The Absolute Drought of Critique

This chapter looks at Walter Benjamin's essay “Critique of Violence” in 1921. In the essay, it explains that violence is representational sovereignty that declares the state of exception, be it to found or to conserve regimes of representation. It points out how more foundation, representation, and catastrophe involves becoming more regular and familiar with violence. Absolute knowledge and recollection would be the absolute drought of critique or destruction. The chapter highlights the “Critique of Violence”, which is a critique of sovereign right itself and a critique of the violent opening of initiation in which it consists. It further explains Benjamin's essay and its discussion on violence as the dialectic that puts exception to work for the triumphal cortege of representation, establishing a continuum between violation and progress.

Sovereign Exception, Destructive Exception

This chapter discusses Walter Benjamin's “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which refers to a regime of sovereign representation where the state of emergency is the rule. It explains the paradigm of sovereignty that is constituted teleologically from exception, as the foundation and conservation of representational regimes. For Benjamin, the state of emergency is equivalent to “progress as a historical norm.” The chapter also looks at the commissary-sovereign state of exception that is functional to a policing critique and a politics whose prerogative is to put the regimes of representation into crisis. It analyzes a prerogative that subsumes the destructive character of the exception within a dialectical concentration of the rule, making the spectrality of destruction a function of the system of representation.

Critique as the Unworking of Theater

This chapter focuses on “The Author as Producer,” where Walter Benjamin sets out the demand, the artistic, or political coefficient that Bertold Brecht made of author-actors and of critics. It looks at the ways illusions are nourished in situ without interruption that represents a highly disputable activity and even more so if the materials enhancing such fascination present themselves as revolutionary in nature. The chapter also analyzes Edgar Allan Poe's works that suggest writing a poem is conceived as an absolute commodity that defines beforehand the points of sensibility upon which the poem must act so as to absolutely fascinate. It emphasizes how fascination is what any commodity tautologically seeks rather than to awaken or establish a distance. The author, the director, the actor, and the modern poet hope to exercise the power of reverie in which the spectators embody their hopes in order to satisfy them passionately.

Critique and Installation

This chapter discusses the possibility of critique that can no longer simply count on the dogma of an “age,” on mediation, the mode of production, or on a generalized present that encourages forces of interrogation to drum against its limits. It analyzes a general framework in which the multiplicity of fragments might be surprised by an epokhé that places it outside of itself and considered lacking. The chapter also talks about the opening or breach that is disseminated within the coexistence of anachronisms. It talks about Ernst Bloch's so-called “nonsynchronicity of the synchronous,” which is described as looking into concepts but not seeing the singularities into singularities. The fragments or elements of an installation are preinscribed within a totality that arranges them like bodily organs or parts of a landscape or composition.

The Coexistence of Technologies: Marx

This chapter discusses Karl Marx's brief comment on the second edition of Capital in 1837. In his comment, Marx presents an archipelago of singular times, a montage of anachronisms, and of clashing modes of production that become unstable as to their own identity, arranged in a vacillation of influences and contagions, mutual interruptions, and infections that make any presupposition of a present unviable. The chapter affirms the case for self-complacency of each singular time mentioned by Marx with respect to a specific present and as regards to the endogenous categories of self-understanding. It explains Marx's words on how the political economy remains a foreign science in Germany when he wrote the second edition of Capital. Marx emphasizes that the living soil from which political economy springs was absent in Germany and had to be imported from England and France as a ready-made article.

Sovereign Critique I

This chapter discusses the sovereigns who are demanded to eliminate all presupposition as it is exercised in the absolute beginning. It also points out the sovereignty's demand to suspend (epokhé) presupposition, heteronomous regulation. It explains how there is no prince or sovereign beginning-principle if it does not emerge from pure decision, without anterior motivation, force of habit, or histories. The chapter talks about the sanctioned beginning as the product of a principle and a previous habit rather than of pure decision. It analyzes critique as a modern “critical attitude” that was conceived in exemplarily fashion by Cartesian philosophy as hyperbole or the evil genius who decides on the beginning principle without principle or beginning, without condition, on the beginning.

Critical Attitude

This chapter pays attention to the question of government, composition of things, and consequent multiplication of the pedagogic, political, economic, and methodological arts that took place as of the sixteenth century. It talks about disassociation from critique, the “critical attitude” that will be expressed in a more modern fashion in the question of “how not to be governed.” The chapter also mentions Plato's Allegory of the Cave. In it, Plato provides a whole repertoire of locations of frontiers and thresholds and investments in a regard that is pregnant with life-or-death consequences, in theologies of salvation or damnation as well as epistemic moralities of truth and falsity. Within the stage machinery of comings and goings, it was decisive that a center is established so as to give meaning to movement and place.

Technologies of Critique

This chapter refers to two or three regimes that are transversal to the various modes of existence of critique and crisis, even of life and work. It explains the technologies of critique as a question of organic structure and theatre, which, although not the same, are not essentially different regimes either, superimposing themselves on one another and even substituting the one for the other. André Lalande, in his Dictionnaire philosophique, notes that the concept of structure designates a whole in solidarity with itself, such that each of its elements depends on the others and can only be what it is in and through its relation with them. The chapter tracks the metaphor of structure in the aporias through Aristotle's writing. A structure, Aristotle writes, that is irreducible to the simple sum of its parts.

The Kríno Constellation

This chapter defines the etymological constellation of the word kríno,, in which each critique and crisis takes place in particular sites of production on the basis of technologies and modes of existence. It outlines derivatives and idiomatic that always refer to meanings of specific, practical usage according to languages, dates, and cartographies. The Greek word kríno is the action of separating, picking, excluding, sieving, examining, opening, distinguishing, and differentiating a simultaneously analytical-contemplative and manual task. The chapter also discusses the medical use of krisis, which links together two levels of significance. One level is performative, in which the critical day of the illness or of the patient resonates. The other level is speculative which describes the moment of observation or medical diagnosis.

The Exhausted Age

This chapter highlights how to criticize the nihil without feeding its pluripotent interface or becoming just one more fold within its immanence. It also explains how to dodge the nihil without the feint being reappropriated beforehand as one more input into its polytechnics. Critique as the critique “relative to...” is nothing without what it criticizes. The critique “relative to...” is always in need and lacking what it criticizes, such as the mode of production and understanding of an epoch. The chapter further explains that “relative to...” is also structurally constituted as the “critique of...”, which refers to a presupposition. The critique's starting point is always reactive, its affirmation and positivity belonging to the domain of the negative.