Critical Theory in Research

Based on critical theory, this chapter focuses on the first generation of Frankfurt School (mainly to authors such as T.W. Adorno, M. Horkheimer, and W. Benjamin). For discussing methodology in research, these authors are considered more representative than the younger generation (e.g., Habermas and Honneth) mainly because of the renewed interest in the direct critique of society and because of the failure of the younger generation to produce empirical research. The proponents of critical theory establish connections between theory and practice, in the sense that the social content of research must have human dignity at its centre. The difference between method-led and content-led research is discussed and considered central for this kind of approach to empirical research. Feminist research methodologies and critical race methodology are considered as closely associated with critical theory. These different approaches have developed autonomously from critical theory and are not directly related to it. However, feminist research methodologies and critical race methodology are expounded here because of their similarities to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School aimed at providing an emancipatory approach to empirical research.

Psychopathy as a Modus of Human Destructiveness in the Literary and Philosophical Reflection of Postmodernity (Based on the Novels "A Clockwork Orange" by A. Burgess and "The Wasp Factory" by I. Banks)

The sociopolitical circumstances of people's lives are constantly changing, which is studied by science, philosophy and art. The twentieth century is a time of great upheavals that changed the approach to the concept of man and the field of his existence. Philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century pay attention to the destructive nature of state power, its institutions are interpreted as suppressing freedom and consolidating violence as an ideology (the Frankfurt School, J. Baudrillard, S. Zizek, etc.). Another important concept is the interpretation of destructive impulses as a normal component of a person (J. Bataille, Z. Freud, E. Fromm, J. Deleuze, etc.). This idea creates a pattern of behavior that is considered psychopathic in the article. Psychopathy is a genetically determined type of antisocial personality. The phenomenon of psychopathy is a subject not only of scientific study, but also of art: the psychopath became a central character in many works of literature and cinema in the second half of the twentieth century. The article analyzes the novels "A Clockwork Orange" by E. Burgess (1962) and "The Wasp Factory" by I. Banks (1984), where the main characters are teenage psychopaths. The article concludes that these works complement each other, exploring two main areas of human life (the world of the state and the world of the family). It is suggested that by referring to the psychopathic hero, writers describe the changes that take place in society, these changes are also analyzed by philosophers. The fact that psychopathic traits in novels are concentrated in the images of teenagers indicates the possibility of psychopathy developing and spreading in the future.

Critical Scholarship on Terrorism

Understandings of “critical” in critical scholarship on terrorism range from a Frankfurt School–influenced definition to a broader definition that aims to interrogate commonsense understandings of terrorism and counterterrorism. Overall, critical scholarship on terrorism draws on multiple disciplines and methodological traditions to analyze terrorism and counterterrorism. Within these, there have been ongoing debates and discussions about whether the state should be included in research on terrorism and, if so, what the inclusion of the state would do for the understanding of terrorism. Critical scholarship has also outlined the need for further attention to research ethics, as well as urged researchers to acknowledge their standpoints when conducting and communicating research. Some, but not all, critical scholarship has a normative orientation with the goal of emancipation, though the meaning of emancipation remains debated. Methodologically, the majority of critical scholarship on terrorism utilizes an interpretive lens to analyze terrorism and related issues. A central goal of critical terrorism research is to rework power relations such that Global South subjectivities are centered on research. This means including research conducted by Global South scholars and also centering Global South peoples and concerns in analyses of terrorism and counterterrorism. The role of gender, analytically and in practice, in relation to terrorism is also a key part of critical scholarship. Critical scholars of terrorism have observed that race is absent from much of terrorism scholarship, and there needs to be ongoing work toward addressing this imbalance. Media and popular culture, and their depiction of terrorism and counterterrorism, form another key strand in critical scholarship on terrorism. Overall, critical scholarship on terrorism is about scrutinizing and dismantling power structures that sustain commonsense knowledge regarding terrorism.

FEMINISME SEBAGAI KRITIK KAPITALISME: MEMPERKENALKAN TEORI KRITIS NANCY FRASER

<em>This article is an overview of the intellectual and historical background of Nancy Fraser's thought. Intellectually, Fraser is a socialist feminist and critical theorist of the Frankfurt school who sought to reconnect gender analysis and the critique of capitalism. According to Fraser, the shift from state-managed-capitalism to neoliberal capitalism is the historical context that separates gender analysis and capitalism criticism in such a way that feminism is trapped as a handmaiden of neoliberalism. Based on an examination of Fraser's works and related literature, this article shows the problems of feminism in the neoliberal era and Fraser's critical theory offers to reclaim it.</em><br /><br /><strong>Key words:</strong> socialist feminism, critical theory, the Frankfurt School, gender, capitalism.

