Kritik på delagtighedens betingelser. Om at være et problem

In this article, I discuss the issue of critique under conditions of complicity. Complicity and privilege might be said, in some sense, always to be conditions of possibility for critical discourse. But the complicity, I consider here, is not of this general or abstract, conceptual kind. Rather, I examine a critical genre – critique under conditions of complicity – in which the critical subject is both complicit in and privileged by the system, he or she is nevertheless attempting a critique of. I discuss three rather different examples of critique under conditions of complicity: A literary genre that I term ‘hypocrite fiction’, French anti-imperialism represented by Jean-Paul Sartre, and Critical Whiteness Studies. What these three critical positions share is, most importantly, their distaste of a global system of which they are themselves beneficiaries. Each of these three discourses thus respond in its own way to the systemic inequality and injustice caused by specific configurations of capitalism, imperialism, and racism, respectively. I argue that the experience of complicity, guilt, and hypocrisy recorded in these critical discourses are forms of moral-existential and critical thinking. I also suggest that the cultural, intellectual, public, and academic discourses that register complicity do not overall testify to the withering of critique.