Old Stars in New Settings: The Critical Potential of Post-9/11 Action Comedy

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Jens Bjering
Keyword(s):  
Critical Potential

International Legal Thought

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Kleinlein
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Critical Potential ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

This contribution reflects on the role of tradition-building in international law, the implications of the recent ‘turn to history’ and the ‘presentisms’ discernible in the history of international legal thought. It first analyses how international legal thought created its own tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These projects of establishing a tradition implied a considerable amount of what historians would reject as ‘presentism’. Remarkably, critical scholars of our day and age who unsettled celebratory histories of international law and unveiled ‘colonial origins’ of international law were also criticized for committing the ‘sin of anachronism’. This contribution therefore examines the basis of this critique and defends ‘presentism’ in international legal thought. However, the ‘paradox of instrumentalism’ remains: The ‘better’ historical analysis becomes, the more it loses its critical potential for current international law. At best, the turn to history activates a potential of disciplinary self-reflection.

scholarly journals A transnational judicial public sphere as an idea and ideology: Critical reflections on judicial dialogue and its legitimizing potential

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 186-207
Author(s):  
KNUT TRAISBACH
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
International Courts ◽  
Critical Potential ◽  
Normative Significance ◽  
Judicial Authority ◽  
Cross Fertilization ◽  
Critical Reflections

AbstractThis article sheds a critical light on judicial dialogue when its purpose and meaning are taken beyond cross-fertilization and comparative reasoning. It cautions against a conceptualization of judicial dialogue as a means to foster commonalities between courts and to legitimize judicial governance. The argument develops from an idealized notion of a ‘transnational judicial public sphere’. In this sphere, domestic, regional and international courts ideally form common opinions through dialogue and pursue common purposes. The danger of this understanding is to construct a new paradigm that not only overlooks important differences in the interest, influence and opinion of courts, but also overstates the socio-normative significance of exchanges between courts and of judicial governance in general. The critical potential of judicial dialogues lies less in the formation of commonalities or in the legitimization of judicial authority than in bringing alternatives and a plurality of opinions to the fore.

Adorno’s Philistine: the Dialectic of Art and its Other

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Paul Ingram
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Critical Potential ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Critical Turn ◽  
The Ideal

Abstract Theodor Adorno’s philistine functions as the other of art, or as the ideal embodiment of everything that the bourgeois aesthetic subject is not. He insists on the truth-content of the derogation, while recognising its unjust social foundation, and seeking to reflect that tension in a self-critical turn. His model of advanced art is negatively delimited by the philistinism of art with a cause and the philistinism of art for enjoyment, which represent the poles of the aesthetic and the social. The philistine is also the counterpart to the connoisseur, with the interplay between them pointing to his preferred approach to aesthetics, in which an affinity for art and alienness to it are combined without compromise. However, Adorno fails to realise fully the critical potential of the philistine as the immanent negation of art and aesthetics.

The Crisis in Modern Social Psychology and How to Find It

1996 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 135-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erica Burman
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Potential

The postmodern impulse within the modern discipline of psychology is analysed in this article in relation to the ways in which discourse and qualitative research is accounted for within student practical reports. I take these to exemplify key themes within the discipline that function to ward off the potential challenges of relativism and multiplicity offered by postmodern ideas. I discuss the arena of ‘methods’ as a central pedagogic structure for the filtering of knowledge and the erasing of subjectivity in psychology. After identifying key areas of both continuity and critique between postmodern ideas and psychology, I go on to analyse student accounts of the achievements and limitations of discourse and qualitative research which, alternatively, they claim improve upon, or fail to meet the standards of, psychological rigour and discovery. I argue that these highlight strategies of either incorporation or rejection of the critical potential of, in particular, discourse analysis. By such means ‘the crisis’ in modern social psychology becomes part of the continuing narrative of the discipline that can be identified, researched and ‘found’, rather than the story of the impossibility of its project and the desirability of its demise.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Engelkamp ◽  
Katharina Glaab ◽  
Judith Renner
Keyword(s):  
Critical Approach ◽  
Critical Potential ◽  
Specific Reading ◽  
Normative Evaluation ◽  
One Step ◽  
Made In

AbstractIn their response to our article »Office Hours«, Nicole Deitelhoff and Lisbeth Zimmermann issue three major points of critique towards our proposal of a critical approach to norm research: They criticize, firstly, our discussion of constructivist norm research, secondly, our use of the concepts of local and Western and, thirdly, the overall critical potential of our proposed approach, which they criticize as going merely beyond an unmasking gesture. We take our response to our critics, firstly, as an opportunity to clarify some of the arguments made in our article. Secondly, we confront the points of criticism outlined above and show that Deitelhoff’s and Zimmermann’s critique can only be maintained if one accepts their specific reading of our article. Moreover, it gets tangled up in three major contradictions and is built upon a problematic understanding of the relation between empirical facticity and normative evaluation.

Disrespect and political resistance

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 114 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-60
Author(s):  
Renante D. Pilapil
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
Critical Potential ◽  
Ethics Of Recognition ◽  
Struggle For Recognition ◽  
The Way

This article examines the critical potential of Honneth’s theory or ethics of recognition by raising two concerns as regards the success of such a project. Firstly, this article argues that Honneth’s ethical turn in critical theory might not be completely warranted and that there are good reasons to supplement his theory of recognition with an account of justificatory practices. Secondly, it argues that the complexity of the beginnings of political resistance proves that an explanative gap remains to be filled to account for the way in which personal experience of disrespect can be transformed into a collective struggle for recognition. By way of conclusion, this article posits that instead of rejecting the critical potential of Honneth’s theory, the concerns raised therein are invitations to specify his theory further, so that contemporary struggles for recognition can be understood more profoundly.

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