Catholicism and the Frankfurt School

The paper traces the development from the medieval, traditional union, through the modern disunion, toward a possible post-modern reunion of the sacred and the profane. It concentrates on the modern disunion and conflict between the religious and the secular, revelation and enlightenment, faith and autonomous reason in the Western world and beyond. It deals specifically with Christianity and the modern age, particularly liberalism, socialism and fascism of the 2Oth and the 21st centuries. The problematic inclination of Western Catholicism toward fascism, motivated by the fear of and hate against socialism and communism in the 20th century, and toward exclusive, authoritarian, and totalitarian populism and identitarianism in the 21st. century, is analyzed, compared and critiqued. Solutions to the problem are suggested on the basis of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society, derived from the Critical Theory of Society of the Frankfurt School. The critical theory and praxis should help to reconcile the culture wars which are continually produced by the modern antagonism between the religious and the secular, and to prepare the way toward post-modern, alternative Future III - the freedom of All on the basis of the collective appropriation of collective surplus value. Distribution and recognition problems are equally taken seriously.

On critical hope and the anthropos of non-anthropocentric discourses. Some thoughts on archaeology in the Anthropocene

In this essay I scrutinize the non-anthropocentric discourses used by the social sciences and humanities narratives and critiques of the Anthropocene. Although not always predominant within the academic Anthropocene debate, such discursive strands remain politically and ethically inspiring and influential in that debate and for the public discourse concerning the epoch. I stress that these discourses inherit the hope for human progress that characterizes critical theory of the Frankfurt school, i.e. ‘critical hope’, a type of hope that renders the non-anthropocentric discourses self-contradictory. Even when they manage to escape the hold of critical hope, these discourses, I argue, suffer from ethical and political failings due to their inherent lack of focus on human–human relations and largely ahistorical nature. I conclude the essay by advocating an Anthropocene archaeology that remains critical of and learns from the ethical and political shortcomings of non-anthropocentric perspectives and making a related call for a slow archaeology of the Anthropocene.

Marcuse’s Contribution to Political Thought: On Potentiality, Pre-enactment, and the Surrealism of Liberation

Among theorists associated with the first generation of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse’s position is singular in that he provides us with an unabashedly affirmative theory of politics as liberatory practice. The article discusses Marcuse’s contribution to political thought by pointing out how, in particular, three aspects remain highly pertinent to contemporary thought: (a) his account of freedom as potentiality, to be actualized in political practice; (b) his conception of the political pre-figuration or pre-enactment of a liberated society; and (c) his rehabilitation of the human faculty of imagination that allows us to overcome the reality principle of the status quo by venturing, qua practice, into the realm of the revolutionary surreal, thereby enlarging the horizon of what is politically imaginable. In a final step Marcuse’s contribution is contrasted with contemporary theories of the political.

Levinas, Adorno, and the Light of Redemption: Notes on a Critical Eschatology

It seems natural to suppose that the burgeoning field of critical phenomenology would come to bear at least some affinities or resemblances (whether implicitly or explicitly) to critical theory, insofar as both are deeply concerned with directing a rigorous critical eye towards the most pressing political, economic, cultural, and social issues of our time. Yet critical theory has also had its share of critics of phenomenology itself, not least of which was the foremost member of the first-generation Frankfurt School critical theorists, Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno’s critique of phenomenology was, for historical reasons, confined to Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and might be concisely put as follows: for Adorno, classical phenomenology is insufficiently critical towards contemporary realities of oppression and domination (an insufficiency variously attributed to an alleged pernicious idealism, solipsism, methodological individualism, descriptivism, or ahistoricism in classical phenomenology). On this count, critical phenomenologists today may very well agree—at least to the point of affirming that phenomenology’s critical potential remained largely “untapped” in its classical formulations. However, in a twist of historical fate, Adorno failed to engage with a contemporaneous phenomenologist with whom he perhaps had more in common than anyone else: Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas himself was also notably critical of Husserl and Heidegger (while of course also being enormously indebted to them), for reasons not altogether dissimilar to Adorno’s. For Levinas, phenomenology had hitherto neglected the fundamental ethical or moral dimensions of experience—in particular our ethical responsibility towards the Other in the face of the manifold evils and injustices of the world. What might Adorno have thought of Levinas’s work, and Levinas of Adorno’s? What might they have learned from one another? And how might this exchange have affected the trajectories of critical theory, phenomenology, or critical phenomenology?