CRITIQUE CRITIQUE BETR AYAL RobeRt beRnasconi This first volume in a new EDITED BY bRenna bhandaR series of books from the archive AUSTIN GROSS FRançoise collin of the British journal Radical MATT HARE Philosophy reflects upon the MARIE LOUISE KROGH simon cRitchley rich and troubled history of PeneloPe deutscheR the Enlightenment concept of meena dhanda critique as it has been extended, haRRy haRootunian transformed, translated and Pauline Johnson betrayed in Marxism, feminism and postcolonial theory. BETR AYAL chRistian KeRslaKe The editors, Austin Gross, PhiliPPe lacoue-labaRthe MAtt HAre & MArie Louise KolJa lindneR KroGH, are PhD candidates in the JosePh mccaRney Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), andRew mcGettiGan Kingston University London. PeteR osboRne Rosa & chaRley PaRKin stella sandFoRd lynne seGal essays from the albeRto toscano radical philosophy archive isbn 978-1-9162292-0-4 9 781916 229204 CRITIQUE & BETRAYAL CRITIQUE & BETRAYAL Essays from the Radical Philosophy Archive volume 1 edited by Austin Gross MAtt HAre MArie Louise Krogh Published in 2020 by Radical Philosophy Archive www.radicalphilosophyarchive.com isbn 978-1-9162292-0-4 (pbk) isbn 978-1-9162292-1-1 (ebook) The electronic version of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC-BYNC-ND). For more information, please visit creativecommons.org. The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 Designed and typeset in Calluna by illuminati, Grosmont Cover design by Lucy Morton at illuminati Printed by Short Run Press Ltd (Exeter) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Contents IntroductIon The time of critique AUSTIN GROSS, mATT HARe & mARIE LOUISE KRoGH 3 KantIan Ripples 1 Spontaneous generation: The fantasy of the birth of concepts in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason stellA SandfoRd 19 2 Hegelian phenomenology and the critique of reason and society PeteR osboRne 45 3 The vertigo of philosophy: Deleuze and the problem of immanence ChristiAn KeRslake 71 dISOWNED ENLIGHTENMENTS 4 Feminism and the Enlightenment PAuline JoHnson 103 5 Will the real Kant please stand up: The challenge of Enlightenment racism to the study of the history of philosophy RobeRt beRnAsConi 129 6 Exchange on Hegel’s racism JosePH mcCarney & RobeRt beRnAsConi 151 7 The philosopher’s fear of alterity: Levinas, Europe and humanities ‘without Sacred History’ AndRew mcGettigan 166 Interlude 8 Peter Rabbit and the Grundrisse RosA And Charley Parkin 193 betrayals 9 Oedipus as figure PHilippe Lacoue-LabartHe 199 10 Generations of feminism lynne segal 223 11 Name of the father, ‘one’ of the mother: From Beauvoir to Lacan Françoise Collin intRoduCed by PeneloPe deutscheR 247 12 Black Socrates? Questioning the philosophical tradition simon CRitCHley 269 crItIque In tHe expanded fIeld 13 Marx’s Eurocentrism: Postcolonial studies and Marx scholarship Kolja lindner 295 14 Who needs postcoloniality? A reply to Lindner Harry HarootuniAn 324 15 Race, real estate and real abstraction BrennA Bhandar & AlbeRto toscano 340 16 Anti-castism and misplaced nativism: Mapping caste as an aspect of race meenA DhandA 362 sources 387 image credits 388 index 389 ESSAYS FROM THE RADICAL PHILOSOPHY ARCHIVE series editor Peter Osborne This new series of books from the archive of the first 200 issues of the British journal Radical Philosophy (1972–2016) offers thematic selections of articles on topics that continue to innervate theoretical and political debates on the Left. volume 1 Critique & Betrayal ed. Austin Gross, Matt Hare & Marie Louise Krogh volume 2 Philosophy & Nations ed. Austin Gross, Matt Hare & Marie Louise Krogh FortHcoMinG volume 3 Societies of Assessment ed. Austin Gross, Matt Hare & Marie Louise Krogh volume 4 Philosophies of War ed. Mark Neocleous www.radicalphilosophyarchive.com Previous anthologies from Radical Philosophy Spheres of Action: Art and Politics (2013) ed. Éric Alliez & Peter Osborne Philosophies of Race and Ethnicity (2002) ed. Peter Osborne & Stella Sandford A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals (1996) ed. Peter Osborne Socialism, Feminism and Philosophy: A Radical Philosophy Reader (1990) ed. Peter Osborne & Sean Sayers Radical Philosophy Reader (1985) ed. Roy Edgley & Richard Osborne INTRODUCTION The time of critique AUSTIN GROSS, mATT HARe & mARIE LOUISE KRoGH ‘Our age’, wrote Immanuel Kant in 1781, ‘is the genuine age of critique, to which everything must submit.’1 This note, from the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, does not so much announce the critical age as crystallize it. Kant’s consciousness of the modernity of critique implies, as a corollary, the relegation of the ‘dogmatic’ to the past. The first Critique was an epoch- making book, defining the reception of the Enlightenment, such that the critical age would become the