Search results for "critical theory"
showing 10 items of 37 documents
Giordano Bruno: quanto può una vita?
2020
Giuliano Montaldo’s Giordano Bruno is a biopic that marks a turn in the history of Italian biographical cinema. This essay analyses this movie in the light of Bruno’s thought, highlighting its relevance for the present “biographical turn” as well as the importance of film theory and practice in the framework of the so-called “Italian Thought”. By considering them as strictly intertwined, the essay aims at underlying the crucial theoretical role played by biopics in the definition of specific key concepts of the present time.
Prefazione a Conoscenza Linguaggio e azione. Studi in onore di Francesca Di Lorenzo
2021
Tra Nietzsche e Auschwitz
2019
Adorno's thought can be considered like an attempt, after Nietzsche, to save a form of critical-negative philosophy. Adorno, and more in general Critical Theory, have to be thought like alternative to the several form of postnietzscheian philosophy from Heidegger to Foucault and postmodernist thinkers. However, the internal developments of the Frankfurt School (Habermas, Honneth) shed light on some limits of Adorno's thought.
On Theodor Adorno
2016
I have never fully bought (albeit often tempted to) into the simplistic and somewhat caricaturist versions of Theodor Adorno’s ideas about the cultural industry and the alienated consumer given by some supporters of the “active” audience. Even more so today, when digital social media seem to make participatory culture, creativity and active citizenship a dream coming true. I have always thought instead that, beyond the traps of binary thinking (powerful media vs active audience), there is a much more complex story to be told and that we, as cultural analysts and media literacy educators, need to patiently reconstruct – with all possible evidence coming from empirical data – the intricacy of…
The limits of subtractive politics: Agamben and Rousseau’s inheritance
2020
The article critically engages with Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Rousseau in order to explore the affinities between the two authors’ subtractive approach to political subjectivation. In The Kingdom and the Glory. Agamben argues that Rousseau’s Social Contract reproduces, in a secularized manner, the providential paradigm of government, whose origins Agamben finds in early Christianity. This paradigm establishes a fictitious articulation between transcendent sovereignty and immanent government, presenting particular acts of government as emanating from general divine laws. We shall demonstrate that Rousseau was neither unaware of the problematic character of this paradigm nor did he venture…
Who Is Ill When a Society Is Ill?
2021
This chapter gives an overview of four different approaches to social pathologies, which are present in contemporary critical social theory, and analyses their social-ontological commitments. The different approaches can be divided into two camps. The ‘thin sense’ of social pathology focuses on social wrongs, and the socially caused and pervasive suffering of individuals. The ‘thick sense’ of social pathology, in turn, claims that society is its own entity, or a whole, which can be ill. This chapter discloses the ontological commitments behind different conceptions of social pathology in order to highlight what difference these commitments make in relation to the critical potential of socia…
On the ontology of social pathologies
2019
The recent years have seen a rehabilitation of the concept of social pathology in the critical social theory. However, several pertinent questions about how to understand social pathologies remain. One of the big issues is, who is actually ill when a society is ill? Is it certain individuals, a large proportion of the population, groups, institutions, or the society as a whole? And what does it mean for these entities to be in a pathological state?This short presentation introduces four conceptions of social pathology that can be divided into roughly two camps. The “thin sense” of social pathology is more metaphorical and focuses on the socially caused and pervasive suffering of individuals…
Grounding social criticism : from understanding to suffering and back
2019
This paper critically examines John Dewey’s and Axel Honneth’s critical social philosophies in order to highlight two different normative sources of social struggle: scientific understanding and social suffering. The paper discusses the relations of these sources with each other and aims to show to what extent the normative sources of Dewey’s and Honneth’s critical social theories are compatible. A further aim is to use the comparison between Dewey and Honneth in order to argue for a desiderata for critical social ontology. The argument is that we want to consistently include both elements – suffering and understanding – in critical social theory as only by having both will critical theory …
Ecological Sensibility: Recovering Axel Honneth’s Philosophy of Nature in the Age of Climate Crisis
2020
What is “critical” about critical theory? I claim that, to be “critical enough”, critical theory’s future depends on being able to handle today’s planetary climate crisis, which presupposes a philo...
Approche critique : quelle appropriation par les SIC ?
2017
Sprung up from the confluence and the interaction between different disciplines, information and communication sciences have been enriched by international critical thoughts from which they borrowed a large number of concepts. However, the genesis and the critical function of theses paradigms are not always examined. By exploring the appropriation processes of the most important critical schools of thought within the discipline, the author contributes to enliven a space for discussion about the adoption of a critical perspective in communication studies. Social critique; Critical perspective on communication; History of information and communication sciences; Critical Theory; Cultural studi…