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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
We have become superheroes. Nothing can resist us anymore: not persons, ideas, facts, realities, or beings. We owe our superhuman strength to a tool we have taken up that submits everything to the scrutiny of our judgment: critique. After its first formulation at the end of the sixteenth century, the project of critique spread from one sphere to another until it became almost universal: we have all of us been transformed by our equal capacity to judge, approve, and reject. If modernity is defined as the journey we have taken to move away from the myths and dogmas of the past, then critique, with its emphasis on reason and the autonomy of judgment, has been the lynchpin of modernity.
Today, however, the critical project shows signs of exhaustion. We are beginning to realize that being right is useless, now that everyone can lay claim to the same power as we can. The democratization of reason, proceeding alongside the development of critique through modernity, has produced a stalemate: for every judgment that we pronounce, there is another opposing one – with grounds as solid as our own, and the same right to assert itself. Rather than elevating us above the world, critique has mired us in an impasse of claim and counter-claim.
The age of critique is now over, argues Laurent de Sutter, and in its place we need to develop a postcritical form of thinking, one he calls “superweak,” a form of thinking based not on establishing grounds, pronouncing judgment, and determining duty, but on welcoming possibility, exploring what the world has to offer, and cultivating a vertiginous appreciation for moving within a world less grounded and less bounded by the terms of critical reason.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Quote
Introduction
Kratè
§1 A brief encounter at Ichijō-ji
§2 The Musashi posture
§3 A surplus of strength
§4 Critique and modernity
§5 Reason: being right
§6 Virality of critique
§7 Five weaknesses
§8 We are the detritus
§9 Kant fatigue
§10 Beyond
Notes
Book I
Phusis
§11 What is critique?
§12 Subjects with an attitude
§13 Being, at the limit
§14 Modes of life
§15 For an ethics of the dandy
§16 Incorporating the aesthetic
§17
Giudizio
and
gusto
§18 The logic of incarnation
§19 The ordeal of judgment
§20 Of defiance
§21 The time of reflection
§22 Two forms of reason
§23 The haptics of merit
§24 Mirror, mirror, on the wall
§25
Epistêmê aisthetikê
§26 What matters
§27 To judge well
§28 The form of the limits
§29 First antinomy of critique
§30 The imperative of reason
§31 How to overcome philosophy
§32 History of intussusception
§33 Hand to hand, body to body
§34 Distrust. . .
§35 The life and death of superheroes
§36 Every human being is an artist
§37 Punk philosophy
§38 Beyond place
§39 The precarious of all lands. . .
§40 Kryptonite hypothesis
§41 Censure, my fine care
§42
Tetsugaku
and
bimyôgaku
§43 What is
kokoro?
§44 Critique against critique
§45 Too disgusted
§46 Portrait of No-Face
§47 Chez Panisse
§48 Coprology of critique
§49
Dancing in Your Head
§50 Proposals for a poetics of excarnation
Notes
Book II
Archè
§51 Architectonics of thought
§52 A question of principles
§53 The right to power
§54 What comes from below
§55 Cosmic anarchy
§56 Surveilling the world
§57 Now, dig!
§58 One must make distinctions
§59 Back to the basement one started from
§60 For a decomposed architecture
§61 A world of constraints
§62 Of deconstruction
§63 The shithouse stage of design
§64 Functionalism of critique
§65 To be and to be duty-bound
§66 Phantoms against phantoms
§67 Kindly pay in advance
§68 Freemasonry & Co.
§69 Spirit, are you there?
§70 Just anything
§71 Assigning blame
§72 Ever more
§73 Green cabbage and cabbage greens, or, Six of one, half dozen of the other
§74 Second antinomy of critique
§75
Ergründen
and
Abgründen
§76 Running out of steam
§77 Ground Zero
§78 Factishes of all lands. . .
§79 This is inadmissible
§80 Elements of anarchic cosmology
§81 To infinitize again
§82 Adieu to philosophy
§83 The weather takes a turn for the worse
§84 Delete as appropriate
§85 Method of the madness
§86 Quite presumed
§87
The Blade
§88 Each time unique, the beginning of the world
§89 Less than nothing, more than everything
§90 Maximalist manifesto
Notes
Book III
Nomos
§91 I think, therefore I judge
§92 From
dikazein
to
krinein
§93 Putting order into effect
§94 The institution of crisis
§95 Politics of philosophy
§96 Servants of the
nomos
§97 To death!
§98
Cui bono
§99 Inquisition everywhere, justice nowhere
§100 On the guarantee
§101 Green cabbage and cabbage greens, or, Six of one, half dozen of the other (2)
§102 Critique of prejudicial reason
§103 The Treaty of Osnabrück
§104 The origins of geometry
§105 Force of rule
§106 At the limit
§107 Kant the surveyor
§108 Necessity of the
Bestimmung
§109 Third antinomy of critique
§110 What is necessary is necessary
§111 Lethal weapon
§112
Dikaian krisis krinate
§113 Listen to the
logos
§114 Cosmic shortcut
§115 Behind the truth
§116 The engineering of Creation
§117 Onward and upward!
