Critique /krɪˈtiːk/

Noun
A detailed analysis and assessment of something, especially a literary, philosophical, or political theory: ‘a
critique of Marxist historicism’

Verb
Evaluate (a theory or practice) in a detailed and analytical way: ‘the authors critique the methods and
practices used in the research’
- Oxford English Dictionary, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/critique

“From Reinhart Kosellek’s Critique and Crisis, we learn that critique emerges in ancient Athens as the
jurisprudential term krisis. Nearly untranslatable from the holistic Greek context to our much more
compartmentalized one, krisis integrates polis rupture, tribunal, knowledge, judgment, and repair at the
same time that it links subject and object in practice. Krisis refers to a specific work of the polis on itself—a
practice of sifting, sorting, judging, and repairing what has been rent by a citizen violation of polis law or
order…
“At times today the term is taken to convey polemical rejection, at other times to signal immanent or
deconstructive analytic practices, and at still others, to identify the search for a secreted truth within a tissue
of mystifications. In all of its uses, however, critique would seem to carry a tacit presumption of reason’s
capacity to unveil error. Therein lies part of our problem.”
- Wendy Brown, ‘Introduction’, in Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood,
Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), p. 9

“A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on
what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought, the
practices that we accept rest.… Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to
show that things are not as self-evident as we believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no
longer be accepted as such. Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult.”

- Michel Foucault, ‘Practicing Criticism’, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other
Writings, 1977–1 984 (translated by A. Sheridan et al. edited by L.D. Kritzman) (New York:
Routledge, 1988), pp. 152–58

“… I see the aim of “critique” to be a detailed analysis of the foundations of the way we understand the things
we think about, whatever they are. Critique is useful and necessary to all forms of theory, because it exposes
the assumptions we make as being not natural or neutral but, rather, associated with our particular position
in the world. Critique can therefore enable us to understand, at least, that our own view is partial.”
- Margaret Davies, Asking the Law Question (3rd ed)
(Sydney: Thomson Lawbook Co., 2008), p. 199.