Grappling with critique beyond negativity and judgment

How can we re-envision critique beyond negativity and judgment? What other modes of critique are there, different from the ones envisioned in Kant’s Three Critiques? How can critique alter, intervene, transform, affect our narratives of  social, cultural and economic co-habitation today?

Together with Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory in Utrecht, and in preparation of the expert seminar Terra Critica II, the workshop discussed these questions on the basis of a joint reading: Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas. What can we learn from Woolf’s sharp analysis of the links between money, women’s rights and war – published in June 1938? How situated is her critique, and what can we derive from it for today? To what extent is critique always a working on a ‘today’ in view of more equitable futures? And how are fabulations-slash-analyses like Woolf’s crucial critical practices that open the horizon for  the ‘today’ of tomorrow?

The workshop was conducted by Kathrin Thiele and Birgit M. Kaiser.