Description: Re-examining the stakes of critique in the twenty-first century, this book contends with the complex socio-political realities of a globalized world and the changing role that critique and the academy have to play.
Brief description: Birgit M. Kaiser is Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She has been a visiting researcher at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Paris-Nanterre (April/May 2017) and at the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University, USA. She is co-editor - with Lorna Burns - of Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze (2012) and editor of Singularity and Transnational Poetics (2015) and is author of Figures of Simplicity (2011) and - with Kathrin Thiele - Diffracted Worlds - Diffractive Readings (2018).
Review Quotes:
"How to sustain criticality as a living force, when the critical stance seems readily assumed today by the right and the left alike? I applaud the authors' concerted interventions in this hazardous terrain. The result is a richly stimulating collection that brings the ends of critique up to date with a commendably ethical vision." --Rey Chow, author of A Face Drawn in Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present
"This fascinating volume provides an accessible and informative engagement with current debates over the supposed deaths and putative aims of critique. Engaging with diverse forms of cultural, literary and political criticism, it provides a compelling demonstration that critique serves a range of different ends and is far from over." --Paul Patton, author of Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics and translator of Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, Wuhan University and Flinders University