idee nachzuvollziehen. Frieder Vogelmann stellt zudem die wichtigste Kritik an Horkheimers Argumenten sowie deren Weiterentwicklung in der Frankfurter Schule vor.
The article shows that Amy Allen’s diagnosis of a too idealistic account of reason forms the backbone of her critique of contemporary Frankfurt School critical theory, before it discusses her criteria for an adequate conceptualization of the intertwinement of reason and power.
How can we diagnose and criticize “untruth in politics” without idealising the sciences or a supposedly singular “scientific method”?.
The role played by the diagnosis of an “era of post-truth” in political, scientific and medial struggles necessitates a critique of reason.
![Fighting with Untruth. Why a Critique of Reason Remains Necessary [in German]](/public/publication/2019_westend_unwahrheit/featured_westend_cover_small.jpg)
Radical critiques of reason are possible, I argue, if we turn our attention to the practices of criticizing, if we refrain from a sovereign epistemology, and if we pluralize reason without trivializing it.
Discourse analysis is critical, I argue, if it produces “unwieldy knowledge”.
I argue that the reasons both for the way ‘biopolitics’ stirred Foucault’s readers and for his subsequent abandonment are to be found in the relation between Foucault’s model of critique and the role ‘biopolitics’ plays in it: it names the counter-truths derived from Foucault’s critical diagnosis of the dispositif of sexuality
What is the significance of the fact that ‘responsibility’ now plays such a central role in, for example, work, the welfare state, or the criminal justice system? What happens when individuals are generally expected to think of themselves as ‘responsible’ agents? And what are the consequences of the fact that the philosophical analysis of ‘responsibility’ focuses almost exclusively on conditions of agency that are mostly absent from real life?
Interpretations of Foucault’s critique have not payed full attention to all three of Foucault’s methodological imperatives which he calls nihilism, nominalism and historicism. The article offers such a reading of Foucault’s critique.
After distinguishing three pictures of the activity of critique – measuring, disrupting and emancipating critique – I discuss the theoretical activities these pictures commit critical theorists to.
A systematic and philosophical reading of Foucault.
In this book, Frieder Vogelmann demonstrates how large parts of philosophy have fallen under responsibility’s spell, and he uses a Foucauldian approach in an attempt to break it. The three axes of power, knowledge, and self are used in a detailed analysis of the practical regimes of labour (including the welfare state), criminality (including policing, punishment practices, and criminal proceedings), and philosophy, and of the two subject positions required by ‘responsibility’ – those of …
talks
Roundtable discussion on critiques of reason
Basiert auf der Veranstaltung “Vernunftkritik in der kritischen Theorie”.
The talk is part of the conference The Concept of Progress at the University of Bremen, organized by Martin Saar, Frank Nullmeier, Martin Nonhoff and Frieder Vogelmann.
The task of diagnosing the present explains how Foucault’s critique functions as a philosophical practice, and by making explicit in which ways it emancipates us, it gives us reasons why we might be interested in doing critique like that.
A defense of radical critiques of reason against the champions of “post-critical” thinking and the decriers of “post-truth”.