§118 After the law
§119 One does not know what one can do
§120 Ever new
§121 Introduction to jurifuturism
§122 Protasis and apodosis
§123 Post-truth
§124 To work!
§125 Everything you always wanted to know about modernity, but were afraid to ask
§126 How does one evolve in chaos?
§127
Kekkai
§128 On the other side
§129 Cosmopoetics and transnodality
§130 Postface to transgression
Notes
Book IV
Gramma
§131 Alas!
§132 Ludology of reality
§133 Ow, ow, ow!
§134 The madman and the poet
§135 From the book to the Book
§136 Controversy surrounding faith
§137 There is only the outside of the text
§138 Including the unknowable
§139 Whereof one cannot speak, one speaks about it all the same
§140 The method of detection
§141 All culpable
§142 Redemption!
§143 For an ugly realism
§144 Thanatography
§145 The shittiness of things
§146 The semiology of irenicism
§147 All language is fascist
§148 “There is nothing outside the text”
§149 Fourth antinomy of critique
§150 To abjure language
§151
Cherchez la fiction!
Seek the fiction!
§152 Silence, it’s talking
§153 Weird realism 2.0
§154 It’s implausible!
§155 From top to bottom
§156 Uncertainties and inconsistencies
§157 A little further to the east
§158
Water Margin
§159 A history without end
§160 Comic of lucidity
§161 Anti-vitalism
§162 Toward objectality
§163 An encounter
§164 To become poem
§165 Of life in the fore-worlds
§166 Still and always
§167 In praise of space opera
§168 More than anything
§169 Assholes & Co.
§170 Infrastructuralism redux
Notes
Book V
Epistémè
§171 Politics of the boudoir
§172
Libido sciendi
§173 The art of striptease
§174
Mehr Licht!
§175 Program for a policing of the hole
§176 You won’t fool me there
§177 Porn rationalism
§178 On cretinism as a postulate
§179 Algorithmic anthropology
§180 The solitude of reason
§181
Cherchez la forme!
Seek the form!
§182 The product of a minus and a minus is a plus
§183 What is an argument?
§184 Theory of the therefore
§185 Introduction to the
catuṣkoṭi
§186 How it works
§187 Dialetheic manifesto
§188 Fifth antinomy of critique
§189 The non-duped err
§190 Postcritique 1.0
§191 Prolegomena to general semantics
§192 For a quantum thought
§193 Beyond reality
§194 What the gods do
§195 May-be
§196 Brrrr!
§197 Menace contra menace
§198
Mobilis in mobile
§199 Questions of scale
§200 Anything goes
§201 To stir shit up
§202
Il pensiero debole
, or, weak thought
§203 Return to. . .
§204 In praise of departure
§205 What if . . . ?
§206 It’s too easy
§207 The coming infrastructuralism
§208 Another chaos is possible
§209 Who cares
§210 Royal flush
Notes
Epilogue
Sophia
§211 A wooden sword
§212 Once critique, always critique
§213 In the zone
§214 Everything happens
§215 Toward a new obscurantism
§216 Take a chance, give it a try
§217 So that was it!
§218 Acceleration!
§219 To be done with the assholes
§220 …
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Dedication
Bruno Latour, in memoriam
Superweak
Thinking in the 21st Century
Laurent de Sutter
Translated by Robert Hughes
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in French as Superfaible by Flammarion. Copyright © Laurent de Sutter, 2023. All rights reserved.
This English translation © Polity Press, 2026.
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6646-4 – hardback
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6647-1 – paperback
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2025933644
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
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Quote
“Critique is easy, but art is difficult.” Philippe Néricault Destouches
“Critique is easy, and art even more so.” Louis Scutenaire
INTRODUCTIONKratè
§1A brief encounter at Ichijō-ji
“I only have one thing to teach you, and it is this: you are too strong. Do you understand me, Musashi? The way of the sword is the way of man. Being strong doesn’t last forever. You are too strong. Truly, you are too strong.” Miyamoto Musashi turned pale. Each of the words the monk threw in his face struck him like the blows without count that he had rained down upon others – but he did not understand why they should affect him so. All his life, he had trained to master the art of the sword so that he could defeat and triumph over any who dared face him in combat. He succeeded and became the greatest swordsman in Japan. Yet the taunts of the monk rekindled the doubt that he had smothered one day long ago. He had thought that the way of the katana required him to master every gesture, every breath; he had become the very sword he used to cut down his adversaries. Even as it meted out death, the sword brought life to the one who seized upon its energies and its curves, its plenitude and its void, its beginning and its end – or so Musashi had thought. But with a few words, the monk had reduced this self-certainty to nothing; the unyielding strength the young rōnin had learned to cultivate was transformed into a wince – worse: it assumed the face of the very impasse that the discipline of the sword should allow one to avoid. Musashi trained to become Japan’s most powerful samurai – but in achieving this, he had lost all access to the way of life to which he aspired. In becoming too strong, he had lost life as such. All this time, he had failed to grasp the most elementary lesson: that life is not a question of strength – indeed: that it is the contrary of all strength. In life, one never wins; in life, triumph is a vanity – as is the greatness one hopes to derive from it.
