Critical Times 3:2 Cover

CRITICAL TIMES 3:3

Now available online through Duke University Press

read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times

This issue plumbs the currents of contemporary politics and violence, and offers powerful rethinkings of critique and belief in ordinary life. On subjects ranging from the abject rhetoric of Matteo Salvini to emergent discourses of resilience, essays from Étienne Balibar, Lorenzo Bernini, and Rodrigo De La Fábian offer a picture of global power in action. A roundtable on Talal Asad’s work on Wittgenstein and the Qur’an brings together leading voices in the study of religion.

Capping the issue are dispatches from global student movements and an artistic intervention from the KUNCI Study Forum and Collective.

> Table of Contents

In the Midst | Blog

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"In the Midst" conveys the difficulties of writing during critical times, and registers the importance of writing from within concrete, unfolding situations, of staying with the troubles of the moment, of thinking from particular grounds, and of allowing for responsive, experimental, and tentative interventions.

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  • / January 12, 2021 4:14 pm / Covid-19

    Translated by Tara Phillips First published in Página 12 on October 4, 2020. Unpaid debts for rents and utilities, including electricity, water, gas, and internet access, grew at an accelerated rate during the months of social distancing meant to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. Currently, feminized and precarized economies are the preferred objects of indebtedness.

  • / December 7, 2020 1:28 pm / Covid-19

    According to Hannah Arendt, if the inside of the body “were to appear, we would all look alike.” If we could see the insides of bodies, they would validate the claim that we are indistinguishable, since we are all subject to the same requirements for the maintenance of life and face the same exposure to disease and death. The philosopher makes this observation to explain that our being of the world cannot be understood as a simple being in the world, reduced to our organic nature or our status as biological bodies. For Arendt, and contrary to a popular belief in ethology, life is not only the external appearance of something interior, since surface effects (such as plumage) are much more differentiated than their internal, organic causes and therefore cannot be simply their secondary expression. Who, by contrast, could distinguish individuals from one another by examining their viscera? We would … Read More

  • / September 9, 2020 11:50 am / Racial Justice

    Politics today is nothing short of civil war. The driving question is no longer so much whether this or that conflict is a civil war but what political work the notion of “civil war” is being exercised to do. States descend into civil wars when contrasting conceptions of life within them are deemed irreconcilable. Living, for a considerable proportion of the state’s inhabitants, is made unbearable. Those at least nominally controlling the state apparatus insist on obedience and deference to its way of being, on pain of erasure. Civil wars are struggles over competing ways of being in the world, over their underlying conceptions, over control of the state and its apparatuses to materialize and advance these commitments.

 

Critical Times, a project of the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs, is a peer reviewed open access journal published by Duke University Press with the aim of foregrounding encounters between canonical critical theory and various traditions of critique emerging from other historical legacies, seeking to highlight the multiple forms that critical thought takes today.

Critical Times seeks to reflect on and facilitate the work of transnational intellectual networks that draw upon critical theory and political practice across various world regions. Calling into question hemispheric epistemologies in order to revitalize left critical thought for these times, the journal publishes essays, interviews, dialogues, dispatches, visual art, and various platforms for critical reflection, engaging with social and political theory, literature, philosophy, art criticism, and other fields within the humanities and social sciences.