Naveh Frumer

Agamben’s political philosophy claims to offer an ontological account of the problem of state violence and the ‘desubjectification’ involved in our idea of citizenship, which manifested itself in the emergency measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Agamben’s theory of the homo sacer traces a constitutive potential, lurking at the heart of all forms of Occidental politics, for suspending the rule of law, exposing the lives of its subjects to a violence that is both legally permissible and free of legal sanction. The article criticizes Agamben’s logic of potentiality, as it appears in several crucial junctures of his theory: his ontologization of historical configurations of political violence; his concept of form of life; and the way his messianic vision is based on a problematic notion of the destituent potential of human life. The article ends by examining a more promising treatment of potentiality, offered by political theories centered around the notion of human dependency, and the potential abuse or exploitation thereof.

The key critical idea of Judith Butler’s recent work is ‘differential precarity’: how the same network of social dependency that sustains our existence creates a divide between those for whom it proves protective and enabling and those for whom it implies precarious social existence. Yet the examples Butler analyses present problems not only with how precarization is unequally manifested but how it is rooted in the structures of dependency. Against her intent, Butler reduces systemic problems of dependency to distributive inequalities of precarity. We propose to adapt and enrich Butler’s insight by integrating it into a Marxist framework. The result is a problematization of how capitalist societies are predicated on a productive feedback loop between dependization and precarization. We argue the critical grammar of dependency–precarity helps articulate the latent normative content of Marxism, while the latter advances this grammar beyond the limited envelope of distributivism, offering a critique focused on the nature of dependency and not only its ensuing precarity.

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print. Adorno’s social theory is enjoying renewed attention, as is the debate to what extent is it Marxist. A central issue remains Adorno’s concept of social totality: capitalism as a fully integrated society in which every difference is levelled. One problem this raises is why is he still committed to the Marxist concept of class. And second, how to understand his critique of the idea of proletarian class-consciousness, which seems to leave his critical theory without an addressee. The article suggests that, for Adorno, capitalist society exhibits what is termed here “differential integration.” It is predicated both on the labor/capital distinction and, at the same time, on sufficient homology between the two, such that the qualitative class divide is experienced as mere quantitative variance. This efficacious gap between social structure and social experience is at the center of his concept of ideology. Ideology-critique for Adorno is mainly the critique of symptomatic misconceptions of how ideology functions, due to lack of attention to how the class structure is in fact not experienced as such. Adorno’s alternative to proletarian class consciousness is “differential solidarity”: consciousness of social domination that is on the one hand found across class divides yet is experienced differentially between them.

According to Axel Honneth, Adorno's very idea of social critique is self‐defeating. It tries to account for what is wrong, deformed, or pathological without providing any positive yardstick. Honneth's idea of critique is a diagnosis of chronic dysfunctions in the relations of recognition upon which the society in question is grounded. Under such conditions of misrecognition, institutions that embody what he calls social freedom regress to negative freedom. However, such a deficit‐based notion of critique does not square with Honneth's own diagnosis of our present: namely, the transformation from welfare capitalism to neoliberalism. In fact, Honneth's diagnosis is very much in line with Adorno's idea of late capitalism as a society of “total integration.” Adorno's matching conception of critique, it is argued, avoids the problems Honneth runs into. At the basis of Adorno's critical idiom are two key points: an explanation of how social relations can be functional while contradictory and an account of social domination that is diffused throughout society while being differentially experienced by different classes. Adorno's answer to Honneth's concern, regarding the lack of a positive yardstick, is that it is domination that gives meaning to our idea of freedom, rather than the other way around.

The most promising recent attempt to rethink both Discourse Ethics (especially Rawls and Habermas) and Kantian deontology is found in the work of Rainer Forst. This paper suggests the strength of the latter lies in its shift from a theory of justice to a theory of injustice: from the question of what legitimates claims that seek normative consensus, to claims that argue the normative status quo is problematic. In Forst’s idiom: claims arguing the justifications behind that status quo are unacceptable. Yet the association of injustice with justificatory inequality—disparities in people’s capacity to either demand or present reasons—ends up tracking not injustice but mere disagreement. In so doing this theory effectively exposes the broader problem of discourse ethics: its conception of injustice as a (negative) quality of discursive conduct rather than of social relations. At the same time, Forst’s theory also effectively implies a more wholesale rejection of the deontological interpretation of dignity than his reading of Kant suggests. This dual-impasse points to an alternative albeit latent conception of injustice, offering a more promising starting-point for Critical Theory: Injustice understood not as dignity-violations, but as forms of social interdependence predicated on turning certain people systemically vulnerable.