The Ends of Critique re-examines the stakes of critique in the 21st century. In view of increasingly complex socio-political realities and shifts in a fully globalized world, the roles and manners of critique also change. The volume offers an unprecedented re-examination of critique under those conditions of global entanglement and asymmetrical relations from a diversity of scholarly perspectives within the humanities. All contributions move the notion of critique into more diverse traditions than the Eurocentric, Kantian tradition and emphasize the need to attend to a plurality of critical perspectives. The volume's reflections move critique toward a situated, perspectival, and entangled critical stance, with interventions from decolonial and systemic, deconstructive and (post)human(ist) perspectives. In that way, the volume develops a decidedly different approach to critique than recent considerations of critique as post-critique (Felski) or those endebted to Frankfurt School thought and liberal theories of democracy. It is the first full-length research publication of the interdisciplinary research network Terra Critica.

Diffraction patterns in quantum physics evidence the fact that the behavior of matter is the result of its entanglements with measurement, or as Karen Barad suggests, the entanglement of matter and meaning. In this sense, therefore, phenomena (including texts, cultural agents, or life forms) are the results of their relational, onto-epistemological entanglements and not individual entities that separately pre-exist their joint becoming. As such, 'diffraction' proposes a new understanding of difference: no longer a dualist understanding, but one going beyond binaries. Diffraction is about patterns, constellations, relationalities. From this angle, the book explores 'diffraction', which has begun to impact critical theories and humanities debates, especially via (new) materialist feminisms, STS and quantum thought, but is often used without further reflection upon its implications or potentials. Doing just that, the book also pursues new routes for the onto-epistemological and ethical challenges that arise from our experience of the world as relational and radically immanent; because if we start from the ideas of immanence and entanglement, our conceptions of self and other, culture and nature, cultural and sexual difference, our epistemological procedures and disciplinary boundaries have to be rethought and adjusted. The book offers an in-depth consideration of 'diffraction' as a quantum understanding of difference and as a new critical reading method. It reflects on its import in humanities debates and thereby also on some of the most inspiring work recently done at the crossroads of science studies, feminist studies and the critical humanities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Parallax.

Diffraction patterns in quantum physics evidence the fact that the behavior of matter is the result of its entanglements with measurement, or as Karen Barad suggests, the entanglement of matter and meaning. In this sense, therefore, phenomena (including texts, cultural agents, or life forms) are the results of their relational, onto-epistemological entanglements and not individual entities that separately pre-exist their joint becoming. As such, 'diffraction' proposes a new understanding of difference: no longer a dualist understanding, but one going beyond binaries. Diffraction is about patterns, constellations, relationalities. From this angle, the book explores 'diffraction', which has begun to impact critical theories and humanities debates, especially via (new) materialist feminisms, STS and quantum thought, but is often used without further reflection upon its implications or potentials. Doing just that, the book also pursues new routes for the onto-epistemological and ethical challenges that arise from our experience of the world as relational and radically immanent; because if we start from the ideas of immanence and entanglement, our conceptions of self and other, culture and nature, cultural and sexual difference, our epistemological procedures and disciplinary boundaries have to be rethought and adjusted. The book offers an in-depth consideration of 'diffraction' as a quantum understanding of difference and as a new critical reading method. It reflects on its import in humanities debates and thereby also on some of the most inspiring work recently done at the crossroads of science studies, feminist studies and the critical humanities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Parallax.

Figures of Simplicity explores a unique constellation of figures from philosophy and literature Heinrich von Kleist, Herman Melville, G. W. Leibniz, and Alexander Baumgarten in an attempt to recover alternative conceptions of aesthetics and dimensions of thinking lost in the disciplinary narration of aesthetics after Kant. This is done primarily by tracing a variety of simpletons that populate the writings of Kleist and Melville. These figures are not entirely ignorant, or stupid, but simple. Their simplicity is a way of thinking; one that author Birgit Mara Kaiser here suggests is affective thinking. Kaiser avers that Kleist and Melville are experimenting in their texts with an affective mode of thinking, and thereby continue, she argues, a key line within eighteenth-century aesthetics: the relation of rationality and sensibility. Through her analyses, she offers an outline of what thinking can look like if we take affectivity into account."

The Ends of Critique re-examines the stakes of critique in the 21st century. In view of increasingly complex socio-political realities and shifts in a fully globalized world, the roles and manners of critique also change. The volume offers an unprecedented re-examination of critique under those conditions of global entanglement and asymmetrical relations from a diversity of scholarly perspectives within the humanities. All contributions move the notion of critique into more diverse traditions than the Eurocentric, Kantian tradition and emphasize the need to attend to a plurality of critical perspectives. The volume's reflections move critique toward a situated, perspectival, and entangled critical stance, with interventions from decolonial and systemic, deconstructive and (post)human(ist) perspectives. In that way, the volume develops a decidedly different approach to critique than recent considerations of critique as post-critique (Felski) or those endebted to Frankfurt School thought and liberal theories of democracy. It is the first full-length research publication of the interdisciplinary research network Terra Critica.