Description:

In the lively debate over the question “Is Critique Secular?,” very fundamental questions have been raised about critique itself, which go beyond the issue of its secularist presuppositions. In this lecture, Kompridis argues that overcoming the secularist presuppositions of critique requires releasing ourselves from a picture of critique that continues to hold us captive. In his contribution to the “Is Critique Secular?” debate, Talal Asad exposes both the limitations and dangers of this picture of critique, but nonetheless remains in its grip. Looking closely at Asad’s argument, and pointing out its affinities with a number of contemporary “critiques of critique” I will show how we might release ourselves from this picture of critique, and practice critique differently, without secularist (and Western) presuppositions.

NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS is Research Professor in Philosophy and Political Thought and Foundation Director of the Institute for Social Justice at Australian Catholic University. He has published widely on a broad spectrum of topics in philosophy and political theory, and is the author of Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future (MIT), Philosophical Romanticism (Routledge, 2006), The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought (Bloomsbury, 2014), and is completing two new books, Aesthetics and Political Theory (Polity, forthcoming) and Critique and Receptivity.

Co-Sponsored with the Center for Global Culture and Communication