FOR THE SLOW WORK OF CRITIQUE IN CRITICAL TIMES. BY WEBB KEANE. "Critique is not simply “criticism.” Criticism asserts that something is wrong. The critic attempts to unveil the truth of a reality that others misrecognize. Critical observation contains a normative avowal pitted against a state of affairs. Critics unmask in order to judge: things should not be the way they are. They take the facts as knowable and assume that the critic and the audience share some moral bearings. By contrast, critique brings an ethical imagination to bear on the very conditions of possibility for our present circumstances. It aspires less to unmask falsehood than to compel its audience to see matters in a different—but not necessarily truer—light. It is not always negative. After all, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason wasn’t an attack on reason but an effort to identify the fundamental conditions that make reason possible. If the pace of criticism is urgent and may demand immediate action, critique can be slow and indirect, and often raises more questions than it answers. The aim of critique is to open up what we can imagine." "Critique investigates the assumptions that underwrite the way things seem to be, as well as their sources. However, like criticism, its focus on matters such as gender, race, or economic value also rests on an underlying judgment. The practitioner of critique must believe that examining these categories of identity and worth contains some potential to emancipate its audience. Otherwise, why engage in it at all?"