Abstract | What’s at stake in debates over critique and post-critique in International Relations (IR)? To subvert that question, this paper is written in the format of a theatre play that stages a repeated encounter between scholars who are invested, or not, in that debate. At the centre of the conversations that take place are questions linked to academic responsibility, the nature of reflexivity, and the possibility of different political futures. The play and its characters are fictions, though they are hoped to reflect the ‘narcissism of small differences’ that often pervades academia. In doing so, we seek to 1) foreground how small changes in context (here, from an academic to a practitioner conference) force radical changes on how intellectual controversies are debated, 2) emphasize that the true stakes of debates such as those between critique and post-critique are often obscured by the combative nature of academic discourse, and 3) advocate for a refusal of, or active withdrawal from, the arbitrary classification of scholars into particular intellectual camps or positions. This process of fixing identities, the false idea that we are simply our academic personas, very rarely reflects either our personal-political realities nor the complex, polyphonic, and sometimes happily contradictory qualities of our evolving intellectual lives. |
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