Across the twentieth century, Western critical theory questioned the values and norms of liberal humanism and liberal institutions. Psychoanalysis, Marxism, Foucauldian genealogies, postcolonial studies: in various ways, all these intellectual movements defined themselves against the prevailing ideology of liberalism, which appeared more or less secure in Western Europe and the United States from World War II through the end of the Cold War. Today, however, the liberal order has fallen into crisis, and the anti-liberal spirit appears stronger on the political right than on the left. Critiques of liberal humanism strikingly similar to those long voiced by critical theorists now infuse technofeudalist politics, conservative jurisprudence, religious revivalism and Christian nationalism, and the ethos of the alt right. Increasingly, the New Right is appropriating a set of philosophical traditions, theories, and critiques conventionally central to a critical theory canon.
This panel considers the origins and contemporary contours of the present intellectual and political situation. What are the legacies of critical theory’s classic arguments and concepts today? How can we understand and respond to the right’s investment in an intellectual corpus shared in part with theory? What happens when subversion and transgression serve a post-liberal agenda? How is an unmasking of power long undertaken by the left justifying an unbridled Realpolitik for leading architects of the New Right? Our papers explore various ways of revising and revitalizing critical theory, rather than abandoning it, in response to changing political conditions.
Each paper focuses on a keyword of critical theory. Jennifer Fleissner begins the panel by considering the shifting nature of “Antihumanism,” which initially emerged as a conservative reaction against secular modernity. With the rise of poststructuralism, a suspicion of the human as a category became a bedrock of much critical theory. Yet today, this left antihumanism is itself undergoing reevaluation. Fleissner charts how a questioning of posthumanism animates everything from ecocriticism to recent debates within Lacanianism and Black Studies. For Fleissner, a renewed embrace of humanism is also crucial to a robust defense of the humanities.
Moira Weigel’s paper grapples with the complicated logic of “Resentment,” the diagnosis of which has long been a staple of critical theory. Through a reception history of Nietzsche and specifically Rene Girard’s reappraisal of Nietzsche’s thought, Weigel shows how Silicon Valley tech elites like Peter Thiel mobilized resentment as part of a pitch to construct the user of online platforms and proselytize a vision of technology as “creative monopoly.” Weigel traces this mindset to the early 1990s culture and canon wars that engulfed the Stanford campus and proved formative to the tech elite networks that today dominate geopolitics.
For Liz Anker, a parallel theory envy within the 1990s legal academy motivated neoliberal scholars like Chicago School of Law & Economics’ Richard Posner to adopt and redeploy certain theories of “Power” crafted by critical theorists. Posner’s circle not only started sympathetically reading Foucault, whose account of the anonymous, decentralized, capillary nature of power became an instruction manual for then-emergent organizations like the Federalist Society. Schmittian accounts of power also furnished an early blueprint for ideas that would flower into the “unitary executive theory” that today offers a key basis for the Roberts Court’s willingness to bless overreach by the second Trump administration.
Examining the stakes of “Disavowal,” Caleb Smith closes the panel by asking whether the disintegration of liberal norms is transforming the conditions for the charge of disavowal. Smith sketches a genealogy of the styles of moral and critical judgment entailed by disavowal, tracing that concept’s centrality to Fanon, Butler, and Foucault. As post-liberal regimes “take off the mask” and openly avow their motives of domination and extraction, accusations of disavowal lose their moral force. Yet the term persists in critical discourse, although to register the diminished efficacy of truth-telling and facts—that is, of critical knowledge itself—in politics.
Papers will intentionally be brief to guarantee ample time for discussion of their big-picture concerns: must critical theory rethink its intellectual (pre)histories as well as certain enabling assumptions and tactics in order to confront the gravest challenges of the present? How should such an endeavor proceed?