age of the Critiques. In his famous 1843 letter to Arnold Ruge, Karl Marx borrows the Kantian costume, reactivating the battlefield metaphors in which Kant had shrouded his announcement of the critical project. ‘Anarchy’ and ‘confusion’ reign among the social reformers of the 1840s as to what future they are fighting for, precisely because they attempt ‘dogmatically to prefigure the future’.2 The hubris of the reformers, analogous to that of dogmatic metaphysicians in Kant’s version, is to have made claims on the future. But instead of undertaking a critique of our own faculties – to delimit the extent of our right to speak about the future – Marx proposes to ‘find the new world … through the critique of the old’.3 The critical project is thus reactivated by Marx within the context of a political movement. The task of critique con- sequently takes a more militant shade as a weapon in the war between classes: If the designing of the future … is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the present – I am speaking of the ruthless critique of everything existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be.4 The knot between critique and the present becomes more densely wound. In Marx’s letter, critique is not only ‘what we have to accomplish at present’, but also a critique of the present. The essays gathered in this volume – from the archive of the British journal Radical Philosophy – speak to, or from within, the assumption that thinking has to measure itself against its time and that this task, in some sense or another, implies a critical gesture. The temporality of critique to be found in this collection is, however, consistently more complicated than it was for Kant. Although critique is still something to be undertaken ‘at present’, Kant’s age is long gone. Written over a period which spans 40 years, from 1975 to 2015, these essays are from a critical age, no longer the critical age. And if critique is still a task for our times, it is also indisputably something that has been handed down to us. The handing-down of critique poses the problem of how it is to be taken up, that is, not only the reflective assessment of the relation between the present and a critical tradition, but also and just as importantly the question of how critique must be trans- formed in order to be enacted in a new present. In the quarrel between those for whom fidelity means cryogenic preservation and those for whom it signifies transformation, each party will cast the other as a traitor. In the reception history of critical philosophy, one of the recurring motifs that exemplifies this problem most clearly is that of metacritique. Almost as old as the Kantian Critiques themselves, the term was first introduced in the late eighteenth century by Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder, to name the exhibition of conditions and dependencies of reason which stood beyond the domain of transcendental philosophy. In Herder’s book-length Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason 4 Critique and Betrayal (1799) and Hamann’s shorter ‘Metacritique on the Purism of Reason’ (written in 1784 but only published in 1800), it was specifically used to address Kant’s disavowal of language as a medium of reason and the consequent neglect of the historicity of the institution of language in reason’s self-critique. But the conditions that metacritique points to are not always linguistic. Take Stella Sandford’s article on metaphors of bio logical genera- tion in the Critique of Pure Reason, which opens this collection. Language and metaphor certainly constitute one of the fields into which her reading displaces the Critique. But another aspect of this reading is the dimension of what Sandford calls ‘fantasy’,5 and in particular a fantasy with regard to sexual difference, which structures Kant’s efforts to keep matter under form’s control. The very purism and self-sufficiency of reason (to undertake its own critique, but also to see itself as giving birth to pure concepts by parthenogenesis) is seen as grounded in such a fantasy. Critical social theory, historical materialism, and even G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit could also be situated as forms of metacritique, a proposal which Garbis Kortian ventured in his 1979 Metacritique, a book whose power was precisely to read the whole lineage of critical theory through Hamann and Herder’s term. Hegelian phenomenology is, however, a particularly paradoxical case, as is discussed in Peter Osborne’s contribution on Gillian Rose’s Hegel Contra Sociology. Hegel does not denounce the self-sufficiency of reason or of philosophy, but only the self-sufficiency of the standpoint of ‘knowledge’ (or ‘cognition’ as Erkenntnis is often translated) defined in a technical sense by the separation of the knowing subject and the known object.