This paper explores the limits of philosophy of law in addressing the prevailing political crises of our time–the dissolution of the so-called “rules based liberal order” and the fascist underpinnings of “Western” politics–by considering an alternative approach to legal analysis grounded in a Foucauldian conception of nomos. To show how modern law serves to reproduce global inequalities and hierarchies by institutionalizing and naturalizing colonial relations of force, it reconsiders modern law through the framework of power. In doing so, it posits a new reading of modern law as a technology for upholding what Aníbal Quijano has called “the Eurocentered capitalist colonial/modern world power,” or what we can more simply understand as the colonial order of things.
Bio: Sabeen Ahmed is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Swarthmore College, where she works in the areas of social and political philosophy, philosophy of race, and anticolonial thought. Her teaching and scholarship take as their starting point the recognition that white supremacy is the defining political and existential problem of modernity, and that the discipline of philosophy has historically been implicated in this imperial reality. Her research and pedagogy are grounded in decolonial, antiracist, and anti-imperial commitments that bring global perspectives and historically marginalized voices to bear the major political (and thus philosophical) questions of our present.
What is critique? According to the Kantian tradition, it is an investigation of the transcendental conditions for the possibility of thinking and experience. While later critics shifted the focus to material conditions, core metaphysical commitments and procedures of critique remained unchanged. Critique of Critique (Stanford UP, 2023), the subject of this talk, probes critique as an orientation of thought through its historical manifestations from Plato to the Frankfurt school and present-day critical theory. In the process, it asks us to consider what critical thinking is and whether it can assume orientations other than critique.
Bio: Roy Ben-Shai is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College. His recently published book, Critique of Critique (Stanford University Press, 2023), is the first volume in a trilogy on the concept of “orientation” in critical thought. He is currently working on the second volume, Emancipatory Thinking, or the Art of Thinking Otherwise. He is an NSSR alum (MA Philosophy 2005, PhD Philosophy 2012).