Aletta Diefenbach and Matthias Lüthjohann (Freie Universität Berlin), Hans Roth (University of Mainz), Çiğdem Inan (b_books), Stefan Wellgraf (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Language: German

Between 2019 and 2023, the Collaborative Research Center hosted a working group dedicated to the relationship between affect and critique. In this session, we revisit this work and open it up for discussion. The “affective turn” in the humanities and social sciences has been accompanied by a critical rethinking of established academic practices of critique. This “critique of critique” emerged, among other things, in response to the disruptive, non-semanticized intensities of the present, which expose the limits of a purely debunking or deconstructive mode of critique.

In response, scholars have turned toward affective movements and relations that are not fully captured by established semantic frameworks. Rather than focusing solely on norms and rules, this perspective shifts attention to how practices of arguing and criticizing actually unfold. To better grasp this “how” of critique, the discussion will explore how the pragmatic approach of the sociology of critique (Luc Boltanski and others) can be combined with a renewed focus on questions of form.