Experiencing critique

Law and Critique

Volumn 16, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 95-112

  Pavlich, George ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA   (Canada)

Author keywords

Critical grammar; Critique; Critique and hospitality; Derrida; Foucault and judgement; Judgement and criticism

Indexed keywords

EID: 22644444911     PISSN: 09578536     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s10978-005-4906-9     Document Type: Review

References (59)

1. J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984);
2. J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982-1985 (Sydney: Power Publications, 1992);
3. Z. Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity and Intellectuals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987);
4. "The World Inhospitable to Levinas", Philosophy Today Summer (1999) 151-167.
5. G. Pavlich, "The Art of Critique, or How Not to be Governed Thus", in G. Wickham and G. Pavlich, eds., Rethinking Law, Society and Governance: Foucault's Bequest (Oxford: Hart Publishers, 2001).
6. Lyotard (1984), supra, n. 1.
7. For the allegorical lineage in sociology that is implicitly tapped in parts of the following discussion, see S. Lash, Another Modernity, A Different Rationality (London: Blackwell, 1999).
8. Here one might recall the boldness of Kant's sweeping claim: '...our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit'. I. Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, and What is Enlightenment? L.W. Beck, trans. (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958), 7.
9. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977).
10. M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 261-162.
11. T. Adorno, Introduction to Sociology (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000);
12. J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987);
13. H. Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (London: Allen Lane, 1968).
14. S. Zizek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis) Use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2001).
15. T. Adorno, Critical Modes: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 281.
16. Ibid., at 285.
17. See Lyotard, supra, n. 1.
18. I b i d.
19. Z. Bauman, The Individualized Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 99.
20. I b i d.
21. Ibid., at 100.
22. See R.J. Bernstein, "Metaphysics, Critique, and Utopia", Review of Metaphysics 42 (1988), 255-273;
23. R. Kosselleck, Critique and Crisis. Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Oxford: Berg, 1988), 103.
24. R. Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 85.
25. Further, as Dean points out, this emphasis on judgement is also replicated in the context of critical theory: 'Within the terms of critical theory, "critique" stands for that process by which the pathological processes of rationalisation can be judged from the perspective of universal values and in the name of "emancipation"' (M. Dean, Critical and Effective Histories: Foucaull's Methods and Historical Sociology (London: Routledge, 1994), 129-130.
26. See, for example, P. Connerton, The Tragedy of Enlightenment: An Essay on the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Koselleck, supra, n. 17;
27. R. Con Davis and R. Schleifer, Criticism and Culture (London: Longman, 1991).
28. G. Pavlich, Critique and Radical Discourses on Crime (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000); and Pavlich, supra, n. 2.
29. Foucault, supra, n. 6.
30. See Bauman, supra, n. 1; and Lyotard (1984), supra, n. 1.
31. Pavlich, supra, n. 20.
32. Koselleck, supra, n. 17, at 103, note 15;
33. J. Ayto, Dictionary of Word Origins (London: Bloomsbury, 1990), 146.
34. See Connerton, supra, n. 19; and Con Davis and Schleifer, supra, n. 19.
35. R. Barthes, Criticism and Truth, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 33; emphasis in original. The possibility is also conjured by Foucault in the following passage: 'I can't help but dream of about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgements but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes - all the better'. M. Foucault (1994), 323.
36. See Pavlich, supra, n. 20, and n. 2;
37. also G. Pavlich, "Nietzsche, Critique and the Promise of Not Being Thus...", International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 13 (2001), 357-375.
38. See J. Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999);
39. J. Derrida, "Hospitality", Angelaki 5 (2000), 3-18;
40. J. Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (London: Routledge, 2001);
41. J. Derrida, Negotiations, E. Rottenberg, ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002);
42. and J. Derrida and A. Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
43. M. Bruckner, Narrative Invention in Twelfth-Century Romance: The Convention of Hospitality (1160-1200). (Lexington: French Forum Publishers, 1980), 29.
44. F. Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 22.
45. Derrida and Dufourmantelle, supra, n. 28, at 15.
46. Ayto, supra, n. 24, at 287.
47. W.W. Skeat, ed., The Concise Dictionary of English Etymology (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1993), 209.
48. Derrida (2002), supra, n. 28.
49. Derrida (1999), and (2000), supra, n. 28.
50. See Derrida and Dufourmantelle, supra, n. 28, at 77-83.
51. Derrida (2000), supra, n. 28, at 5.
52. I b i d.
53. Ibid., at 14.
54. See Ayto, supra, n. 24, at 287.
55. J.D. Caputo, and J. Derrida, Deconstruclion in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 110.
56. Derrida (2001), supra, n. 28, at 84.
57. Derrida (1999), supra, n. 28, at 24.
58. M. Foucault, Fearless Speech (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001), 17-18.
59. Some might ponder whether the proposed grammar takes us out of the realm of critique. Part of the aim in this paper is precisely to challenge the blackmail that asserts this: either one practices critique as founded judgment, or is ipso facto not engaged in critical inquiry. This arrogating extortion is part and parcel of the dominance of judgmental grammars in disciplinary contexts. Hoy's recent assessment is rather more refined as he describes the ways that poststructural concerns appear to usher in 'postcritical' epistemological environments (D.C. Hoy, Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique (Mass: MIT Press, 2004). Interestingly, the assumption of critique as judgement looms as revenant trace in this formulation, but one could usefully reframe the position to raise this prospect: is it now timely to rethink what we understand by the term critique?