Introduction

The history of modern critical thought might, then, be best narrated as a history of attempts to register and amplify conditions of crisis in the pursuit of a radical renewal of the intellectual and social order. To consider merely the period since the turn of the twentieth century (and even then, by no means comprehensively), such a history might explore the relations between psychoanalysis and the fraying social fabric of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the catastrophe of the Great War; the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and the economic strife, totalitarian oppression, and global violence of the 1930s and ’40s (a period during which, tellingly, two associates of the School, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, conceived a journal entitled Krise und Kritik); existentialism and the material and spiritual desolation of post-Second World War Europe; post-structuralism and a range of historical forces, from the unresolved legacy of the Holocaust to the Algerian War of Independence, the Vietnam War, the events of May 1968, and the threat of nuclear apocalypse; feminist criticism and the radical reorganization of work, home, family, and sex in the 1960s and ’70s; cultural studies and the breakdown of Britain’s social democratic “post-war consensus” in the 1970s and ’80s; the new historicism and the coalescence of a neoliberal, free market hegemony in the US under Ronald Reagan; and postcolonial criticism and a variety of bitter nationalist, ethnic, or religious confl icts from South Africa to Northern Ireland to Israel/Palestine.1