§2The Musashi posture
When Yoshikawa Eiji wrote his epic romance of Musashi’s life1 and decided to include the encounter with the monk Nikkan, it was as a sort of moral fable. To the furious arrogance of the rōnin, he wanted to oppose the ironic wisdom of a Buddhist monk, to suggest that wisdom, if it exists at all, must pass through an examination from the outside, an exterior to our obsessions. But it was a fable whose scope went far beyond a simple lesson in balance and modesty: it implied a general relation with the world. Underscoring the vanity of strength, suggesting that life is in the first instance a defeat, sneering at the possibility of greatness – collectively, these indicate a posture, a physical and mental position. One might say there is a “Musashi posture” proper to all individuals standing up and facing the world as if they expect it to justify itself to them – even if it ends up crushing them just like anyone else. This posture was not exclusive to Japan at the start of the twentieth century, to its aggressive desire for death, or to the spirituality it sought in its syncretism of Shinto, Buddhism, and philosophical thought. It was a posture that could be found wherever issues of truth, beauty, or action were interpreted in the manner of a physics equation, in which it is only the forces that are present that count. Between the Japan of the Shōwa era (when Yoshiwara wrote) and that of the Edo period (when Musashi lived), a temporal arc embracing all of modernity could be traced. To this temporal arc, one might add a geographical one, starting from Japan and encompassing the entire globe: an arc which would define a zone of the arrogance of strength and the forgetfulness of life. This double arc, it must be said, was, and still is, the one within which we think.
§3A surplus of strength
The age in which we live – however we understand this “we” – bears witness to the triumph of the Musashi posture. Wherever an equanimity, intelligence, or reconciliation with a world larger than us prevails, the same obsession with strength is in evidence. This obsession, however, does not direct itself upon the means through which humanity might crush or destroy; it is not an obsession with the violence or pollution that has marked almost the entirety of its history. Rather, it is the obsession with the possibility of detaching oneself – an obsession with creating a space situated somehow above the mediocrity of our fellow human beings, their morbid impulses, and their senseless actions. The strength of one who wins every time is a strength whose prime characteristic is that it encounters no real resistance: it is a literally inexorable strength – a surplus of strength. We have, in fact, become superstrong. There can be nothing placed before our eyes or submitted to our curiosity that is not subject to an examination in which we alone are judge, jury, and executioner, and with no possibility of appeal. Nothing can resist us: the greatest work of art, the most heroic action, the noblest enterprise, the most impeccable figure – their superlativeness pertains only so long as we grant that it be so. Each of us, everywhere in the world, whatever our wealth or poverty, our culture or our ignorance, our effective power or lack of the same – we are stronger than all. Superstrength is the contemporary condition of human being – a condition of thought, a way of looking and reflecting, a system of evaluation. Above all, it is a space: a sort of mental gymnasium where, like Musashi, we move our warrior body with the same pitilessness as the rōnin felt for his adversaries.
§4Critique and modernity
One might well ask if there was something new in the human obsession with strength – even dating it back to the dawn of modern times. It is a notable fact, however, that the era in which Musashi fought duel upon duel was also the era in which, on the other side of the globe, a philosophical project was launched which took strength as its explicit object. This was the project of critique, a project of great prestige and certainly among the greatest theoretical successes of modernity. There is even something of a synonym there: modernity could only ever be a critical modernity. From its birth at the end of the sixteenth century, the critical project spread first in literate circles, then in popular ones, until it constituted the fundamental basis of everything that matters to contemporary society: education, the press, politics, the arts, and so on. From theater to design, from political theory to rhetoric, from literature to the social sciences, the critical project constitutes the default system for all thought processes enjoying any degree of respectability. Historians, for their part, have shown the importance of the role it played in their original conception, their development, and their evolution – how it was decisive in opening up an exit ramp from the age of religious, political, and scientific dogma.2 Absent the possibility of critical thought, we would forever be delivered over, bound and tied, to the power of authorities who, in the name of God, the Law, or the True, claim the capacity to distinguish the thinkable from the unthinkable, the possible from the impossible, the sayable from the unsayable. If modernity can be defined as the journey we have undertaken in our move away from dogmatics, then critique must be accorded its due praise. This merit, however, scarcely conceals a difficulty, a problem, a whispering unsettlement – one that ever more insistently arises from the overthrow of dogmatism and the restitution, to each person, of the authority to think. Authority – in other words, strength.
