Abstract: In a 1978 lecture entitled, 'What is critique?' Michel Foucault discerned between critique as a 'high Kantian enterprise' and critique as 'the little polemical activities that are called critique'. By this statement, Foucault warns us that critique is not a monolithic enterprise, and one that is at the same time very difficult to pin down - critique is very much based on its object, and 'only exists in relation to something other than itself'. In Judith Butler's comments on this lecture of Foucault, she remarks: 'Thus, Foucault seeks to define critique, but finds that only a series of approximations are possible. Critique will be dependent on its objects, but its objects will in turn define the very meaning of critique. Further, the primary task of critique will not be to evaluate whether its objects - social conditions, practices, forms of knowledge, power, and discourse - are good or bad, valued highly or demeaned, but to bring into relief the very framework of evaluation itself. What is the relation of knowledge to power such that our epistemological certainties turn out to support a way of structuring the world that forecloses alternative possibilities of ordering?
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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