Receptivity

 ( Critical Theory ) 

Receptivity, or receptive agency, is a practical capacity and source of normative ethics, which, according to the philosopher Nikolas Kompridis, has both ontology and ethical dimensions, and refers to a mode of listening and "normative response" to demands arising outside the self, as well as "a way by which we might become more attuned to our world disclosure of the world, to our inherited ontology," thereby generating non-instrumental possibilities for social change and self-transformation. Kompridis has argued for the importance of receptivity to democracy, romanticism and critical theory.Nikolas Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 199-210.

• "A Politics of Receptivity". Special issue of Ethics and Global Politics, Vol 4, No 4 (2011), guest editor Nikolas Kompridis.