§5Reason: being right
Critique is the materiel of superstrength. The absolute omnipresence of critique compels this assessment in all domains of the thinkable – therefore also of the sayable, and therefore also of the possible. It is thanks to critique that our gaze, our palate, our hearing, our sense of touch, indeed the whole panoply of our senses, encounter the phenomena within their scope as inferiors – as migrants, as it were, subject to our validation. Faced with a world of things and sensations, it is we who have the power to decide what is worthy and what is not, what is acceptable and what is not, what is beautiful or what is not – even if we qualify our judgment as pertaining “for me.” In actuality, it is never merely “for me” that we judge. If we judge, it is for the very fact of judging – it is because our regime of thought is now entirely structured by the logic of judgment.3 If critique is the materiel of superstrength, this is because we no longer possess any other; its omnipresence, within the space of the thinkable, has crushed all possibility of assuming any posture other than that of Musashi. In rejecting the authority of dogmas, the moderns have wholly submitted themselves to an anti-dogma, as one would speak of an antipope: the anti-dogma of reason – the ordering of thought in accordance with the possibility of being right. By defending a new conception of reason, critique has resulted above all in defending the capacity of reason to triumph over everything that is not reason – or, to be more precise, to triumph over everything that fails to conform to the functional specifications that support reason’s ability to make evaluations. To critique is to be right – it is to feel the intoxication of the powerful asset that reason provides to those who accept its supremacy: the intoxication of the impossibility of resistance.4No one can reason against reason.
§6Virality of critique
Even so, the critical program seems to be showing signs of exhaustion. If superstrength ought to have assured us of our capacity to rise ever higher in the face of the world, it now increasingly resembles the wince that made Musashi blanch. We realize, in a confused, almost embarrassed way, that being right is useless – now that everyone, everywhere and all the time, can lay claim to the same authority or the same power that we claim for ourselves. The democratization of reason, proceeding through modernity alongside the development of critique, has produced a general stalemate: at this point, to be reasonable and right means taking the view that those who counter us with their own claims upon reason and rightness must be wrong on principle. This wrong, however, remains unlocatable, because the omnipresence of reason has obscured its every trace and possibility; henceforth, the triumph of critique also marks the unadulterated triumph of a reason now left to its own devices and its own ineffable delirium. How can one be right when reason has never had any other purpose than to deploy itself through the bodies that seized upon it for a weapon? How can anyone be right when reason alone can be right? Subjects who imagined themselves armed with the greatest strength awakened to find themselves embarrassed by a logic within which they functioned only as powerless vectors, like creatures carrying what might properly be called a “virus.” Out of the spiral movement that critique had organized, where the interrogation of reason’s conditions of possibility had become an interrogation of everything that could claim to evade it, what remained was but the desiccated, bloodless corpse of the superstrong ensnared by the very thing that had given them their strength. The result was the critique of critique – a critique that each new gyration of the spiral sought to surpass, while forcing itself in the more deeply.
§7Five weaknesses
Perhaps it is time to declare that the age of critique is over. Whatever its legacy, at this point it can offer us little more than the agitation of its advocates coming from a place of the profound sacrifice of possibility. To make such a claim, however, calls for an inquiry into something that has arguably been overlooked about critique and what it might offer us – in particular, about what brought us to such a pass that critique now abandons us, leaving us bound and tied. This inquiry would not focus on the discovery of a culprit, fault, or crime, even if this is precisely what critique has continually urged as the only legitimate protocol for thought. There is no mystery to critique, nothing to finally unveil before the eyes of one and all. What we find instead is a weakness, a kind of taint that is almost ethical, but which critique’s self-assurance has continually ignored, even as respecting it might perhaps have changed everything. In the present book, this weakness will be seen to present five different faces. The first is an aesthetic face: the view that critique is first and foremost a question of the body grappling with a general organization of movements that determine which gestures are possible and which impossible. The second presents a political face: the structuring of a space in which these bodies are deployed around an axis whose primary function is archic. The third has a juridical face: linkages between the structuring of this space and a necessary geometry that condemns thought to an obsession with limits. The fourth presents a textual face: a theory of language inscribing its possible uses within a hierarchy whose dominant pole is realism. The fifth, finally, is epistemic: the submission of everything to the requirements of argument and justification.
Traits of critique
Face
Actor
Operation
Product
Problem
Aesthetic
Body
Incarnation
Attitude
Posture
Political
Space
Subtraction
Order
Foundation
Juridical
Law
Judgment
Death
Limit
Textual
Language
Impossibility
Reality
Cessation
Epistemic
Argument
Distinction
Strength
Overhang
§8We are the detritus
To identify these five faces of critical weakness is not merely to declare a fundamental debility of critique; their function, rather, is to underscore what the deepening of critique has led to as a loss, even as it would have been admissible to take note of it and learn its lessons. If we were to examine the strange posture forced upon us by our unconditional adherence to critical reason’s appetite for itself, we might put into words the tensions that we have always felt in sustaining it. It should also allow us to articulate something that might look like a postcritical horizon – a call whose form would no longer be that of a program to implement but that of a perspective to be desired, an opening to explore, an ignorance to grasp. We might call this horizon superweak, as opposed to the superstrong condition that has ensnared us. This opposition refuses the frontality of denunciation or overcoming, of contempt or declarations of nullity. It is not a question of celebrating the frail, the fragile, or the sickly, against the valorization of strength, sturdiness, and solidity which has run all through critical modernity. It is, to the contrary, another test or challenge, another excess, another super. Rather than a negative weakness, taking the form of a remainder, or even a surrender, it should be possible to imagine an affirmative weakness – a way of digging into the world precisely from the place where it is digging into us, and where we have continually accomplished the opposite. Criticalism has been a philosophical extractivism. Perhaps the time has come to let ourselves be extracted from a world which we have long preferred to annex to our thinking, instead of accepting that we ourselves are the annex. We are the detritus of the world – waste which, for too long, has tried to transform the world into a waste dump made in our own image.
