Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory Between Past and Future

In Critique and Disclosure, Nikolas Kompridis argues provocatively for aricher and more time-responsive critical theory. He calls for a shift in thenormative and critical emphasis of critical theory from the narrow concern withrules and procedures of J?rgen Habermas's model to a change-enabling disclosure ofpossibility and the enlargement of meaning. Kompridis contrasts two visions ofcritical theory's role and purpose in the world: one that restricts itself to thenormative clarification of the procedures by which moral and political questionsshould be settled and an alternative rendering that conceives of itself as apossibility-disclosing practice. At the center of this resituation of criticaltheory is a normatively reformulated interpretation of Martin Heidegger's idea of"disclosure" or "world disclosure." In this regard Kompridis reconnects criticaltheory to its normative and conceptual sources in the German philosophical traditionand sets it within a romantic tradition of philosophical critique.Drawing not onlyon his sustained critical engagement with the thought of Habermas and Heidegger butalso on the work of other philosophers including Wittgenstein, Cavell, Gadamer, andBenjamin, Kompridis argues that critical theory must, in light of modernity'stime-consciousness, understand itself as fully situated in its time--in anever-shifting and open-ended horizon of possibilities, to which it must respond bydisclosing alternative ways of thinking and acting. His innovative and originalargument will serve to move the debate over the future of critical studiesforward--beyond simple antinomies to a consideration of, as he puts it, "whatcritical theory should be if it is to have a future worthy of its past."