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According to Benjamin and Foucault, calling something into question is not just a precondition of critical practice but its very realisation. The effect of critique depends on how a question is asked. An inaccurately posed question supports what it aspired to criticise. Critical practice thus involves a critique of allegedly critical questions. In their critique of power and violence, Foucault and Benjamin expose the moment in which a critical question becomes uncritical and subsequently seek its critical transformation. In Foucault, this movement is identical with "desubjugation", and in Benjamin, with "revolution". A revolutionary resoluteness in raising critical questions, however, can turn out to be decisionistic and uncritical itself. In this paper I reconstruct the struggle for an accurate critical question in Benjamin and Foucault and address how the dialectical turn into uncritical action might be avoided.
Säkularisierung und die Souveränität der Moderne. Ein Kommentar zur Agamben-Lektüre Jürgen Mohns
(2014)
A decorated pair of trousers excavated from a well-preserved tomb in the Tarim Basin proved to have a highly informative life history, teased out by the authors – with archaeological, historical and art historical dexterity. Probably created under Greek influence in a Bactrian palace, the textile started life in the third/second century BC as an ornamental wall hanging, showing a centaur blowing a war-trumpet and a nearly life-size warrior of the steppe with his spear. The palace was raided by nomads, one of whom worked a piece of the tapestry into a pair of trousers. They brought no great luck to the wearer who ended his days in a massacre by the Xiongnu, probably in the first century BC. The biography of this garment gives a vivid glimpse of the dynamic life of Central Asia at the end of the first millennium.