Crisis without Critique: A Post-Koselleckian Political Phenomenology

Xiaohong Xu, University of Michigan

The historical dialectics between crisis and critique, according to Reinhart Koselleck, constituted the foundational dynamics of political modernity. This paper radicalizes Koselleck’s generative yet conservative diagnosis of the nexus of crisis and critique and scrutinizes the political origins of the stability-maintenance complex in postsocialist China. I argue that such a stability-maintenance complex rests upon the marriage of a pervasive sense of crisis and insecuritization and an econo-technocratic depoliticization of and capitalization on this psychological condition. I trace the historical roots of this hegemony of crisis without critique to an earlier crisis of Maoist socialism at the height of the Cultural Revolution mass mobilization. The Maoists’ own depoliticization and capitalization of a crisis thus paved the way for both the demise of the Maoist project and the depoliticization of the post-Mao era. By dissecting this pattern of crisis with critique, I show the political and ideological roots of the complicity between China’s stability-maintenance complex and neoliberal insecuritization complex, which has conditioned China’s integration into global capitalism.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 246. Uncertainty, Crises, and Critical Junctures in the Political History of China and beyond