How to criticize without ever becoming a critic

Abstract

The chapter elucidates the disposition of the critical IR scholar by exploring the resonances between the political subject and the figure of the critic. While the critical disposition is often contrasted with proper politics as overly negative and devoid of constructive effects, I argue that political praxis and critical activity share a similar modus operandi in overcoming exclusions, overturning hierarchies and abolishing restrictions in a given world. The political subject is not a poet, artist or ‘world-maker’, but a pitiless critic of the worlds s/he finds itself in. Critical IR is therefore a political intervention into the world of the IR discipline that does not seek to consolidate a specific identity within its disciplinary structure but rather to problematize this structure in its entirety.