crisis and critique

Crisis and Critique, is a journal of political thought and philosophy, appearing two times a year. It has an international audience and readership, authors and editorial board. The journal has gained a reputation for its rigour and perspicacious treatment of the topics it covers. It began in 2011, whereas the first issue was published in 2012. Our commitment is equally between three disciplines: philosophy, psychoanalysis and politics.

“Crisis and Critique”: concepts are of immense importance for philosophical, yet also for political thought. But, especially today it is crucial not too hastily assume one already knows what either means. Both concepts are obviously related to concrete but also rather abstract practices. Both crisis as well as critique are practical concepts that, as we assume, do not have any transhistorical or transcendental status and thus do neither come with a pregiven unchangeable content. Crisis as well as critique must be thought from within a specific contemporary time frame. This frame is the frame of the present. The journal is therefore first and foremost a journal about the present – political, social, aesthetic, and philosophical – we are living in. Yet, in difference to Reinhart Koselleck’s famous book “Critique and Crisis” (1959), that sought to expose the hidden absolutist political agenda inscribed into these seemingly universalist-humanist enlightenment terms, the journal is not primarily occupied with providing genealogies of the present and debunk the true face of the world. Rather, by turning around the order of the terms, “Crisis and Critique” begins from the assumption that today we are facing a massive crisis, not only economic or political, but even a crisis of what previously was referred to a critique and critical engagement. That there is a crisis of critique implies that one has to investigate what this crisis is, how it was brought about and what needs to be done, if this is even possible, to unfold a renewed concept of critique that might be apt to overcome the impasses critical thought ended up with. This will involve a potential revisiting and investigation of all concepts previously deemed critical and examine not only their contemporary explanatory power but also what they still (might) enable us to think. The journal will continually thereby develop a potential weaponry and/or dustbin of philosophical, but also political and psychoanalytic concepts that can generate orientation for the present condition, not only of politics, but of thought.

Editors

Agon Hamza & Frank Ruda

Crisis and Critique appears twice a year.

ISSN 2311-5475

ISSN 2311-8172 (print)