§9Kant fatigue
This inquiry into superweakness will take us along lengthy detours into strange materials and exotic places – some of them seemingly unrelated to contemporary concerns. It will demand short-circuits, sudden leaps, and frivolous expositions as much as it will require close reasoning or precise theses; perhaps, here and there, it will even call for a little critique. One ghost hovers over each of its turns: that of Immanuel Kant and the late monument to critique that he published in the years around the French Revolution – a monument that was both an accomplishment and a tombstone. Kant, you say? Again, you say? Indeed. But it is likely that rather few will recognize this Kant – a Kant shattered, as if inverted, such that the most important elements will find themselves relegated to oblivion and the most insignificant details elevated to the rank of decisive symptoms. Ours, however, is not an inquiry into Kant, or even around him; it is an inquiry in which a few necessary returns to Kant will allow the recalibration of our instruments for measuring the legacy of critique. Because he finally formalized the links between reason, judgment, critique, and the posture of the subject, Kant remains what we might call the benchmark of a long movement which began two centuries before him, and which we ourselves have inherited. Kant himself did not invent critique and he did not perfect it. He merely presented the formal system, once all the precursory elements from two hundred years of questioning had been arranged – but, for that very reason, Kant offers it as a summation. This summation, because it has been celebrated as one of the crowning glories of modernity, must thus be restored to its place as a simple reminder for an era that no longer needs it – a Post-it note on a fridge now abandoned to disuse.
§10Beyond
What will come in its place? We will find out in the end. This inquiry will not conclude at its outset. But it is already possible to say this: if one is to imagine a regime of thought no longer bound by critical specifications, then this regime of thought will imply a different design of the space in which it is deployed. It will also imply another system of circulation, another way of deciphering what we encounter, another relation to exploration or experimentation, another concept of reality, and even a different way of articulating the conclusions of thought. We can anticipate that these shifts will give rise not so much to a new system or a new logic as to a disorderly tangle of propositions evading any system or any logic. Finally, we can foresee that defeat, or loss, will play a role here, once the valorization of triumph that critique has defended in favor of reason is reassigned to its somewhat infantile place. Results of an inquiry are very rarely glorious; there is no cause to imagine anything different in the present case – even if the sense to be given to the absence of glory will be perhaps a little unexpected. In any case, we do know that all this will come in fives – that the five weaknesses of critique will be matched by five superweaknesses of postcritique, which will, at once, encompass them and cancel them out. Since critique has claimed to explain, understand, justify, and delimit everything, postcritique will no doubt imply neither explaining nor understanding, neither justifying nor delimiting – no more than it will imply condemning, judging, executing, or destroying. The only hope that accompanies it is that the void it is about to create will be a void that once again arouses a longing to think in the broadest sense one can give to this word: that of a beyond.
Notes
1
Yoshikawa Eiji,
Musashi: An Epic Novel of the Samurai Era
, trans. Charles Terry, New York: Kodansha, 2012.
2
Concerning the importance of the critical revolution, often confounded with what we call the “Lumières,” “Aufklärung,” or “Enlightenment,” the bibliography is immense. For a vital recent example, see: Jonathan I. Israel,
Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750
, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
3
Peter Sloterdijk,
Critique of Cynical Reason
, trans. Michael Eldred, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. xxxii.
4
Rita Felski,
The Limits of Critique
, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015; Armen Avanessian,
Overwrite: Ethics of Knowledge, Poetics of Existence
, trans. Nils F. Schott, London: Sternberg, 2017; Diana Stypinska,
On the Genealogy of Critique: or How We Have Become Decadently Indignant
, London: Routledge, 2020. See also Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (eds.),
Critique and Postcritique
, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017; and Laurent de Sutter (ed.),
Postcritique
, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2019.
BOOK IPhusis
§11What is critique?
