Critical Theory and Historicity: (Re)imagining an Emancipated Future

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

How might the critique of the present lead to an emancipated future? In making this question an animating concern, the tradition of critical theory has understood its theoretical task to depend on its historical moment. As a result, the aims and foundations of critical theory have shifted as the moment it is responding to has changed. But this admirable insistence on responding to historical circumstances as they transform also creates serious methodological and theoretical puzzles for critical theorists working today. For if the foundations of critical theory shift with its historical moment, does it have any foundations at all? How does it resist the threat of relativism or historicism? How can it keep alive its commitment to an emancipated future in moments where its possibility seems remote? How has the tradition of critical theory undergone transformations in its understanding of its own relationship to the nature of history? And relatedly, in light of a proliferation of intellectual trends that have been placed under the umbrella of critical theory over the past few decades, can we still identify key structuring concepts that make it a distinctive tradition? The papers in this panel turn to both canonical and counter-canonical sources in the tradition of critical theory to think about how these animating tensions can help us to (re)imagine an emancipated future. Each of the papers on this panel seeks to conceptualize anew the relationship between critical theory and its relationship to both its historical foundations and its historical horizons: by recapturing a vision of historical teleology that is still compatible with multiple historical temporalities; by sifting through the politics of soil to theorize how a politics of ecology can imagine a historical turning point where resource exhaustion will spur transformative action towards an emancipated future; by attempting to re-conceive of historical contingency, rather than teleology, as a resource that can animate political praxis in service of new forms of social freedom; and by reinvigorating the critique of alienation by looking beyond the canonical sources of critical theory to anti-colonial thinkers who expand our understanding of this concept while broadening the tradition’s horizons to include forms of alienation and domination specific to colonialism.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Alienation-Critique in Anti-colonial Thought - Arwa Awan, University of Chicago

• Teleology with Multiple Temporalities: Bloch’s Exercises in Non-synchronicity - Loren Goldman, University of Pennsylvania

• Idealism and the Annihilation of History: Georg Lukács’s Antinomies - William Levine, University of Chicago

• Desert Conditions: Ecology, “Metabolism,” and the Frustrations of Action - Nica Siegel, Amherst

Chair

• Massimiliano Tomba University of California

Discussant

• Robyn Marasco CUNY, Hunter College