Transformations in Critical Theory: Decentrings, Openings, Futures

No matter where or how we live, we face enormous challenges today: inequalities continue to deepen, democratic institutions are being attacked and undermined, the environment is being destroyed and climate change is bringing humanity to a point where its very survival as a species is at stake. What does the tradition of critical theory have to say about the great challenges confronting us?

In Transformations in Critical Theory, Maeve Cooke seeks to renew and revitalize Frankfurt School critical theory in ways that will help it engage with key contemporary issues and challenges, while at the same time remaining true to its mission of identifying ways to create a better world for everyone. She seeks to foster communication between critical theory and other intellectual traditions, pushing it beyond Eurocentrism and anthropocentrism and enabling it to expand and enrich its critical methodology and emancipatory visions. She urges critical theory to look outwards, beyond the epistemological and ontological contexts of Western modernity, and to investigate possibilities for better futures opened by this outwards movement. She also urges critical theory to move beyond anthropocentrism and adopt a more ecologically attuned perspective that acknowledges the importance of human relations to other-than-human beings and the ecosystems that sustain all life. Revitalized in this way, the kind of critical theory developed by Cooke re-envisions individual freedom as ethically oriented, self-determining, self-transforming human agency, always opening outwards and towards the future. Such agency is constituted in interrelation with other-than-human entities, attentive to others, human and other-than-human, receptive for new and possibly unsettling experiences and politically as well as ethically-existentially always on the move.

This bold work demonstrates that critical theory in the Frankfurt School tradition is not merely a static repository of texts that belong to the early 20th century and only of historic interest but rather a living tradition ready to learn from other traditions, open to the future and capable of being renewed in ways that can help us address some of the great challenges of the 21st–century.