On May 27, 1978, Michel Foucault delivered, at the invitation of the Société française de philosophie, a lecture that historians of thought consider to be one of the most important of the last period of his work. Its title, “What is Critique?,” soberly indicated its purpose: to formulate, for the present time, a precise definition of critique, beyond such “small-scale polemical-professional activities” as the “high-Kantian enterprise.”1 For Foucault, there could be no doubt that critique constituted a radical rupture in the history of thought – though this rupture was not to be confounded with the philosophical manifestations of the day. He saw this rupture unfolding between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as a movement in the geography of “relations” that subjects sustained with everything – or with almost everything: “a certain way of thinking, saying, and acting, a certain relationship to what exists, to what we know, and to what we do, a relationship to society and culture, a relationship to others as well.”2 Far from being just a philosophical interrogation of the foundations of knowledge or reason’s conditions of possibility, critique was the activity through which relations with everything were seen to be profoundly reconfigured. Three authorities, in particular, were called into question by this reconfiguration: the religious, legal, and scientific authorities, whose entitlement to institute and impose a given state of relations with everything was effectively revoked.3 Critique, as Foucault explained, constitutes a resistance opposing itself to the given character of relations with everything – a resistance based on the idea that any relation can always receive a new face, a new form: any relation is always just a certain relation. To critique is to resist the supposed necessary character of given relations – it is to resist the forces that would govern them.
§12Subjects with an attitude
In his lecture, Foucault makes recourse to a rather unexpected concept to synthesize the new mode of relation to authority that he saw emerging around the sixteenth century: the concept of “attitude.”4 Since critique liked to think of itself as an interrogation on the state of relations with everything, such an interrogation could hardly limit itself to theoretical discussion alone; it necessarily implicated the totality of constituent dimensions of the subject. To speak of attitude allowed one to underscore that the critical resistance opposed to the governing of relations was also a resistance of languages and tongues, a resistance of hands and bodies – a resistance as much physical as it was philosophical. It is the subjects themselves who are critical – not just their thoughts or ideas. This was why the definition that Foucault gave of critique put great emphasis on the idea of “desubjectification”: the attitude of the critical subject was precisely the attitude of subjects who no longer let themselves be considered as subjects without reacting.5 This reaction, however, should not in principle be one of revolt, negation, or flight; the critical attitude, to the contrary, was rather a kind of distrust or suspicion – a restrained refusal that Foucault described as “the art of not being governed quite so much.”6 The critical attitude is the attitude of a body deploying, in all its dimensions, the possible articulation of a relation not given to everything – and deploying it by turning its back, when judged necessary, upon the claims of authorities who seek to govern it. The critical subject is the subject who declines to pay the price of governing before the latter has provided a list of services and benefits to be obtained from it – because the subject now has the means to demand it. The desubjectified subject is a subject who has found in the critical attitude a means to resist the governmentalizing tendency of the authorities.
§13Being, at the limit
But what were these means? What was this new strength which now allowed the subject to recognize an advantageous moment and rise up in the face of authorities whose propensity for brutality was as natural as night and day? This was a line of inquiry that Foucault never directly pursued. In a different lecture, “What is Enlightenment?,” which he gave in the United States in the year or so before his death, he put some elements on the table from which we might construct a partial answer.7 He returned to the concept of attitude to propose an equation, missing from “What is Critique?,” between “critique” and “modernity.” The critical attitude, he explained, is the “attitude of modernity,” in the sense that modernity signifies the “permanent reactivation” of a way of being, a mode of life, in which the primary movement is the “permanent critique” of “man’s historical mode of being.”8 From these sibylline notes, we might deduce that, in Foucault’s eyes, the critical subject was, in the first instance, a subject that took itself as a target. More precisely: a subject that always began by desubjectifying itself. It is true that critique exceeds the limits of philosophy, but this is so insofar as the excess returns the subject to its place at the limit of philosophy – where philosophy fails to define it completely, as a “being.” We might say that the critique of being is the being of critique, in the same way that a refusal of governing is a refusal of self-governing – of government of the self by the self, of the subject by the subject, of the being by the being. In consequence, the critical attitude should be understood as the attitude of one who stands at the limit of the self, insofar as this self cannot confine an individual within its limits. The critical attitude is the attitude of one who is, at the limit.
§14Modes of life
To be, at the limit, is thus to no longer be completely; it is already no longer really part of the world in which being decides everything and confers authority upon those powers that decide in its name or on its basis. If critique constituted such a radical rupture in the history of the West (and, perhaps, of the world), this is because the desubjectification that it organized inverted the coordinates of change. It was not power that was to be shattered, but the subjects themselves – because what is power when it no longer has subjects upon whom to exercise itself? Critique had removed the subjects from power – and, in so doing, it supplied them with a new strength, which was precisely the strength of the limit where they were now situated. To be at the limit of being, to fashion one’s life beyond the coordinates fixed by being, not to be entirely a subject: the critical attitude, in shattering ontology, had transformed power into a simple question of manner – of ēthos, that is. To the manner of governing, subjects opposed a way of life – a mode of life which made, out of its permanent surpassing, an ethics without which there could be no possible desubjectification. Critical attitude was thus the attitude of the mode of life – the attitude of life as a mode situated at the limit of being, where it tips over into that which exceeds it and thus transforms it into something other than itself. At the limit, thanks to critique, the West left the domain of being in order to enter the mode, the modality, of “a certain relation” and of the test which is possible to make of it when one is modern. To renounce authority, in this context, did not constitute a simple political or theoretical tipping point – but a true fall, a passage from ontology to ethology, or even, as Foucault himself said, to ethics, to the art of “virtue.”9 With critique, the West entered into the age of the strength of ēthos.
