Beyond Ambiguity and Ambivalence: Rethinking the Tools of Critique

Abstract

This essay analyzes the central architecture of critique. It argues that, across the humanities, critique has followed a uniform methodology, where in qualities like ambiguity, ambivalence, uncertainty, contradiction, and paradox have represented the main tools of not only critique and unmasking but also disclosure and transformation. Within teaching philosophy, critique has thus done more than to politicize the classroom; it has also ingrained an equation between pedagogy and therapeutic witnessing or confessionalism. For many, qualities like ambiguity and uncertainty have furthermore been imagined to bear distinctly ‘ethical’ fruits. This essay questions these staples of pedagogical theory, in particular the redemptive faith that paradox and contradiction will prove inherently critical and/or progressive. It therefore historicizes the architecture of critique, submitting that among other things the contemporary political climate challenges unbridled faith in those qualities. And it instead promotes values like trust, integrity, clarity, and noncontradiction as the goals of a postcritical education.