We are living in an age of crisis―or an age in which everything is labeled a crisis. Financial, debt, and refugee “crises” have erupted. The word has also been applied to the Arab Spring and its aftermath, Brexit, the 2016 U.S. election, and many other international events. Yet the term has contradictory political and strategic meanings for those challenging power structures and those seeking to preserve them. For critics of the status quo, can the rhetoric of crisis be used to foment urgency around issues like climate change and financialization, or does framing a situation as a “crisis” play into the hands of the existing political order, which then seeks to tighten the leash by creating a state of emergency?
Critical Theory at a Crossroads presents conversations with prominent theorists about the crises that have marked the past years, the protest movements that have risen up in response, and the use of the term in political discourse. Tariq Ali, Rosi Braidotti, Wendy Brown, Maurizio Lazzarato, Angela McRobbie, Jean-Luc Nancy, Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière, Saskia Sassen, and Joseph Vogl offer their views on contemporary challenges and how we might address them, candidly discussing the alternatives that new social movements have offered, alongside an exchange between Zygmunt Bauman and Roberto Esposito on theories of community. Sparring over crucial developments in these past years of catastrophe and the calamity of everyday life under capitalism, they shed light on how crises and the discourse of crisis can both obscure and reveal fundamental aspects of modern societies.
Brown, Wendy: - Wendy Brown (PhD, Political Philosophy, Princeton) is Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (Zone, 2015), Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Zone, 2010), and Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Empire and Identity (Princeton, 2006) and coauthor (with Rainer Forst) of The Power of Tolerance (Columbia, 2014), among a number of other titles. Her interests include political theory, critical theory, continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, democratic theory, capitalism, and neoliberalism.
Cauwer, Stijn de: - Stijn de Cauwer (PhD, Literary Studies, Leuven) is Researcher in the Department of Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Leuven. He is the author of A Diagnosis of Modern Life: Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften as a Critical-Utopian Project (Peter Lang, 2014) and the editor of several special issues of journals, including "Immunity, Society and the Arts," Configurations (#25, 2017), "Georges Didi-Hubermann," Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities (2018), and "Immunity and Modernity: Picturing Threat and Protection," Boundary 2: an International Journal of Literature and Culture. He has also published articles in a number of journals, including (in English) Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, Interiors: Design, Architecture and Culture, Studies in Social and Political Thought, and Meridian Critic. He is also the founder and director of IdeaLab: The Biopolitical Condition, a forum for research on contemporary theories about biopolitics.
Nancy, Jean-Luc: - Jean-Luc Nancy (PhD, Philosophy, Toulouse) is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Human Sciences in Strasbourg and the Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Chair and Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School. He is the author of more than 20 books, many of them translated into English, including The Banality of Heidegger (Fordham, 2017), Being Singular Plural (Stanford, 2000), The Sense of the World (Minnesota, 2008), and (with Alain Badiou) German Pgilosophy: A Dialogue (MIT, 2018); he is also a contributor to our successful book Democracy in What Sense? One of the leading French philosophers of our time, he is best known for his writings on psychoanalysis, deconstruction, Heidegger, globalization, Christianity, and the arts.
