The Ends of Critique re-examines the stakes of critique in the 21st century. In view of increasingly complex socio-political realities and shifts in a fully globalized world, the roles and manners of critique also change. The volume offers an unprecedented re-examination of critique under those conditions of global entanglement and asymmetrical relations from a diversity of scholarly perspectives within the humanities. All contributions move the notion of critique into more diverse traditions than the Eurocentric, Kantian tradition and emphasize the need to attend to a plurality of critical perspectives. The volumes reflections move critique toward a situated, perspectival, and entangled critical stance, with interventions from decolonial and systemic, deconstructive and (post)human(ist) perspectives. In that way, the volume develops a decidedly different approach to critique than recent considerations of critique as post-critique (Felski) or those endebted to Frankfurt School thought and liberal theories of democracy. It is the first full-length research publication of the interdisciplinary research networkTerra Critica.

Kathrin Thiele is associate professor of gender studies and critical theory in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. Trained transdisciplinarily in gender studies, sociology, literary studies, and critical theory, her research focuses on questions of ethics and politics from queer feminist, decolonial and posthuman(ist) perspectives.

Birgit M. Kaiser is associate professor of comparative literature and transcultural aesthetics at Utrecht University. Her research spans literatures in English, French and German of the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, always with a focus on literature as a mode of poetic knowledge production, on the relation of literature, aesthetics, and affect, as well as on writing subjectivity in transcultural and post/colonial constellations of power.

Together, Kathrin Thiele and Birgit M. Kaiser founded and coordinate the international groupTerra Critica: Interdisciplinary Network for the Critical Humanities(http://terracritica.net).

Timothy OLeary is Head of the School of Humanities& Languages at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He researches in contemporary European philosophy, in particular the work of Michel Foucault. Recently he has focused on the transformative potential of the engagement with works of literature.

Introduction / Birgit M. Kaiser, Kathrin Thiele, Timothy OLeary

Part I: Visions of critique

Chapter 1. After Humanism? Time and Transformation in Critical Thinking / Kathrin Thiele

Chapter 2. The Most Difficult Task: On the Idea of an Impure Pure Non-Violence in Derrida / Leonard Lawlor

Chapter 3. The Changeability of the World: Utopia and Critique/ Sam McAuliffe

Chapter 4. Seeking Intelligent Life in the Time of COVID-19; Or, Thinking Epicritically/ Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor

Part II: Critical Reading

Chapter 5. Suspicious Minds: Critique as Symptomatic Reading / Esther Peeren

Chapter 6. The Ends of Critical Intimacy. Spivak, Fanon, and Appropriative Reading / Birgit M. Kaiser

Chapter 7. Critical Vivisection: Transforming Ethical Sensibilities / Timothy OLeary

Part III: Institutions and Technologies

Chapter 8. Unwinding the Abstraction of Whiteness / Shannon Winnubst

Chapter 9. How Not to be Governed like that by Our Digital Technologies / Mercedes Bunz

Chapter 10. Defective Institutions; Or, Critique / Jacques Lezra