A Philosophy of Crisis? Methodological and Critical Perspectives

Abstract

Building on Miguel de Beistegui's Crisis: A Critique (2026, Bloomsbury Academic), this forum exchange debates the book's central arguments and their significance for contemporary social, political, and ecological thought. In contrast to philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, who question the relevance of the concept of crisis because of its entanglement with a meta-physical vision of temporality and history or scholars like Janet Roitman who deconstruct the uses of crisis narratives, Beistegui's project restores crisis as a philosophical concept through a genealogical and transdisciplinary approach attentive to its polysemy and eventfulness. Beistegui approaches crisis not as an abstract concept and a master definition, but as a historically variable regime of normative discourse and power through which societies interpret and govern profound instability or rupture. Key to his differentiated account that aims to strike a balance between sensitivity to historical context and critique is the distinction between four regimes of crisis – deviation, exception, contradiction, and extinction or collapse – each related to a specific manner of reading and enacting the undoing, change, and the emergence of novel norms. The contributors to the debate engage critically with this typology, as well as with Beistegui's genealogical and critical-methodological approach. Particular attention is given to how contemporary discourses of ecological collapse, capitalism and its contradictions, and social transformation are modelled by divergent regimes of crisis, and to the possibilities for imagining political action and collective futures anew.