Ricerc@Sapienza

The authors aim to introduce two sensitive concepts in sociology: gift and agapic love. Starting from a clarification of the semantic areas of the two terms, their history, their connections and their opacity, the paper aim to release gift and love only from the private sphere and to give them a public dimension, recognising a strong critical and reflective charge.

Since their inception, queer theories have had a remarkable influence on how we think of law’s effects on social reality. In particular, in the past three decades the debates and polemics that have arisen in this burgeoning subject area have shed a critical light on how the law grants social speakability and political agency to forms of sexuality and

This article discusses the recent emergence of postcritical approaches in a variety of
disciplines, and mostly (for present purposes, at least) in literary studies, anthropology
and political philosophy. Although it is not uncommon to read of a turn – if not
the turn – to postcritique, more than one farewell to traditional social criticism is
at stake, and more often than not bearing little resemblance to each other in terms
of both methodology and content. This is why, by focusing on the different ways in

This is a note on what philosophy can do if it takes a postcritical attitude. It begins with a juxtaposition of literature and philosophy and explains both what they share and what the latter can do better than the former. The main claim is that postcritical philosophy can enter life in a way that philosophy is no longer used to doing insofar as it ties up with other disciplines.

This article centres on Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of social critique and its political potential. It first examines important objections to his view of the way in which critique works, particularly from those scholars who claim that it implies an objectivist notion of people’s cognition and agency. It continues by clarifying that this objection rests on a misplaced understanding of Bourdieu’s idea of the levels at which critique takes place.

This article addresses postcritique as a novel epistemological and methodological attitude that invites to get closer to how social actors put the social together. It first discusses the break with critical scholarship by juxtaposing alternative conceptions of what guides people’s conduct. While most critical approaches concern themselves with the invisible mechanisms governing social action, postcritique is more attuned to how people’s doings produce effects of connection. The article goes on to discuss the notion of theory postcritique entails.

This article sets forth a tentative genealogy of postcritique and in particular of how
some of Bruno Latour’s insights on epistemology and the methodology of social
sciences have paved the way for a postcritical approach to the study of the social. To
this end, I centre on two major breaks with critical paradigms. First, the rejection of an
understanding of knowledge as a self-referential system of classification. Second, the
dismissal of the idea that social action always occurs within a broader context. Based