We Thinkers from the Gilt-Edged Margins: Six Theses on Critical Theory

The theses identify impasses in critical theory as practiced over the last few decades: Nominally pledged to an emancipatory and egalitarian politics, it often sticks up for free-market capitalism and the old European empires. Its anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist positions are routinely reworked by others to justify European and US dominion. Critique becomes a way for intellectuals to convince themselves that they have not been swallowed by the market. Critical theory has begun to function as cultural capital. The critical point of view is a way of miming a politics in scholarly domains whose political stakes have already been neutralized.