Critique of Critical Theory

Stream coordinator: José-Manuel Barreto

Critical Theory (Marxism, the Frankfurt School, Postmodern philosophy, Critical Legal Studies, et al.) emerged within the coordinates of the European intellectual tradition─a fact that constitutes its condition of possibility, as well as a source of its limitations. Contemporary productions and dominant interpretations remain within the same horizon of understanding, as in the cases of Agamben and Zizek.

It is as a consequence of this reflection on the locus of enunciation of Critical Theory that Enrique Dussel has pointed to the Eurocentric bias of Habermas’ comprehension of the key events for the formation of modern subjectivity─the German Reformation, the British Parliament, the French Revolution and the Enlightenment.  Dispesh Chakrabarty has advanced the task of ‘provincialising Europe’, including the work of Marx, among others reasons, because of his comprehension of modern history  according to which more industrialised countries incarnate the way less developed ones will be in the future. On her part, Sabine Broeck has shown how Adorno and Horkheimer failed to see how modernity and the modern subject are products of imperialism and slavery, and ended up assuming that modernity was ‘innocent of colonialism’.  For Walter Mignolo ‘the future demands thinking beyond the Greeks and Eurocentrism’ and ‘a radical reconceptualisation of the human rights paradigm.’

This stream invites papers that deal with critiques of Critical Theory regarding the Eurocentric bias and limitations that underlines its philosophy of history and its engagement with the social sciences, the humanities, the arts and law; and papers that explore the vast range of consequences of the Eurocentrism of Critical Theory on the theory and praxis for social and global justice including, but not limited to, those developed by:

Decolonial Thinking

Postcolonial Theory and Orientalism

Subaltern Studies

Critical Race Theory, Radical Black Theory and Black Atlantic Studies

Feminism and Third World Feminism

Third World Approach to International Law (TWAIL).