Since the publication of this Open Review edition of the first draft of this book manuscript, the manuscript has been significantly revised and has now entered production with Columbia University Press. Please search here soon for information on the publication of the book, Critique & Praxis.
Part I: Theoria — Reconstructing Critical Theory
Critical theory foundered in the mid-twentieth century on the shoals of positivism. Since then, a succession of anti-foundational challenges to traditional critical theory fragmented the landscape of critical theory.
This part offers a way forward to reconstruct critical theory by means of what I call “counter-critical theory”: it is a critical method that indexes the original impulse of critical theory, but liberates it from its positivist foundations, in order to allow for a more open-ended and permanent reexamination of how power circulates and recirculates in society. It calls for the constant and unending unveiling of illusions, to expose how belief systems and material conditions distribute resources in society, attuned to the fact that the very unveiling will produce new illusions that themselves need to be unmasked and exposed.
Counter-critical theory is a pure theory of illusions and calls for an ongoing and unrelenting theoretical stance of resignification, reinterpretation, and reevaluation.
