Critique Under Duress: What Is the Role of Critique and Radical Critical Theory in the Present of Pathos?

This section looks at critique in times of crisis, taking pathos, knowledge, and duress as the anchors for this consideration. With this scaled up view in mind we ask: what is the role of critique and radical critical theory in the present of pathos?

Building on the analysis of the 2010 Haiti earthquake and Spinoza’s distinction between true/false judgments versus adequate and inadequate knowledge, this chapter proposes ‘super-knowledge’ and ‘super-learning’ as a more nuanced approach to understanding crises: ‘super-’ in the sense of supersession or sublation, to critique not the falsity but the inherent inadequacy and insufficiency of imagination-based thought, to encompass as well general and singular modes of understanding. ‘Super-learning’ defamiliarizes the ways of ‘knowing time,’ working against the dominant ways in which time and temporality of crises are understood, measured, or approached. Super-learning allows us to situate the historical, material, and social constitution of the body at the same time that it names the collective affordances made available by disentangling the temporalities constitutive of and exposed by crisis. In so doing, super-learning helps us to conceptualize what can critique be and do across shared, yet asynchronous, crises, and to see the causes of events and processes, asking: what do crises reveal?