Affirmative Critique as Counter-archiving and An-archiving: For Another Academic Freedom to Come

The article offers an analysis of a major Danish controversy on alleged “excessive academic activism” and “pseudo-Research”. Unfolding in 2021, it not only came to include and affect newspapers, bloggers, the Danish Parliament, the Danish Universities, and the general Danish public, but also did serious harm to the research communities under attack. The article includes anarchived material, a visual cartography and a parodical rendering of the controversy. These are used as means to showcase how the notion of critique was coopted in this controversy by the fare-out right-wing anti-gender movements and used to attack proponents of gender studies among others. Simultaneously, these movements invoked freedom of speech at the expense of academic freedom. Subsequently, the article gives an outline of and conceptualizes a more general condition that works as a back cloth for the controversy. This is the dissemination, decay and wide-spread misuse of the traditional well-merited institutions of critique and freedom of speech that have recently come to be used in sometimes almost parodic ways. Searching to develop to a more-than-adequate response the spread of negative critique in the ruins of critique, we develop an alternative notion and practice of critique by formulating ten dogmas of affirmative critique. In addition, we suggest experimenting with forms of anarchiving to pave the way for an affirmative critique and another academic freedom to come.