§15For an ethics of the dandy
Because the body marks the place where the limit of the subject passes, it is also the body that must account for the critical attitude – the body where, precisely, it forms a limit: its surfaces and its vestiture. In order to define the attitude of modernity, Foucault selects as his model a figure that historiography is hardly accustomed to considering as an example of revolt or resistance – at least, in the ordinary sense given to these words. This was the figure of Charles Baudelaire – and the model that Baudelaire offered for a better understanding of the critical attitude was none other than the dandy whose features he had painted in My Heart Laid Bare and “The Painter of Modern Life.”10 In Foucault’s eyes, however, there was more to the Baudelairean dandy than simple theatrical affectation; there was a real attitude – in the sense of a passage to the limit of being in the mode of life, from a politics of resistance to an ēthos of desubjectification. Above all, the dandy, in a permanent quest for invention, is the one who incarnates, in the most exact way, the idea of the displacement of relations to everything by the displacement of the relationship to oneself – becoming a sort of work of art beyond the work of art. If the critical attitude is the attitude of the dandy, this is because the dandy is the experimenter of the self – in the sense of the movement that he ceaselessly imposes at the limit of his own being as well as his own capacity to reinvent it. The “permanent critique” of “man’s historical mode of being,” of which Foucault spoke, if it presented itself as an ethics, must be immediately understood as an aesth-éthique – as an ēthos enveloping the question of art as the very place of the passage to the limit of being or of the subject. To be at the limit is to take the mode of life to the limit – and to take the mode of life to the limit is to take the mode to the limit, as a complete, incipient, realization of art.
§16Incorporating the aesthetic
Thus it was necessary to understand this: the advent of critique, as the advent of an attitude, was not, in the first place, the advent of a politics, a knowledge, or even an ethics; or, rather, if it was all of these, it was like so many singular expressions of an aesthetic.11 In critique, aesthetics is preeminent – because it is from its character of experimentation-at-the-limit that all other reconfigurations of relations can be reconstructed: with respect to the authorities, to reason, to others, and even to oneself. To understand critique, then, one must understand the way in which aesthetics, which appeared together with it at the end of the sixteenth century, constituted the guiding principle behind the upheaval in the relations with everything. Aesthetics is not the final moment of critique – the moment in which it bears witness to the logic of preference and rejection, taste and aversion, beauty and ugliness, through which subjects express their relation to the ornaments of a world. Quite the contrary. Aesthetics is critique’s original moment – the inaugural scene in which are deployed the first virtual forms of desubjectification and the first vague wishes to set up that-which-is at the limit. By singling out the figure of the Baudelairean dandy as the incarnation of the attitude of modernity, Foucault merely indicated the terminus ad quem, the end point, of a process that had been set in motion three centuries earlier, as he himself had emphasized. The dandy was the perfect figure of critique – but this perfection itself required a long intellectual journey before it could be formulated in terms of a modernity of the limit and experimentation – that is, of an incorporation of aesthetics. To understand the advent of critique, it was thus necessary to understand the advent of aesthetics – to reread its appearance and development in light of the idea of attitude, as if it were coextensive with it.
§17Giudizio and gusto
In a celebrated article from 1961, “Judgment and Taste in Cinquecento Art Theory,” Robert Klein offered a preliminary description, still in good standing today, of the early stirrings which led to the co-emergence of aesthetics and critique at the same historical moment.12 This description was based on an analysis of lexical shifts discernible among writers and thinkers in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, who, in writing about artistic creation, came to concentrate their interest more on “taste” (“gusto”) than on “judgment” (“giudizio”). From Leonardo to Alberti, from Poliziano to Aretino, Petrarch, or Tasso, a new necessity came into play, one which aimed to establish a then-unprecedented relationship with works of the mind and spirit, a relationship no longer about recognizing the deference that works showed toward supposedly timeless rules. Up to the end of the Renaissance, European art had been an objective art, in the sense that the qualities, merits, or virtues of its works were judged for their conformity to criteria external to the works themselves. Given that only the work’s objective deference to the rules made it possible to distinguish between greatness and mediocrity, to establish a relationship with a work of art was thus to establish a protocol for measuring respect for these rules. In the objective regime of art, works constituted pieces detached from reality – things whose own existence called for their own system of evaluation, without establishing a specific relationship with those who had produced or judged them. The world of the giudizio was split in two: on one side, there were the works encompassed by rules which determined their greatness; on the other side, there were human beings whose task was to implement them. Before the advent of “taste,” the relationship to art was a non-relation – a simple contiguity.
