Feminist critique without the essentialisation of women, moral progress without ignorance of imperial history, self-transformation without commitments to orthodox theories of the ego and its drives––these are some of the topics that Amy Allen, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Pennsylvania State University, has explored in her wide-ranging work. In five (co-)authored books, nine (co-)edited volumes, and numerous articles, she has made crucial contributions to contemporary feminist philosophy, critical social theory, and psychoanalytic theory. For her work, she has been recognised with fellowships and awards, most recently with the 2024 Lotte Köhler Prize by the Sigmund Freud Institute and the 2023 Astor Visiting Professorship of Political Theory at the University of Oxford.
Following a graduate workshop on her work in May 2025, OPR interviews editor Samu/elle Striewski sat down with Allen to ask about the development of her work from an earlier feminist rereading of the ‘Foucault-Habermas debate’ to her attempts to decolonise the normative foundations of the Frankfurt School and her most recent interest in psychoanalysis and its relevance for critical theorising. In the interview, she further discusses the personal and intellectual complexities of doing critique while also being complicit in the very relations of power one tries to criticise and explains how and why critical theory must go beyond developmental notions of both history and the self.
Samu/elle Striewski (SE): To kick us off, can you recount how your thought has developed from your earlier works up to your more recent projects on decolonisation, history, and psychoanalysis?
Amy Allen (AA): I came to critical theory through my previous work on feminist conceptions of power and on the work of Michel Foucault. So, from the beginning I was very interested in thinking about how feminist critical theorists are situated within the same complex and cross-cutting relations of power that we aim to critique and transform. This requires us to be attentive to the complexities of power relations, including how one can be simultaneously oppressed (on the basis of, say, gender) while in a position of dominance (by virtue of one’s racial or class position, for example). I discussed some of these issues in my first book The Power of Feminist Theory(1999/2025), which was recently published in a (significantly) revised and expanded edition. My second book, The Politics of our Selves (2007), rethinks these questions of self, power, and critique through the lens of the Foucault-Habermas debate. Although that book was read by some as pro-Habermasian, my aim was to do justice to both sides. Still, insofar as the argument was quite wedded to the concept of reflexivity, one could say that it had a tendency toward rationalism. As someone who was trained as a philosopher, unlearning the commitment to rational reflexivity is a lifelong process! In that book, I only briefly touched on the questions of history, modernity, and progress––a point on which Foucault and Habermas of course had a huge disagreement. Trying to grapple with these questions laid the groundwork for my third book, The End of Progress (2016). In that project, my sympathies were much more clearly with Foucault, and this turned out to also shift the centre of gravity in my understanding of doing critical theory.
SE: Your main argument in The End of Progress is that contemporary Frankfurt School critical theory—exemplified in the work of Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rainer Forst—remains entangled in developmental and Eurocentric assumptions about historical progress. Besides Foucault, whom you already mentioned, you also turn to Theodor W. Adorno to find immanent resources in that same tradition to engage in a ‘decolonisation’ of its own ‘normative foundations’, as you call it. Your book has been widely discussed and has also been received critically. What were some important criticisms you received? Have your views shifted in response to those criticisms? Would some of them lead you to revise or refine the project if you were writing it now?
AA: First, when writing the book, I thought that Max Horkheimer’s original vision for critical theory in his famous essay ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ (1937) and the Foucauldian-Adornian conception that I sketch at the end of the book were more or less, if not exactly, the same. Now, I see more tension between these two positions regarding what it means to do critical theory. Horkheimer has, in my view, a much more traditionally Marxist understanding of how the tension between power and reason resolves itself throughout history. By contrast, I am more drawn to the conception of critical theory put forward by Adorno in his inaugural lecture, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ (1931). I see many affinities between this Adornian conception of critical theory and Foucault’s genealogical project, although this has been controversially received, particularly by Adorno scholars. Perhaps, there are then actually three conceptions of critique operating in the background of my project, and I would probably now be more careful about distinguishing among them.
Second, some critics of my book pointed out that I unfairly dismissed Marx and the Marxist tradition as potential resources for rethinking the relationship between history and normativity. This is a fair criticism, I think, because aside from a discussion of Habermas’s reconstruction of historical materialism in chapter two, I do not really discuss Marxism at all—and I certainly do not argue enough to justify setting aside the entire tradition! Since the book was published, I have gone back to Marx and Marxism to try to think through some of these questions. One of the complications is that Marx and the Marxist tradition have played a very important role in the critique of imperialism. However, this does not necessarily mean that these thinkers offer us good conceptual resources for disentangling normativity from progressive readings of history. In fact, in some of my recent work (2024), I have argued that Rosa Luxemburg offers what we might call an ‘epistemically imperialist’ critique of imperialism, i.e., a strong critique of imperialism that nevertheless remains wedded to an orthodox Marxist understanding of progressive history. I would say that Marx holds a similar view, although there are some shifts in his late work that complicate this picture somewhat. While I still think that Foucault is a better resource than Marx for rethinking the relationship between history, critique, and normativity, I would be more cautious now about making overly dismissive claims about the latter.
Third, a number of critics rightly zeroed in on my use of the term ‘decolonising’. Some pointed out that decolonisation is not just a matter of epistemology and certainly not just a metaphor; it requires material change to overcome the unequal exposure to global crises like poverty, forced migration, extractivism, pandemics, or the climate catastrophe. The End of Progress takes up a narrow, epistemic conception of decolonisation, and this is admittedly a limitation of the project. Still other critics have justifiably noted that this narrow focus on the (epistemic) decolonisation of the normative foundations of critical theory is a far cry from the development of a fully decolonised, much less decolonial, critical theory—and that accomplishing any of those projects would require a more sustained and substantial engagement with decolonial thinkers than I offer in the book. Here I think I was not always as careful as I could or should have been about the precise and somewhat modest aims of my book––which is probably best read as an immanent critique of the contemporary Frankfurt School that was designed to open that tradition up to more engagement with post- and decolonial critique.
