Critique in the broadest sense means “evaluation”. This term is often used in a narrower sense, reflecting its use by Karl Marx and subsequent authors who deal with emancipation in one form or another. The influence of Marx and Sigmund Freud on European semiotics is deep, Marxist and Freudian terminology is a bright thread in the fabric of semiotic discourse. Used in this way, critique means a form of reflection whose approximate goal is critical consciousness (an awareness of the true nature of something or someone) and whose ultimate goal is liberation. Critical consciousness must be understood as the opposite of mystified consciousness. It may be suppressed or used without taking these conditions into account.
Usually, this unconsciousness is not just a lack of consciousness, but a stubborn reluctance to come face to face with what we vaguely feel is the essence. This unconsciousness, especially when reluctance is a key or a certain sign, is called mystical or naive consciousness. The aim of the critique is to test this unconsciousness in the name of liberation or emancipation.
However, modern thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are so committed to the hermeneutics of suspicion that the name of freedom, soaked in the blood of innocent people, could not simply be invoked, if at all.
Roland Barthes once admitted that for him semiology “begins with an emotional impulse.” He believes that the study of signs “can stimulate social criticism”, can provide more ways to penetrate and “understand (describe) how society produces stereotypes, ie the triumph of the artificial, which is then consumed as innate meanings, ie the Triumph of Nature“.
This study was undertaken by him because of “the intolerance of this mixture of bad faith and good consciousness, which characterizes general morality …” (Barthes, Reader, 471).
How is it possible to take into account the fact that decent people also commit or tolerate brutal acts? If this is not due to simple “natural” fears or hatreds, but on the basis of myths (imaginary fears, hatreds, desires, etc.), isn’t it crucial to understand the processes by which such myths are invented?
