From its inception, Critical Theory was a project that not only intended to study modern society, but also to change it. Today, with almost a century passed, the term has acquired a life of its own and is used across the intellectual field, institutionally as well geographically.
Thus, to ask about the past, present, and future of Critical Theory means opening it up and exposing it to new influences. This is a consequence of the claim that theory is not outside history, but must always respond to a changing present grasped in its contradictions and opened up towards other possibilities; a process that involves a constant reappraisal of what Critical Theory is today.
In 1985, the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard curated “Les Immatériaux” at Centre Georges Pompidou. Though widely misunderstood at the time, the exhibition marked a “curatorial turn” in critical theory. Through its experimental layout and hybrid presentation of objects, technologies, and ideas, this pioneering exploration of virtuality reflected on the exhibition as a medium of communication, and anticipated a deeper engagement with immersive and digital space in both art and theory. In Spacing Philosophy, Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein analyze the significance and logic of Lyotard’s exhibition while contextualizing it in the history of exhibition practices, the philosophical tradition, and Lyotard’s own work on aesthetics and phenomenology. “Les Immatériaux” can thus be seen as a culmination and materialization of a life’s work as well as a primer for the many thought-exhibitions produced in the following decades.
The idea of a limit of reason, a measure that defines reason and that it must not overstep, has been a constitutive part of philosophy since its beginnings in Greek thought. Placing itself in opposition to the madness of hubris, the excesses of tragedy, and the stories of religion and myth, philosophy expels its others just as much as it thrives on them. It begins and ends at the limit; it is drawn towards its outside, and exists as a perpetual attempt to find a line of demarcation that always ends up passing through its interior.
The present collection analyzes the phenomenon of limit and excess, through readings that range from tragedy and Greek thought, through early Christianity and the Renaissance, to modern phenomenology and philosophy of language.
I nära dialog med Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte och Friedrich Schelling utvecklade Benjamin Höijer kring sekelskiftet 1800 ett filosofiskt system som i samtiden väckte stor uppmärksamhet i inte bara Sverige utan också Tyskland. Hans huvudverk, Avhandling om den filosofiska konstruktionen, recenserades lyriskt av Schelling, som konstaterade att dess författare ”förtjänar en rang bland de sanna tänkarna”.
Benjamin Höijer. Metafysik, estetik, historia ger en bred presentation av denna numera i hög grad bortglömde filosof. Här kan man läsa om Höijers modernitetsbegrepp och hur han förhöll sig till de samtida tyska idealisterna, om hans konstfilosofi och syn på historieskrivningens uppgifter liksom hans betydelse för Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom och andra svenska romantiker. Fram träder en komplex bild av den första moderna svenska filosofen.
Adorno’s understanding of realism in the present is often taken to have been simply negative. In the posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, too, the negative view is predominant; there are, however, traces of another concep-tion of realism. Adorno proposes, although with some caveats, that what he calls an adequate conception of realism is not only possible, but also something that art in the present cannot and must not avoid.