Publication details
Remaining on the Surface: Emerging Post-Critical Legal Studies
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Since the publication of Latour's essay Why Critique Has Run Out of Steam, the crisis of critique has been the subject of lively debate. Critique as a methodical questioning of taken-forgranted narratives and power structures has relied on a method of so-called symptomatic reading, the aim of which has been to expose disawoved contradictions of ideological edifice. Symptomatic reading, with its metaphor of depth, requires a critic who delves into the text to mine hidden meanings. Post-critical tendencies, inspired by Latour's call for a ‘critique of critique,’ replaced symptomatic reading with a surface reading that rejected in-depth examination of social phenomena whose form was considered a manifestation of the political unconscious. Instead, it settled for descriptions and cartographies of the social networks that define the phenomenon being described. This paper examines the conflict between these two critical methodologies and their impact on critical legal studies. I show that these methodologies, although usually understood as mutually exclusive, are not in stark conflict. Using the method of ideology of ideology developed by Slavoj Žižek, I show that there is a fruitful dialogue between them that is capable of bringing a new dynamic to the debate on the self-critical aspect of critique. To this end, I understand post-critique not as a unified movement directed against critique and its concepts such as symptom, unconscious or ideology, but as a paradigmatic turn that forces critique to rethink its social function, goals, and methods. |
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