Miguel de Beistegui – Crisis: A Critique (11 Mar)

Miguel de Beistegui, ICREA, Barcelona
11 March 3pm, Chrystal Macmillan Building, Violet Laidlaw Room (6th Floor)
CRITIQUE Lecture

Crisis: A Critique

The ‘end of history’ in the form of the triumph of liberalism has given way to a proliferation of crises internal to liberal, and especially neoliberal democracies: our economies and ecosystems, democracies, social and labour relations, constitutions, cultures, identities, and bodies are subjected to repeated and increasingly severe shocks. Unsurprisingly, the vocabulary of crisis is ubiquitous. Ours, we are told, is an age of chronic, multiple, and mutually reinforcing cataclysms. But what exactly do we mean when we speak of crisis?

In this lecture, Beistegui presents crisis as a construction through which we understand, experience and order the world; as a discursive event, producing a range of effects. Drawing on a range of examples (from economic crises to social uprisings, pandemics, genocides, and ecological devastation) and discourses (from ancient medicine to legal theory, political economy, philosophy, the earth sciences, and eco-criticism), Beistegui engages with a range of authors who have questioned the nature of the connection between crisis and critique. If our time “out of joint” presents a crisis of critique itself, we need to re-calibrate our language and thought for an age of seemingly unrelenting catastrophe.