Technologies of Critique

Willy Thayer, John Kraniauskas

Description

Critique-a program of thought as well as a disposition toward the world-is a crucial resource for politics and thought today, yet it is again and again instrumentalized by institutional frames and captured by market logics. Technologies of Critique elaborates a critical practice that eludes such capture. Building on Chile's history of dissident artists and the central entangling of politics and aesthetics, Thayer engages continental philosophical traditions, from Aristotle, Descartes and Heidegger through Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, and in implicit conversation with the Judith Butler, Roberto Esposito, and Bruno Latour, to help pinpoint the technologies and media through which art intervenes critically in socio-political life.

Sujets

• Western philosophy
• Literary theory

Informations

• Publié par: Fordham University Press
• Date de parution: 07 janvier 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780823286768
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

TECHNOLOGIES OF CRITIQUE

TECHNOLOGIES OF CRITIQUE

WILLY THAYER Translated by John Kraniauskas

Fordham University PressNew York2020

This book was originally published in Spanish as Willy Thayer,Tecnologías de la crítica: Entre Walter Benjamin y Gilles Deleuze© 2010 Ediciones metales pesados.

Fordham University Press gratefully acknowledgesfinancial assistance and support provided for the publication of this book by the Fondo Nacional para el Desarrollo Cultural y las Artes (FONDART), Chile.

Copyright © 2020 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at https://catalog.loc.gov.

Printed in the United States of America

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First edition

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10 Hyperbole

11 Sovereign Critique II

Critical Attitude

Sovereign Critique I

Marx’s Critical Turn

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CONTENTS

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Crisis and Avant-Garde

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13 Critique within the Frame, Critique of the Frame

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Translation Has Always Already Begun: Translator’s Introduction

Technologies of Critique

Critique and Work

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12 The Epoch of Critique

The Word “Critique”

15 Heidegger’s Demand

16 Critique and Figure

TheKrínoConstellation

14 Manet: The Kant of Painting

19 The Clash of Film and Theater

17 Thought and Figure

18 The Leveling of the Pit

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Critique and Life

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Sovereign Exception, Destructive Exception

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The Destruction of Theater

Thought Is Inseparable from a Critique

Notes

Index

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Destruction

The Absolute Drought of Critique

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Sorel: Sovereign Critique

Nihil and Philosophy

Critique and Mass

Critique’s Loss of Aura

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Jenny

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Critique as the Unworking of Theater

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Benjamin: Pure Strike and Critique

The Exhausted Age

The Epoch of Nihilism.Nihilas Epoch.

The Coexistence of Technologies: Marx

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Critique and Installation

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TRANSLATION HAS ALWAYS ALREADY BEGUN: TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

If all writing constitutes a worlding of worlds of sorts, then translation—another writing—arguably involves a reworlding, an “afterlife” in Walter Benjamin’s words, 1 providing text with new spatiotemporal coordinates. Conceived as such a pro- cess, translation would not just be a technical “encounter” of languages and its administration as such—including its moments of conjuncture (equivalence in translation) and disjuncture (difference in translation)—but a practice of trans- culturation. This means, in other words, that via the recontextualizing effect of translation (that may even include, as in this case, shifts in the publishing econo- mies of the academicfields into which each version is inscribed, and their respec- tive readerships), this English-language version of Willy Thayer’sTecnologías de la crítica, originally published in Spanish in Chile in 2010, is in many ways another work. At the same time, however, as Benjamin clearly recognizes—andTecnologías de la críticais in large measure a brilliant reading of Benjamin’s oeuvre—that the novelty of the afterlife of a text in translation cannot and does not involve the abstract negation, the erasure, of the “original.” In an ethico-political tradition that may begin with Friedrich Schleiermacher but that passes through Benjamin and culminates more recently in Jacques Derrida’s reflections on the hosting and welcoming of one language by—and in—another, the latter, host language is itself also transformed in the labor of translation as it wrestles with and inter- nalizes the untranslatable, largely inadvertently, as its secret cargo (in the form, for instance, of the pressure that certainflexibilities of Spanish grammar put on the English sentence). As Pierre Macherey reminded us many years ago, no 2 utterance or text comes to us alone. It is this materiality of language—its con- stitutive sociality—that makes translation a practice of transculturation (rather than, for example, of imperial acculturation or mere technical interculturation, 3 however self-assured their administered equivalences may be). For example: Thayer belongs to a dynamic radical intellectual milieu in Chile that was linked with the emergence of an experimental and avant-gardist artistic and literary

