| A Time for Critique Contributor(s): Harcourt, Bernard E. (Editor), Fassin, Didier (Editor) |
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ISBN: 023119126X ISBN-13: 9780231191265 Publisher: Columbia University Press OUR PRICE: $94.05 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: September 2019 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Philosophy | Movements - Critical Theory - Philosophy | Political - Political Science | History & Theory - General |
| Dewey: 142 |
| LCCN: 2018060758 |
| Series: New Directions in Critical Theory |
| Physical Information: 1" H x 6.4" W x 9.3" (1.30 lbs) 320 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: In a world of political upheaval, rising inequality, catastrophic climate change, and widespread doubt of even the most authoritative sources of information, is there a place for critique? This book calls for a systematic reappraisal of critical thinking--its assumptions, its practices, its genealogy, its predicament--following the principle that critique can only start with self-critique. In A Time for Critique, Didier Fassin, Bernard E. Harcourt, and a group of eminent political theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and literary and legal scholars reflect on the multiplying contexts and forms of critical discourse and on the social actors and social movements engaged in them. How can one maintain sufficient distance from the eventful present without doing it an injustice? How can one address contemporary issues without repudiating the intellectual legacies of the past? How can one avoid the disconnection between theory and action? How can critique be both public and collective? These provocative questions are addressed by revisiting the works of Foucault and Arendt, Said and C saire, Benjamin and Du Bois, but they are also given substance through on-the-ground case studies that treat subaltern criticism in Palestine, emancipatory mobilizations in Syria, the antitorture campaigns of Sri Lankan activists, and the abolitionism of the African American critical resistance and undercommons movements in the United States. Examining lucidly the present challenges of critique, A Time for Critique shows how its theoretical reassessment and its emerging forms can illuminate the imaginative modalities to rejuvenate critical praxis. |
Contributor Bio(s): Harcourt, Bernard E.: - Bernard Harcourt (PhD, Political Science, Harvard; JD, Harvard Law School) is Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought at Columbia University. He is the author of Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Harvard, 2015), The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Harvard, 2011), Against Prediction: Punishing and Policing in an Actuarial Age (Chicago, 2007), Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy (Chicago, 2005), and Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken-Window Policing (Harvard, 2001); the coauthor (with W.J.T. Mitchell and Michael Taussig) of Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience (Chicago, 2013); and the editor of Foucault: La societe punitive (Gallimard, 2014), Theories et institutions penales (Gallimard, 2015), and Surveiller et punir (Gallimard, 2015).Fassin, Didier: - Didier Fassin (MD, University of Paris; PhD, Social Sciences, EHESS; Habilitation, Public Health, University of Paris; Habilitation, Social Sciences, EHESS) is the James Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute foe Advanced Study and Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He is the author of When Bodies Remember: Politics and Experience of AIDS in South Africa (California, 2007), Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (California, 2011), Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing (Polity, 2013), Prison Worlds: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition (Polity, 2016), and Life: A Critical User's Manual (Polity, forthcoming) and the coauthor of (with R. Rechtman) The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton, 2009), (with Y. Bouagga) At the Heart of the State: The Moral World of Institutions (Pluto, 2015), and (with M. Lambek, V. Das, and W. Keane) Four Lectures on Ethics: Anthropological Perspectives (Hau, 2015). A former vice president of Medecins Sans Frontieres, he is currently president of the French Medical Committee for Exiles. He was awarded a 2o18 Distinguished Scientist and Scholar Award from the NOMIS Foundation. |