Reorienting critique: From ironist theory to transformative practice

Nikolas Kompridis

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    13 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    In this paper I examine problems besetting forms of philosophical and social critique that are motivated by the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ and normatively oriented to the goal of ‘unmasking’. I argue that there is an urgent need to correct the one-sided emphasis on ‘unmasking’, and we can do this by reorienting critique to the practice of individual and social transformation. The argument goes like this. The practice of unmasking critique has split off from utopian projects in whose service it was originally placed, and has become the vehicle of a self-consuming, practice-crippling skepticism that – from Friedrich von Schlegel to Paul de Man and Richard Rorty – goes by the name of irony or ironist theory. Postmodernism, in one of its aspects, is the latest form of this skepticism. I interpret postmodernism as the manifestation of a crisis of confidence (in our ideals and in our agency) and as an ironization of critique. Drawing upon Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault, I reformulate the normative demands of critique such that its practice avoids the problem of self-reference while responding to the problem of self-reassurance.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)23-47
    Number of pages25
    JournalPhilosophy and Social Criticism
    Volume26
    Issue number4
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2000

    Keywords

    • confidence
    • critique
    • irony
    • postmodernism
    • reason
    • skepticism

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Philosophy
    • Sociology and Political Science

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