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TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

scene during the 1970s and 1980s (neoliberalism and military dictatorship) and after (neoliberalism and postdictatorship) that is most often associated with nov- elists such as Diamela Eltit, painters such as Eugenio Dittborn, critics such as Nelly Richard, and publishers such as Cuarto Propio and Metales Pesados, the publisher ofTecnologías de la críticaas well as previous works by Thayer. There are of course others, too, some of whom are mentioned in the endnotes and references of the main text, below. And several of these interlocutors form part of a fairly longstanding and intensely focused critical culture of Benjaminian thought in Chile, which includes the translation of his works. Beginning with the efforts of Ronald Kay, such reflection and translation continues today with those of Pablo Oyarzún, Elizabeth Collingwood-Selby, and Federico Galende, all important Benjamin scholars, philosophers, and critics in their own right. I am sure thatTecnologías de la críticawould be a very different text without the conversations, agreements, and disagreements, the debates within (and outside) this group and that, although I am not exactly sure how, are nevertheless present in the book’s words and compositional preferences as a condition and whose 4 traces may still be spectrally present in this English-language version. In this sense, one might say ofTecnologías de la crítica,a critique of critique, that the work of translation as transculturation has always already begun, such that this reworlding just adds one more layer that potentially brings it to the attention of new readers and milieus. Indeed,Tecnologías de la críticamay be thought of as a cognitive mapping of “critique” via its constituting and in- stituting technologies (which Thayer refers to as the “organism,” the “theater,” and “singularity”) and its discursive history—that is, of its many translations and travels—from its Greek and Latin “ruins” (Thayer’s word) to its Spanish- language present, as mediated by its versions and transformations in both the German and the French. English does not play a major bibliographical role in this history—although the work of Danto, Jameson, Kuhn, Poe, and others is briefly mentioned—except now, here, as one more translation. As soon as the Spanish wordcríticais thus welcomed into English, however, it is confronted with a problem—that is, the possibility of its translation as either “critique” or “criticism.” Arguably, it is the latter, “criticism,” that is the more widely used. In hisKeywords, for example, Raymond Williams has an entry for “criticism” rather than “critique,” and as he sets out his account of its uses and his criticism of them (that is, criticism’s decontextualized and ideological fore- grounding ofjudgment), he fails to mention the alternative “critique”—as, for example, an account of the conditions of possibility of judgment—at all (despite this being Williams’s own main point in his account: he performs a more or less 5 conventional ideology-critique of the term). From Thayer’s perspective, such a

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

use of the term “criticism” privileges the discursive history ofcrítica’s Latin ruin, while partially erasing the significance of its translation, ascerno, from the Greek word-ruinkríno, and its constellation of meanings—that include to discern(in the English) as well askestrel(cernícalo in Spanish) and thus, also, to loom or to hover (en ciernesin Spanish). As announced in his short prologue-epigraph, below, this image of criticism is part of Thayer’s critical strategy of deconceptu- alizing the concept of critique, opening it up (in a Derridean “pedagogic” vein) to its textuality and—as in this image of the hovering kestrel—interrupting “criti- cism,” resulting, as he writes, in a “vacillation that does not follow the rhythm of the argument—of judgment—and remains balancing without making a decision, 6 in a state of indecision.” Such an image of criticism is, I believe, fundamental to Thayer’s critique of critique, of the overlapping—constellated—transcendental, juridical, and sovereign orders that inform it, especially in the Chilean context of dictatorship and postdictatorship at the time, as well as, differently, in its English-language version as “criticism.” The ethico-political mark of this version’s hosting of Thayer’s deployment of the term in translation, therefore, involves foregoing the use of the English term “criticism”—thus torqueing the juridical art of its judgment—to insist on translatingcríticaas critique throughout (while following Thayer as he eventually pulls the term critically—with the help of both Benjamin and, equally importantly, Gilles Deleuze—toward the idea and image 7 of “acritique” with which the book concludes). In the process of translatingTecnologías de la crítica,a number of changes have been introduced into the text: a combination of the author’s unfulfilled original intentions and more-recent revisions that have been incorporated into the present version to improve on the way in which theflow of his argument is 8 presented. What are the more substantive changes introduced by the author for the present edition? First, the elimination of a second epigraph by Jacques Derrida that, alongside Thayer’s own, arguably overplayed the idea that it was Derridean deconstruction that might occupy that “between” Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze that is sug- gested in the text’s original Spanish-language subtitle (“Between Walter Benja- min and Gilles Deleuze”), and that thus framed its reading along deconstructive 9 lines. What does happen in this “between”—apart, that is, from the arguments mentioned above? In fact, many writers and texts occupy this space, several of whom are associated with the “technologies” that Thayer describes and their cri- tique: Heidegger, as well as Kant, Hegel, and Marx, even Descartes, Leibniz, and Aristotle (the latter in particular insofar as, in Thayer’s view, he may be conceived as the inventor of the idea of the “aura”—quaidealized distance—that later, in 10 its bourgeois form, Benjamin will destroy). This also includes the all-important

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