Critical theory can be daunting. Confronted by dense texts steeped in German idealism, aesthetics, psychoanalytic theory, and Hegelian-Marxism, many a reader has recoiled. Yet, critical theory matters—not least because it speaks powerfully to the most urgent of philosophical and political questions: reason, truth, and freedom. However, because our society represses the struggle toward these, because it collapses their genuine meanings into their opposites, critical theory needs a vocabulary and a conceptual form that appear strange to the prevailing patterns of thought.
This is why critical theory seeks to estrange us from everyday appearances. The pursuit of truth requires that thought should be alienated from the reigning untruth (and the forms of thought upon which it rests), just as the movement toward human freedom can only be accomplished via a rupture from our current unfreedom. To step into the texts of critical theory is thus to enter a conceptual universe that deliberately resists integration into traditional categories of thought. And therein reside both its importance and its strangeness. For only in turning against the dominant ways of thinking might critical theory open a space of freedom.
To be sure, the space of freedom to which radical thought aspires is fleeting and precarious. Yet, this simply testifies to the limited powers of any intellectual practice that remains disconnected from a mass movement to change the world. Indeed, critical theory lives in the shadow of the failure of such movements. It moves in the space of a defeat whose finality it resists. This is why it persists in a form that appears philosophical as much as it seeks to transcend philosophy in the direction of an emancipatory social theory and practice.
But move within the orbit of philosophy it must, not least because philosophy in its most genuine sense preserves the aspirations of reason, truth, and freedom. At the same time, philosophy is implicated in suffering and oppression. It subsists on the division between mental and manual labor, and it has been enlisted in the service of domination and empire. For this reason, critical theory turns philosophy against itself, hoping that the sparks generated in this collision might illuminate new paths for thought and praxis. And here we encounter dialectics—the very source of critical theory. For dialectics, as several texts in this wonderful collection remind us, lives in the space of negative thinking. Dialectics operate in the very act of thinking against ourselves, of estranging ourselves from the modes of thought and forms of life that are inimical to truth and freedom. Yet, critical theory resists the imperial pretensions of philosophy, its grandiose claim to generate a transcendence of that which is via the act of thinking alone. Dialectics in critical theory thus remain materialist in inspiration—oriented to the transformation of our very forms of social life as the only register in which transcendence is possible. So, in seeking tendencies that point beyond the existing state of affairs, in excavating possibilities that the dominant social order and traditional theory repress, critical theory persists through negation. Thus, while theory cannot pose a positive program, it can nourish resources of hope that live in the very activity of thought resisting the prevailing forms of domination.
That is what this stunning collection of texts implores us to do. Not only has Ruth Groff chosen wisely by bringing together some truly outstanding contributions by the “first generation” of Frankfurt School theorists, she has also provided strikingly clear and insightful introductions that situate each text, not merely with respect to its composition, but also in relation to contemporary theory. Readers curious as to how critical theory differs from the likes of pragmatism, skepticism and neo-Aristotelianism will discover dazzling gems sprinkled throughout her presentations. Moving between concerns with questions of epistemology, ontology, and method, Groff gives us critical theory in action, shifting across theoretical idioms in order to demonstrate the power of negative thinking. That power, she reminds us, lies in the enduring resources these texts provide for a kind of thinking that keeps alive the promises of reason, truth, and freedom.