dePICTions Manifesto

a critical review

In 2019, Les temps modernes ceased publication after 74 years. While surely the end of an era, this event gives occasion to breathe new life into the French tradition of the critical review. Such is the task that dePICTions sets itself: based in Paris and inspired by the city’s intellectual currents, yet published in English as the world’s scholarly lingua franca, this new critical review translates a distinctly French approach for an international audience.

dePICTions is not devoted to a specific field of inquiry. The red thread running through the review is that of critical and creative thinking, which we conceive of as a method that can be applied to any topic. Each issue of dePICTIons is thematic, i.e., organized around a particular theme, but we are less interested in the “production of knowledge” than we are in the generation of perspectives and approaches.

While dePICTions considers all fields, it highlights the humanities. These non-quantifiable fields are marginalized in contemporary scholarship, which has quantifiable results as its highest telos. In defiance of this trend, we embrace the open-ended nature of the humanities. A critical text should not tell us what to think—a quantitative task—but teach us how to think, opening up new avenues for our own thinking—a qualitative task.

In the course of their marginalization, many texts and thinkers of the humanities face the threat of oblivion. As much as it is our goal to forge new paths of thought, we equally aim to preserve the chain of transmission tying our work to such texts and thinkers. Our mission of translation, then, extends to the task of translating these varied intellectual heritages into a shared idiom accessible to the entire world of critical thinking.

dePICTions promotes no specific intellectual or political orientation, nor does it prioritize content that serves a specific social or political purpose. We do not presume to police the ways in which readers interpret our texts, and in a global discursive atmosphere that often militates against critical and creative thinking, we believe that applied demonstrations of such thinking are political statements in their own right.

That being said, we do not subscribe to the illusion of scholarly “objectivity.” We believe that being an intellectual means taking sides, and that constructive critical thinking can only arise from an awareness and acknowledgement of one’s own positionality—a critical and questioning awareness, to be sure, but never the pretense of a detached and disembodied objectivity.

The open-ended nature of critical and creative inquiry demands the refusal to regard any text as perfect—that is, as a commodified product destined for mechanical reproduction and consumption. This is why dePICTions is open-access—both for readers and for contributors, with the former invited to comment and the latter to revise at any time, thereby showcasing the open-endedness of their own—and our collective—intellectual journey.