Superweak: Thinking in the 21st Century

We have become superheroes. Nothing can resist us anymore: not persons, ideas, facts, realities, or beings. We owe our superhuman strength to a tool we have taken up that submits everything to the scrutiny of our judgment: critique. After its first formulation at the end of the sixteenth century, the project of critique spread from one sphere to another until it became almost universal: we have all of us been transformed by our equal capacity to judge, approve, and reject. If modernity is defined as the journey we have taken to move away from the myths and dogmas of the past, then critique, with its emphasis on reason and the autonomy of judgment, has been the lynchpin of modernity. Today, however, the critical project shows signs of exhaustion. We are beginning to realize that being right is useless, now that everyone can lay claim to the same power as we can. The democratization of reason, proceeding alongside the development of critique through modernity, has produced a stalemate: for every judgment that we pronounce, there is another opposing one – with grounds as solid as our own, and the same right to assert itself. Rather than elevating us above the world, critique has mired us in an impasse of claim and counter-claim. The age of critique is now over, argues Laurent de Sutter, and in its place we need to develop a postcritical form of thinking, one he calls “superweak,” a form of thinking based not on establishing grounds, pronouncing judgment, and determining duty, but on welcoming possibility, exploring what the world has to offer, and cultivating a vertiginous appreciation for moving within a world less grounded and less bounded by the terms of critical reason.

