ABSTRACT
Criticism and critique work to shake the fixity of the sense of the real, the symbolic nets that define the fields of everyday routine behaviours and so raise the fundamental question of how the sense of the real may be re-configured to meet the individual and collective interests of people, of 'humanity'. The symbolic field that psychoanalytics opens up relates the social, in its broadest sense, that is, a collective life through a variety of forms of organisation with the multitude of others to the psychological, the life of the embodied self that knows itself only through reflections with, alongside and against others and otherness. Achieving critique means achieving the systematic spacings where people can join together in public debate in the place of power(s) where each voice can be heard and incorporated in decision-making and action. Both criticism and critique in their different ways make a demand for change, for the realisation of the new.
