Technologies of Critique - Paperback

by Willy Thayer (Author), John Kraniauskas (Translator)

Critique--a program of thought as well as a disposition toward the world--is a crucial resource for politics and thought today, yet it is again and again instrumentalized by institutional frames and captured by market logics. Technologies of Critique elaborates a critical practice that eludes such capture. Building on Chile's history of dissident artists and the central entangling of politics and aesthetics, Thayer engages continental philosophical traditions, from Aristotle, Descartes and Heidegger through Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, and in implicit conversation with the Judith Butler, Roberto Esposito, and Bruno Latour, to help pinpoint the technologies and media through which art intervenes critically in socio-political life.

Back Jacket

"Willy Thayer belongs to the very core of Latin American thought today. He has produced decisive readings of the contemporary university, of avant-gardism during the Pinochet dictatorship, of the Baroque as a hermeneutic category for Latin American history, and of neoliberal actuality. This deeply original book deals with some of the most forceful and urgent conditions and preconditions of contemporary thought. It will be an essential contribution to contemporary Anglo-American discussions in critical theory and philosophy."--Alberto Moreiras, Texas A&M University

"Thayer is one of the most important philosophers working in the Spanish-speaking world today. He reveals an entirely novel notion of the vanguard--both the artistic and political vanguard--and by extension, of the function of art in the contemporary world."--Brett Levinson, Binghamton University, SUNY

"At a moment when critique would seem to have lost its aura, Thayer has succeeded in reconfiguring critique as constellation and construction. If, from Descartes to Hegel, critique has demanded sovereign totality and continuum, Thayer brings Benjamin and Deleuze into tense conjunction, performing the work of a minor critique as assemblage, montage, and erosion. In the tense interval between them, this work scintillates, brilliantly."--David Lloyd, University of California, Riverside

Critique--a program of thought as well as a disposition toward the world--is a crucial resource for politics and thought today, yet it is again and again instrumentalized by institutional frames and captured by market logics. Technologies of Critique elaborates a critical practice that eludes such capture. Building on Chile's history of dissident art and its entangling of politics and aesthetics, Thayer engages continental philosophical traditions, from Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze through Judith Butler and Bruno Latour, to help pinpoint the technologies and media through which art intervenes critically in socio-political life.

Willy Thayer is Professor of Philosophy at Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencias de la Educación and Professor of Film Theory at Universidad de Chile, in Santiago.

John Kraniauskas is Professor of Latin American Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and the translator and editor of Carlos Monsiváis's Mexican Postcards (Verso).

Author Biography

Willy Thayer (Author)
Willy Thayer is a prominent a prominent Chilean philosopher, art critic, and media theorist. He is Professor of Philosophy at Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencias de la Educación, where he founded the Program in Critical Thought, and Professor of Film Theory at Universidad de Chile, in Santiago. He has written many books in Spanish and has curated gallery exhibits and shows in Europe and Latin America. He has held visiting professorships at Duke Unviersity, Yale University, UNAM (Mexico), and Universidad Complutense de Madrid.