Critical Times 3:2 Cover

CRITICAL TIMES 3:3

Now available online through Duke University Press

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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.

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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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  • / May 20, 2021 12:39 pm / Anticolonialism

    Translated by Aaron F. Eldridge This piece was written on May 13 in Haifa, where mobs of Israeli settlers have violently targeted Palestinians with impunity since May 9 and was published in Arabic on the Cairo-based Mada Masr on May 14. The author included this note to introduce the post: “The last thing I took upon myself before going to the demonstration was to write this post that I sent to a friend, Omar Said. Perhaps it appears unfinished for this very reason: I did not sleep more than 4 hours and for the most part I had assumed that the settlers, with their dreadful numbers, would succeed in invading our neighborhood.” We have asked the author to include some explanatory notes to this English version of the original text…

  • / 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

 

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.