Commitment totelos—a sustained critical rhetoric

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Abstract
Our paper attempts to illustrate how a commitment toward telos enhances the critical process. We argue that self‐critical and “skeptical” scholarship is not an end in itself. Such work does not demonstrate, sufficiently, the contingent nature of criticism and its relationship to the society in which the critic is a member. Self‐reflective criticism isolates the critic and fates her to reproducing a lonely account of what culture is and how it functions. We call for an orientation toward criticism that acknowledges the contingent nature of meaning formation. Critics have a stake in the critical act itself and therefore should describe their purpose through telos. Telos is not teleological or Utopian; rather, telos is the continuous, ever changing purpose, as ephemeral and enduring as putting pen to paper, of the critic and society. It is the temporary fixing of meaning that admits the political nature of criticism, hence its need to affect change. We offer three examples of what a commitment toward telos would do. We then contextualize our own criticism by showing how it sustains traditions of thought, even while offering a new version of them.

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