§18The logic of incarnation
What Klein saw at work among the thinkers and artists of the Cinquecento was, precisely, a move to suture this absence of relation – a shift toward an involvement of individuals in the works by means of gusto. When Michelangelo, in one of his amorous sonnets addressed to the young Tommaso dei Cavalieri, wrote that “Il buon gusto e si raro / C’al vulgo errante cede / In vista, allor che dentro de si gode” (“Good taste is now so rare that it must yield / To vulgar emptiness; oh, but it does / Outwardly only, for, within, it keeps / Its alien happiness”), he was testifying to this shift.13 For Michelangelo, to speak of taste was a way to speak of a form of election or capture – an event seizing the individual whose “vision” had encountered some being or thing and generated enjoyment or jouissance. Thereafter, the relationship to what one could see was no longer a simple non-relation, the simple expression of an objective judgment; instead it manifested the fact that one had been traversed – an emotion of the body translated better than anything else the fact that there had been a relationship and that this relationship was singular. This traversal, however, should not be considered the exclusive privilege of the spectator; on the contrary, as Klein emphasized, it involved just as much, if not more, from the creators themselves, whose own traversal conferred upon the work the status of an “unintentional self-portrait.”14 What the spectator experienced in taste, in gusto, was the flavor of the creators as such – insofar as the work translated their own taste, their own involvement, their own incarnation. In taste, there is a communication of bodies through the interface that constitutes the work – a communication at once so strong and so subtle that, as Michelangelo emphasized, it is available to only a small number of individuals. The vulgar, for their part, can only recoil before the immensity of the experience confronting them.
§19The ordeal of judgment
The bodily involvement at the heart of the new relationship to artistic creation did not entail the complete supersession of the previously prevailing regime, however. Quite the contrary. As Klein insisted, the advent of gusto, far from marking the end of giudizio, instead conditioned its metamorphosis into another instrument of measure, one less oriented toward respect for the rules and more oriented to the reality of an experience. What bodies undergo, as they are traversed in the ordeal of taste, follows from a judgment – but a judgment that, so to speak, operates on its own, as such, and without recourse to any external authority whatsoever. However, as before, the giudizio does indeed support making a distinction or discrimination – expressing the quality of an experience and hence the quality of subjects who share it. No doubt it was necessary to go even further: if the gusto ended up swallowing the giudizio, this was because, in the relationship among bodies being traversed, the only conceivable judgment was a judgment of taste – much in the same way that, for its part, taste could only culminate in judgment. At the end of the Cinquecento, a refiguration in the relation of taste and judgment took place, a folding over of one onto the other, such that the absence of any rule of judgment was mitigated by the demand that one exercise judgment as such. This was the rule necessitated by taste – One must make judgments – else one risked not being able to discriminate between good and bad taste, between the vulgar and those who were sensitive to taste as such. The experience of taste is thus the experience of judgment – because at the moment of judgment one can speak to the traversal and testify to a relationship that sorts the world of subjects into two distinct groups, one more fully subject than the other. For persons of taste in the sixteenth century, to judge was to incarnate – it was to return to the body that which had come out of it from another side.
§20Of defiance
To describe the shift from giudizio to gusto, Klein resorted to the lexicon of critique – he wrote of “critical consciousness,” “the critical function,” and “critical language.” This was no error of anachronism or careless haste.15 In the movement that animated artists and thinkers of the Cinquecento, the contours of what Foucault later called “attitude” were already discernible. Its features took shape as importance was assigned to the bodily experience of art and the establishing of a new relationship where once only non-relation had reigned – but it also formed through what Klein described as a “defiance” with respect to rules inherited from a tradition that had lost its potency.16 For Michelangelo as for others, adherence to the rules had to be replaced by a sort of distancing – a voluntary vacating that might restore a place for the subject within an experience that had been expropriated and reassigned to the authorities. To speak of “taste” meant to speak of what took place in the encounter with a work of art – and not of its greater or lesser academic perfection, its greater or lesser adherence to formal or technical canons unrelated to those who complied with them. This is not to say that individuals were given carte blanche, however: as we have seen, taste asserted itself as the key to making judgments that would sort works and subjects according to what they produce. On the other hand, this meant that, in place of the descending movement of objective judgments handed down, the key induced another movement, circular or spiral, in which subjects were compelled both to look and to look at themselves. Subjects are those who are able to speak to their taste. They can give reasons for it and, in giving reasons and giving an account of their experience, they give themselves. They both reflect and self-reflect.
§21The time of reflection
Critique begins as a movement of reflection in judgment: this was the lesson that Klein offered for our meditation – a lesson that lexicography more or less confirms, since the Cinquecento also marked the appearance of the word “critique” in most European languages. A few decades after Michelangelo wrote of “buon gusto” in his poem to Cavalieri, Shakespeare mocked the figure of the “critic” in Love’s Labours Lost and, in the first two books of his Essays
