A critique of Criticism: thinking the new, "without guardrails" (Hannah Arendt)

Abstract

The relevance of criticism is imposed by the force of “limit situations” (derived from the inevitable condition of rupture in life: death, loss, grief, guilt, suffering, exodus, war), that force us, beyond discrediting the old definitions, which are bankrupt with respect to the limit experiences of the present, to explore renewed senses and meanings to understand the varied forms of violence and dispossession of human existence, which are no longer found precise answer in tradition. This requires us to overcome the obvious, introduce the new and account for our concepts (indices and understanding factors of our time) to understand new social and legal-political realities. Today, however, we have lost our need for understanding, reducing the unusual to the familiar, and automatically and critically subsuming extraordinary and concrete facts to preliminary understandings and moth-eaten theories, without any underlying reality, that propagate prejudices and generalizations, to study the complex historical-political, economic and psychological causes of present-day conflicts. For this reason, today, more than ever, the critical thinking of Hannah Arendt is valid, who, in the Socratic way, exhorts us to seek new tools of understanding and judgment to break the tiring repetition of the extreme events of dispossession, configuring other expectations, renewed and promising, regarding the future.