Critical agency and the future of critique

What is it about?

The aim of this article is to offer a cartography of the current debate on critical agency, starting from the inner ambivalences of the modern notion of critique as resistant negation and affirmative creation of new practices. First, the article discusses the double-faced nature of critique and its interpretations in the European tradition of critical thought. It then engages in reflection on some alternative pathways to conceptualizing critical agency developed by American pragmatism, as well as by anti-Eurocentric and anti-anthropocentric theoretical approaches. The aim of this investigation is to understand the premises for developing critical agency in contemporary historical conditions, and to shed light on the characteristics of critical agency at a time when critique can no longer be solely an unmasking tool, while we have not abandoned the aspiration to link the contingency of situated critical agencies with an image of the future. The capacity to produce critique by imagining the ‘new’, denying the ‘given’ and coping with the constraints springs from everyday life experience and the actualization of ethical orientations in specific contexts involved in changing forms of domination. This work of imagination and actualization is a social practice necessary for all forms of critical agency as a collective enterprise of aspirations and knowledge opportunities.

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