Critical Theory - Past, Present, Future (Paperback or Softback)

From its inception, Critical Theory was a project that not only intended to study modern society, but also to change it. Today, with almost a century passed, the term has acquired a life of its own and is used across the intellectual field, institutionally as well geographically.

Thus, to ask about the past, present, and future of Critical Theory means opening it up and exposing it to new influences. This is a consequence of the claim that theory is not outside history, but must always respond to a changing present grasped in its contradictions and opened up towards other possibilities; a process that involves a constant reappraisal of what Critical Theory is today.

ANDERS BARTONEK is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Söderörn University. His dissertation, Philosophie im Konjunktiv: Nichtidentität als Ort der Möglichkeit des Utopischen in der negativen Dialektik Theodor W. Adornos (2011), deals with Adorno's negative dialectics and the relation between non-identity and utopia. His other areas of research are German Idealism, theories of dialectics, labour, critique, Marxism, and Agamben's political philosophy. His latest book, Kampen om kritiken, was published in 2018.

SVEN-OLOV WALLENSTEIN is Professor of Philosophy at Södertörn University. He is the translator of works by, among others, Winckelmann, Lessing, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, and Adorno, as well as the author of numerous books on contemporary philosophy and aesthetics. Among his recent publications are Adorno: Negativ dialektik och estetisk teori (2019), Spacing Philosophy: Lyotard and the Idea of the Exhibition (2019, with Daniel Birnbaum), Upplysningens estetik: Nedslag i 700-talet (2019), and Deleuze och litteraturen (2018, ed. with Johan Sehlberg), and Architecture, Critique, Ideology: Writings on Architecture and Theory (2016).