This talk addresses the legacy of Kantian concepts such as teleology, perpetual peace and reason in the age of global capital, coloniality, and necropolitical ‘population management' reaching from incarceration to genocide. Already in the 1990s, the shift from Kant’s "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim” to Samuel Huntington’s posthistorical speculation about a “Clash of Civilizations” stripped earlier Enlightenment teleologies of their historical optimism. Today, the Western model of capitalism posits itself as the best of all possible worlds; a natural outcome and endpoint of all historical development. From this perspective, all other histories necessarily appear as detours, diversions, or delays on the way to the latest stage of capitalist modernity, which reveals itself as a permanent “state of emergency,” perpetual war. How then are we to rephrase the basic insights of early Critical Theory according to which the ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ indicates that reason and unreason, rationality and irrationality, civilization and barbarism, violence and peacefulness, are not external opposites but contain each other.

about

Dr. Sami Khatib is a founding member of the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR) and specializes on Critical Theory with interdisciplinary research interests in Philosophy, Aesthetic Theory, Visual Arts, Media Theory, and Cultural Studies. His area of specialty is in 19th and 20th century Continental Philosophy with an emphasis on early Frankfurt School, Kant, German Idealism, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and post-Structuralism. Khatib joined the Orient-Institut Beirut in October 2023 where he is researching practices of Critical Theory from the Global South and the MENA region. At a time when the notion of critique came under attack in Western academia, be it for its European Enlightenment legacy, anthropocentric agency or its turn towards a neoliberal logic of self-improvement and self-care, the perspective and scope of Critical Theory has broadened. Its globalization points beyond the binary of Western/non-Western thought. Prior appointments include guest professorships at various European and Lebanese institutions. His publications include a co-editorship of the volume “Critique: The Stakes of Form” (Zürich, Berlin: Diaphanes, 2020) and authorship of the book “Teleologie ohne Endzweck: Walter Benjamins Ent-stellung des Messianischen” [“Teleology without End.” Walter Benjamin’s Dislocation of the Messianic] (2013).