Superweak - by Laurent de Sutter (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

We have become superheroes. Nothing can resist us anymore: not persons, ideas, facts, realities, or beings. We owe our superhuman strength to a tool we have taken up that submits everything to the scrutiny of our judgment: critique. After its first formulation at the end of the sixteenth century, the project of critique spread from one sphere to another until it became almost universal: we have all of us been transformed by our equal capacity to judge, approve, and reject. If modernity is defined as the journey we have taken to move away from the myths and dogmas of the past, then critique, with its emphasis on reason and the autonomy of judgment, has been the lynchpin of modernity.

Today, however, the critical project shows signs of exhaustion. We are beginning to realize that being right is useless, now that everyone can lay claim to the same power as we can. The democratization of reason, proceeding alongside the development of critique through modernity, has produced a stalemate: for every judgment that we pronounce, there is another opposing one - with grounds as solid as our own, and the same right to assert itself. Rather than elevating us above the world, critique has mired us in an impasse of claim and counter-claim.

The age of critique is now over, argues Laurent de Sutter, and in its place we need to develop a postcritical form of thinking, one he calls "superweak," a form of thinking based not on establishing grounds, pronouncing judgment, and determining duty, but on welcoming possibility, exploring what the world has to offer, and cultivating a vertiginous appreciation for moving within a world less grounded and less bounded by the terms of critical reason.

Review Quotes

"Sutter's pungent, bite-sized provocations are best described as a postcritical Minima Moralia a spanner thrown into the machinery of suspicion and an essential reminder of what the critical spirit is unable to see." Rita Felski, University of Virginia "Using the stealth capacities of hermeneutic distrust as his weapon of choice, de Sutter's writing breaks into unrecovered areas of subtle teachings, shedding light on philosophemes gleaned from Aristotle to punk-led attitude, biojewelry, and the historical buildup of authority billed to the triumph of reason in its many intrusive morphs." Avital Ronell, New York University "Sutter's pungent, bite-sized provocations are best described as a postcritical Minima Moralia a spanner thrown into the machinery of suspicion and an essential reminder of what the critical spirit is unable to see." Rita Felski, University of Virginia "Using the stealth capacities of hermeneutic distrust as his weapon of choice, de Sutter's writing breaks into unrecovered areas of subtle teachings, shedding light on philosophemes gleaned from Aristotle to punk-led attitude, biojewelry, and the historical buildup of authority billed to the triumph of reason in its many intrusive morphs." Avital Ronell, New York University

About the Author

Laurent de Sutter is Professor of Legal Theory at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.