SE: As a result of this immanent critique of Frankfurt School critical theory, you suggest that an epistemic decolonising of critical theory means engaging in a form of ‘problematising genealogy’ of our normative horizons that then allows for a process of unlearning to unfold. You pair this with what you call ‘metanormative contextualism’ which avoids any normative foundationalism and instead opts for a contingent, context-immanent normativity that keeps an openness or ‘epistemic humility’ to being challenged in our very normative foundations through encounters with other forms of life. Given this, how should scholars situated within Western academia—like you and me—engage decolonial theory in a way that acknowledges our own implication in these relations of power and neither appropriates nor speaks for the perspectives of subaltern and (previously) colonised subjects?
AA: Yes, these questions of positionality are quite complex. We must keep them in mind, but we must also acknowledge that a critical perspective does not always correlate with, say, geography. For example, in Brazil, critical theory was initially taken up in a rather Eurocentric way––probably owing to how deeply colonial structures were embedded into its educational system––and this is only recently being reckoned with, a reckoning that is primarily driven by students and younger scholars who are interested in grappling with issues of racism, slavery, indigeneity, and colonialism. Still, I think it is important for relatively privileged, US and Western European critical theorists to remember our positionality and thus to adopt a stance of epistemic humility. I am inspired here by José Medina’s The Epistemology of Resistance (2013), which argues that the epistemic vices of people in positions of domination are almost like a mirror image to the epistemic virtues of the subordinated or subaltern. Moreover, even if it is true that I do not have access to and cannot write from the experience of having been colonised, at the same time, this is no excuse not to engage with issues of decolonisation or authors writing about it. As we discussed in the beginning, the crucial question is: how am I situated in and implicated in the relations of power I am trying to understand and critique? This is a difficult question, but it is also one we must grapple with if we want to get anywhere on these important political topics.
SE: In your most recent book, Critique on the Couch (2020), you explore the relationship between psychoanalysis and critical theory. Can you explain how this project relates to and builds on the previous one?
AA: The two projects are very closely connected—in fact, I initially envisioned them as one book! Both books are attempting to dismantle an adherence to developmental models—of history and of the self—and the role such models play in buttressing mainstream approaches to critical theory. Rereading Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) by Adorno and Horkheimer was the jumping off point for this whole project, because there these two strands of critique, both of Hegelian readings of progressive history and of Freudian developmental models of the self, are closely linked. And, in a more critical vein, both Habermas and Honneth are, I think, committed to intertwined developmental conceptions of history, social evolution and the self. This is the thematic thread that ties the two books together.
There is also a methodological connection. To put it succinctly, one could say that ‘problematising genealogy’ is to history what psychoanalysis is to the practical self-relation. In the last chapter of Critique on the Couch, I explore this idea through a discussion of what Jonathan Lear calls the structural model of transference. On this model, transference is about reactivating within a psychoanalytic situation the analysand’s idiosyncratic way of experiencing the world. This experiential shift enables a practical transformation in the analysand that allows them to creatively and dynamically re-negotiate this mode of experience. When I first read Lear’s discussion of structural transference in his book on Freud (2005/2015), I was struck by how much this sounded like Foucault’s conception of critique in his late work. Think, for example, of the closing lines of his famous essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (1983/1984), where Foucault describes critique as a critical ontology of ourselves that reveals our historical and social conditions of possibility and, in so doing, enables us to experiment with going beyond them. Typically, Foucault is understood to be a staunch critic of psychoanalysis, particularly its dogmatic views on sexuality or some of the authoritarian ways it was taken up in practice. And yet there seems to be an intriguing methodological connection. Indeed, as I have discussed elsewhere (2018), Foucault claimed in his early work that he wanted archaeology to do for the study of history what the psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious did for the study of subjectivity.
SE: One reason Foucault seems to dislike psychoanalytic theory is because of its more substantive beliefs in a certain philosophical anthropology. When mobilising psychoanalysis for critical theory, do we not necessarily buy into that baggage?
AA: I am certainly sympathetic to this worry. At the same time, I am perhaps more comfortable than Foucault was with making some defeasible or provisional anthropological commitments, so long as we understand these as minimal and as waiting to be filled in with specific historical, social, and cultural context. Even with respect to Foucault, this is a complicated topic, because although he was a critic of transhistorical anthropological assumptions, his claim that power is ineliminable certainly seems to make just such an assumption. Turning to psychoanalysis, one of the core assumptions of Object Relations Theory is that human beings are born helplessly dependent on caregivers. Many other mammals are capable of getting up and walking within a relatively brief time after being born, but human infants require a long period of being cared for by others in order to survive. Of course we have to be careful about drawing too many conclusions from that feature of the human condition, but one can argue that, at a minimum, it means that our radical dependence on our primary caregivers—and the ambivalence that results from this complex convergence of love and dependence; even, we might say, of love and power—looms very large in our psychic development. For better or worse, I think that all work in political theory rests on some assumptions about human nature or the human condition, whether those are explicitly stated and defended or not. So even if we must be extremely careful and self-critical when we theorise about the human condition, I do not think we can avoid doing it altogether.