| Summary/Abstract |
This paper introduces the concept of a “parasitic critique.” It begins by theorizing the ethico-political positionality of “critical” researchers by speaking with Michel Serres to introduce the figure of the parasitic-researcher. That device explores a tension in critical research between hearing “thick” descriptions of our interlocutors’ lifeworlds before channeling them into “thin” metatheoretical accounts. The paper argues that this dilemma relates to the rhetorical “style” of critical approaches in IR, which employ a certain “suspicious hermeneutics” that is unwilling to take seriously the voices of particular interlocutors. By contrast, a parasitic critique is laid out as a critical orientating sensibility focused on reordering the methods of critique, with the hope of cultivating a non-judgmental ethic of “care-full” analysis and description. This argument is made by drawing out one “lay” critical theory of political violence that sees critique make a three-fold switch from suspicion to learning, exclusion to combination, and contradiction to composition. Throughout, these claims are nested within self-reflections on work interviewing both victims and perpetrators of torture, which demonstrate—often uncomfortably—how it is necessary to find points of critical sympathy between the subjugator and the subjugated that can be leveraged for the ethico-political good.
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