Critique on the heights of despair: Politics, philosophy and the persistence of hope

"Critique on the Heights of Despair: Politics, Philosophy, and the Persistence of Hope" considers the philosophical sources of despair in the critical imagination. It aims to refresh the landscape of radical political theory through a revaluation of critique and the despair that critique ineluctably suffers. Resisting the prevailing assumption that critique must be rescued from its negative moods, this study aims to dignify despair as an ambivalent and potentially productive orientation to oneself and the world. The dissertation takes up the philosophical writings of G.W.F. Hegel, Soren Kierkegaard, Simone de Beauvoir, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno to trace the "wounds of negativity" carried by the movements of critique. What this tradition of critical philosophy provides is neither the secure confidence of rational foundations nor the buoyancy of affirmative irrationalism, but an avowal of despair as the irreducible condition from which critique proceeds.;The condition that both Hegel and Kierkegaard describe as despair refers to the subject's passionate estrangement from received ways of knowing the world and willing oneself a part of it. While I do not intend to resurrect Hegelian Spirit or Kierkegardian Faith against the despair they help us to understand, both illuminate the dialectical quality of critical despair---the revolt against despair staged by the subject in despair, the hopes harbored and nurtured in the negative movements of critique, the passionate joy nurtured in thinking against the present age. I track this dialectic not to restore Reason or Faith to their redemptive functions, but to suggest that radical political critique does not need rescue from the ambivalent passions that animate it. Instead of securing some way out of the pathway of despair, Beauvoir, Benjamin, and Adorno provide theoretical material with which to recast critique beyond rescue and resignation. In the ruins of a reconciliatory dialectic, I suggest that radical political theory can be enlived by the traces of hope preserved in a critical misrelation to the political, economic, and cultural logic of late modernity. Taking refreshment from the persistent dialectic of hope and despair. Contemporary critique might become joyful beyond and any optimism or pessimism.