Forum
The forum is a space to debate the questions and topics that characterize contemporary Critical Theory. In cooperation with the Critical Theory Network, we annually present 11 theses that seek to start and facilitate a new discussion. Furthermore, the forum is a place to take part in discourses emerging from recent struggles and political developments. In the glossary we engage with controversies surrounding the basic concepts of contemporary social critique.
If you have any proposals or contributions, please contact philohsc@hu-berlin.de
New debate
11 Theses On Needs
Whether we talk about how to reorganize our ecologically unsustainable way of life, or about the critique of capitalism and its logic that puts profit over people, we make implicit assumptions about needs, especially the needs that the current social order does not meet and does not seem able to meet. Many social movements, too, make needs claims in more or less implicit ways – think of struggles around care work, both paid and unpaid, and how they grew more acute during the pandemic, or struggles around housing and the ways in which a profit-oriented housing market fails to respond to the needs of those who actually live in cities like Berlin. The Critical Theory Network opens a debate on the role of needs for critique and political intervention in our times.
Debates
What Approach to Social Totality Does a Critical Theory Need Today?
Is there still a need for a comprehensive social theory today that clarifies the interrelation and interaction of the various social spheres? Often enough, social theoretical designs have tried to accomplish this task by postulating clear hierarchies of social phenomena and derivations between them. This strategy made social theory unattractive to many of the new social movements. Today, however, the question is what connects the inheritors of these movements or at least allows us to deal with the conflicts between them on a theoretical level. If the multiple concrete experiences of exploitation, discrimination, exclusion and so on are not to be reduced to an abstract as well as politically ineffective denominator such as “suffering” or “injustice”, must not then the hour of theories, which promise to reconstruct the coherence of social relations, strike again?