What is Left for Critique? On the Perils of Innocence in Neoliberal Times

Abstract

This essay explores the implications of what we call attachments to innocence for scholarship and politics. After tracing the appearance of innocence in various strands of contemporary thought, we turn to how it shields individuals and groups from facing the depth of our own participation in oppression. This evasion of responsibility works in our perspective as a hindrance to understanding power and engaging with others ethically. The essay also examines how the reductionist and authoritarian dimensions of innocence merge with the neoliberal uptake of progressive politics in university and activist settings. We are interested in how academics and activists are rewarded for cultivating their innocent-selves through discursive and material interventions that leave power relations untouched. It is not merely monetary or status rewards that perpetuate this, but the crisis produced by our implication in the very violence we reject. Working with and through the mobility of agency, power, abuse, and justice, we explore what is at stake in shedding our attachments to innocence in the hope of a different sort of encounter – one that proceeds from the recognition that innocence is not a precondition for our engagement in political life.