By Roy Ben-Shai
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Date: 02/28/2023
Description:
What is critique? How is it used and abused? At a moment when popular discourse is saturated with voices confronting each other about not being critical enough and while academic discourses proclaim to have moved past critique, this book reawakens the foundational question of what ‘critique’ is in the first place. Roy Ben-Shai inspects critique as an orientation of critical thinking, probing its structures and assumptions, limits and risks, history and possibilities. The book is a journey through a landscape of ideas, images, and texts from the history of philosophy, from Plato and Saint Augustine, through Kant and Hegel, Marx and Heidegger, up to contemporary critical theory. Along the way, Ben-Shai invites the reader to examine their own orientation of thought, even at the moment of reading the book; to question popular discourse; and to revisit the philosophical canon, revealing affinities among often antagonistic traditions, such as Catholicism and Marxism.