Table of Contents:
List of tables and figures Introduction Kratè §1. A brief encounter at Ichij -ji §2. The posture of Musashi §3. A surplus of strength §4. Critique and modernity §5. Reason: being right §6. Virality of critique §7. Five weaknesses §8. We are the detritus §9. Kant fatigue §10. Beyond Book I Phusis §11. What is critique? §12. Subjects with an attitude §13. Being, at the limit §14. Modes of life §15. For an ethics of the dandy §16. Incorporating the aesthetic §17. Giudizio and gusto §18. Logic of incarnation §19. The ordeal of judgment §20. Of defiance §21. The time of reflection §22. Two forms of reason §23. Haptics of merit §24. Mirror, mirror, on the wall §25. Epistémè aisthètikè §26. What matters §27. To judge well §28. The form of the limits §29. First antinomy of critique §30. The imperative of reason §31. How to overcome philosophy §32. History of intussusception §33. Hand to hand, body to body §34. Distrust… §35. The life and death of superheroes §36. Every human being is an artist §37. Punk philosophy §38. Beyond place §39. The precarious of all lands §40. Kryptonite hypothesis §41. Censure, my fine care §42. Tetsugaku and bimyôgaku §43. What is kokoro? §44. Critique against critique §45. Too disgusted §46. Portrait of No-Face §47. Chez Panisse §48. Coprology of critique §49. Dancing in your head §50. Proposals for a poetics of excarnation Book II Archè §51. Architectonics of thought §52. A question of principles §53. The right to power §54. What comes from below §55. Cosmic anarchy §56. Surveilling the world §57. Now, dig! §58. One must make distinctions §59. Back to the basement one started from §60. For a decomposed architecture §61. A world of constraints §62. Of deconstruction §63. The shithouse stage of design §64. Functionalism of critique §65. To be and to be duty-bound §66. Phantoms against phantoms §67. Kindly pay in advance §68. Freemasonry & Co. §69. Spirit, are you there? §70. Just anything §71. Who’s to blame §72. Ever more §73. Green cabbage and cabbage green, or, Six of one, half dozen of the other §74. Second antinomy of critique §75. Ergründen and Abgründen §76. Running out of steam §77. Ground zero §78. Factishes of all lands… §79. This is inadmissible §80. Elements of anarchic cosmology §81. To infinitize again §82. Adieu to philosophy §83. The weather takes a turn for the worse §84. Delete as appropriate §85. Method of the madness §86. Quite presumed §87. The Blade §88. Each time unique, the beginning of the world §89. Less than nothing, more than everything §90. Maximalist manifesto Book III Nomos §91. I think, therefore I judge §92. From dikazein to krinein §93. Putting order into effect §94. The institution of crisis §95. Politics of philosophy §96. Servants of the nomos §97. To death! §98. Cui bono §99. Inquisition everywhere, justice nowhere §100. On the guarantee §101. Green cabbage and cabbage green, or, Six of one, half dozen of the other (2) §102. Critique of prejudicial reason §103. The Treaty of Osnabrück §104. The origins of geometry §105. Force of rule §106. At the limit §107. Kant surveyor §108. Necessity of the Bestimmung §109. Third antinomy of critique §110. What is necessary is necessary §111. Lethal Weapon §112. Dikaian krisis krinate §113. Listen to the logos §114. Cosmic shortcut §115. Behind the truth §116. The engineering of Creation §117. Onward and upward! §118. After the law §119. One does not know what one can do §120. Ever new §121. Introduction to jurifuturism §122. Protasis and apodosis §123. Post-truth §124. To work! §125. Everything you always wanted to know about modernity, but were afraid to ask §126. How does one evolve in chaos? §127. Kekkai §128. On the other side §129. Cosmopoetics and transnodality §130. Postface to transgression Book IV Gramma §131. Alas! §132. Ludology of reality §133. Ow, ow, ow! §134. The madman and the poet §135. From the book to the Book §136. Controversy surrounding faith §137. There is only the outside of text §138. Including the unknowable §139. What one cannot talk about, one talks about all the same §140. The method of detection §141. All culpable §142. Redemption! §143. For an ugly realism §144. Thanatography §145. The shittiness of things §146. Semiology of irenicism §147. All language is fascist §148. There is no outside of text §149. Fourth antinomy of critique §150. To abjure language §151. Cherchez la fiction! Seek the fiction! §152. Silence, it’s talking §153. Weird realism 2.0 §154. It’s implausible! §155. From top to bottom §156. Uncertainties and inconsistencies §157. A little further to the east §158. Water Margin §159. A history without end §160. Comic of lucidity §161. Anti-vitalism §162. Toward objectality §163. An encounter §164. To become poem §165. Of life in the fore-worlds §166. Still and always §167. In praise of space opera §168. More than anything §169. Assholes & Co. §170. Infrastructuralism redux Book V Epistémè §171. Politics of the boudoir §172. Libido sciendi §173. The art of striptease §174. Mehr Licht! §175. Program for a policing of the hole §176. You won’t fool me there §177. Porn rationalism §178. On cretinism as a postulate §179. Algorithmic anthropology §180. The solitude of reason §181. Cherchez la forme! Seek the form! §182. The product of a minus and a minus is a plus §183. What is an argument? §184. Theory of the therefore §185. Introduction to the catu ko i §186. How it works §187. Dialetheic manifesto §188. Fifth antinomy of critique §189. The non-duped err §190. Postcritique 1.0 §191. Prolegomena to general semantics §192. For a quantum thought §193. Beyond reality §194. What the gods do §195. May be §196. Brrrr! §197. Menace contra menace §198. Mobilis in mobile §199. Questions of scale §200. Anything goes §201. To stir shit up §202. Il pensiero debole, or, weak thought §203. Return to… §204. In praise of departure §205. What if… ? §206. It’s too easy §207. The coming infrastructuralism §208. Another chaos is possible §209. Who cares §210. Royal flush Epilogue Sophia §211. A wooden sword §212. Once critique, always critique §213. In the zone §214. Everything happens §215. Toward a new obscurantism §216. Take a chance, give it a try §217. So that was it! §218. Acceleration! §219. To be done with the assholes §220. … Acknowledgments Notes

About the Author :
Laurent de Sutter is Professor of Legal Theory at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Review :
“Sutter’s pungent, bite-sized provocations are best described as a postcritical Minima Moralia: a spanner thrown into the machinery of suspicion and an essential reminder of what the critical spirit is unable to see.” Rita Felski, University of Virginia “Using the stealth capacities of hermeneutic distrust as his weapon of choice, de Sutter’s writing breaks into unrecovered areas of subtle teachings, shedding light on philosophemes gleaned from Aristotle to punk-led attitude, biojewelry, and the historical buildup of authority billed to the triumph of reason in its many intrusive morphs.” Avital Ronell, New York University