Crisis and Critique: Philosophical Analysis and Current Events

Phainomena, 2015

The article focuses on the source and the origin of today’s general inundation with crisis or, better yet, already almost completes immersion into it. In this regard the question inevitability arises, if and how this source of contemporary crisis concerns the original critical position of philosophy. The concept and the experience of crisis of the present time concern the original critical position of philosophy. The concept and the experience of crisis are immanent to philosophy, however at the same time in the situation of crisis of the present time philosophy seems to be only of little importance. The blockade of crisis and with it thus needs to be philosophically comprehended as a certainty in itself, together wit the uncertainty of an opening of the path out of it.

Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture, 2021

2020, the year the coronavirus pandemic spread globally, marked the twenty-fifth year since the publication of Pierre Hadot’s work Philosophy as a Way of Life (translated by co-author Michael Chase). In that time, what began as the research specialization of just a few scholars has become a growing area of philosophical and metaphilosophical inquiry, bringing together researchers from around the globe. Hadot’s key ideas of spiritual exercises, and the very idea of PWL, have been applied to a host of individual thinkers from across the history of philosophy: from the Hellenistic and Roman-era philosophers of direct concern to Hadot, through renaissance thinkers like Petrarch, Lipsius, Montaigne, Descartes, or Bacon, into nineteenth-century thinkers led by Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.In more recent years, more global reflections on the “very idea” of PWL have begun to emerge, as well as dedicated journal editions. In these more recent PWL studies, some of the manifold research questions have begun to be explored, which were opened up by the studies of Pierre and Ilsetraut Hadot, as well as its reception in Michel Foucault’s later work. What implications, after all, does understanding the history of PWL, and the predominance of this metaphilosophical conception in the history of Western thought, have for how we understand the practice(s) of philosophy today? Does recovering the alternative understandings of philosophy as a practice in history necessarily lead to a criticism of contemporary, solely academic or theoretical modes of philosophizing, or is the idea of PWL one which has only historiographical force?

Choice Reviews Online, 2013

2020

Taking the recent omnipresence of crisis rhetoric around the Mediterranean as a starting point, the introduction lays out the main terms of this collection—crisis and critique—in their interrelation, as it emerges through the matrix of various declared crises in the Mediterranean. If today’s crisis rhetoric often works to restrict political choices and the imagination of alternative futures, can the concept crisis still do the work of critique or produce alternative modes of representation that can voice marginalized subjectivities and liminal experiences? Can crisis become part of contrarian or transformative languages by scholars, activists, and artists or should we forge different grammars to understand present realities in the region? Boletsi, Houwen, and Minnaard unpack the concept crisis and its operations alongside the concept of critique in our professed “postcritical times.” Underscoring the diagnostic rigor of critique in approaches to crisis-frameworks, they plead for cri...

Parrhesia: A Journal of Continental Philosophy, 2019

Human Arenas, 2021

The aim of this paper is to reflect on historical vicissitudes of relationship between crisis and critique. Starting point is an observational diagnosis of present socio-political conditions, which have transformed crisis from a turning point into a continuation and radicalization of the existing order. In an attempt to understand the ongoing subversion of transformative potentials of crisis, a similar process of pacification and subversion of critique in dominant theoretical paradigms will be examined. It will be argued that both sociopolitical and mainstream theoretical processes work toward pacification of the status quo that raises both existential and theoretical concerns. In order to support the claim that a different relationship between crisis and critique is possible, it will be referred to Reinhart Koselleck's seminal study, Critique and crisis (1959), where it is shown how absolutist state generated its critique by Enlightenment and then Enlightenment conditioned radical changes in form of French Revolution. Relying on that example, the following questions will be raised: What kind of historical structures have been lost since times which generated Enlightenment as a critical stance? What kind of theoretical tools are we missing in post-Enlightenment post-modern times in order to conceptualize and condition radical changes? What is the role of psychological theorizing in sustaining adaptation to the existing order instead of arguing and demanding its radical change? How to reclaim transformative potentials of critique and crisis?

Performance Philosophy, 2018

The ubiquity of "crisis" and its sheer pervasiveness as a description of the contemporary world means that we do not so much write about crisis as much as we write from crisis. What type of thought is possible within crisis? If crisis extends to thought itself, insofar as we find ourselves in a crisis of thought (i.e., the crisis of not being able to think beyond the crisis of thought), then what kind of thinking is possible anymore? These are the questions raised by this special issue of Performance Philosophy , introduced here by the issue's co-editors.