Critique and Its Limits

Recent years have seen the emergence, in some quarters, of a debate concerning the current state of critique and its continued viability. Initiated by Bruno Latour in a 2004 paper, the discussion gained impetus with Rita Felski’s 2015 volume The Limits of Critique. The changing political landscape has also contributed to the sense that critique, and critical practice more generally, is undergoing something of a crisis. This paper takes up several ideas that lie in the background of the discussion (although touched upon in Felski’s treatment) that can also be seen to be at issue in older debates between hermeneutics and critical theory, as well as in the tension between philosophical and social-theoretic, literary, and cultural approaches. A fundamental question is that which Felski raises concerning the limits of critique, but here understood as directed, not only at where critique may come to an end, but also where it begins.