Christoph Menke

The Value of Critique casts its gaze on the two dominant modes of passing judgment in art--critique and value. The act of critique has long held sway in the world of art theory but has recently been increasingly abandoned in favor of evaluation, which advocates alternate modes of judgment aimed at finding the intrinsic "value" of a given work rather than picking apart its intentions and relative success. This book's contributors explore the relationship between these two practices, finding that one cannot exist with the other. As soon as a critic decides an object is worthy enough of their interest and time to critique it, they have imbued that object with a certain value. Similarly, theories of value are typically marked by a critical impetus: as much as critique takes part in the construction of evaluations, bestowing something with value can then trigger critiques. Assembling essays from an international array of authors, this book is the first to put value, critique, and artistic labor in conversation with one another, making clear just how closely all three are related.

In his critical review of Recht und Gewalt Andreas Fischer-Lescano has suggested that the critical insight into the paradoxical entwinement of law and violence should lead towards the utopian idea of a “transcendence” of law. The response to Fischer-Lescano rejects this idea as a false leveling of the - decisive normative - difference between law and society. This difference is the condition of possibility of law’s critical and hence transformative relation to society. The response thus defends the idea, brought forward in Recht und Gewalt by way of an interpretation of Benjamin’s formula of the Entsetzung of law, that the break with law’s fateful violence cannot consist in the “transcendence” but rather the “depotenciation” of law.

Law begins with the experience of violence. Law exists because there is violence, and because recognizing the existence of violence appears to be tantamount to saying that violence should not exist. Law translates the violence that one inflicts upon another into the violation of a law. Walter Benjamin calls the transformation of law in the face of the experience of its violence its Entsetzung. For taking the violence of law seriously, that is, taking the Nietzschean demand which all experience of violence raises seriously, namely the demand to go, "Away, you pain!", must mean to go beyond law. For the "impulse" or "force" at the ground of law is justice: the resistance to violence. "Law and Violence" tries to show this by reference to the experience of law in tragedy, especially the Oresteia, and its philosophical reflection in Benjamin's "Critique of Violence."

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant quotes the traditional view of the relation between the ethical and the aesthetical ('the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good'). However, he elaborates this view in a radically new way: as equivalence between two forms of reflection, between ethical and aesthetic reflection. The article distinguishes three different aspects of aesthetic reflection in Kant and discusses their respective ethical meaning. It shows the unresolved tension between Kant's program of an 'aesthetics of autonomy' on the one hand, and his reference to sensualistic and vitalist motifs of an aesthetic 'energetism' on the other.