Ricoeur, Sedgwick and the Limits of Critique

Dr Sophie Vlacos, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Theory and Literature, the University of Glasgow presents a talk on ‘Ricoeur, Sedgwick and the Limits of Critique'. Critique plays a central role in Ricoeur's system of thought. Its role is no less crucial than that somewhat louder, wholly triumphant account of the productive imagination in The Rule of Metaphor. But critique in recent years has fallen into disrepute, along with the post-Kantian heritage of Critical Theory. Recent turns to realism within literary studies and Continental Philosophy register this rejection of, or at least fatigue with, the post-Kantian worldview; a view potently summarised by the Speculative Realist philosopher Quentin Meillassoux as ‘correlationism' (the inability to countenance a mind-independent reality beyond the correlate of thought and world). This position, directly attributed by Meillassoux and other contemporary realists to Kant and Kantian critique by extension, is commonly associated with the ills of cultural postmodernism, including the rise of conspiracy theory and post-truth culture in general.
      In this talk Dr Vlacos will explore the post-critique arguments of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Bruno Latour into dialogue with Ricoeur's distinctive hermeneutical reading of Kant.