The Irony of Critique

Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History, 2020

Rereading the New Criticism, eds. Miranda B. Hickman and John D. McIntyre, 2012

Inspired by a range of new commentary reconsidering the New Criticism (e.g., Jane Gallop, Terry Eagleton, Charles Altieri, Camille Paglia), the essays in *Rereading the New Criticism* reevaluate the New Critical corpus, trace its legacy, and explore resources it might offer for the future of theory, criticism, and pedagogy. Addressing the work of New Critics such as John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren, as well as important forerunners of the New Critics such as I.A. Richards and William Empson, these ten essays, with an introduction and an epilogue from the editors, shed new light on the genesis of the New Criticism: they revisit its chief arguments and methods, consider its significant contributions to the development of academic literary studies in North America, and address how its theories and techniques might inform methodologies for literary and cultural studies in the twenty-first century.

Since the Enlightenment critique has played an overarching role in how western society understands itself and its basic institutions. However, opinions differ widely concerning the understanding and evaluation of critique. To understand such differences and clarify a viable understanding of critique, the article turns to Kant’s critical philosophy, inaugurating the “age of criticism”. While generalizing and making critique unavoidable, Kant coins an unambiguously positive understanding of critique as an affirmative, immanent activity. Not only does this positive conception prevail in the critique of pure and practical reason and the critique of judgment; these modalities of critique set the agenda for three major strands of critique in contemporary thought, culminating in among others Husserl, Popper Habermas, Honneth, and Foucault. Critique affirms and challenges cognition and its rationality, formulates ethical ideals that regulate social interaction, and further articulates normative guidelines underway in the on-going experimentations of a post-natural history of human nature. In contradistinction to esoteric Platonic theory, philosophy at the threshold of modernity becomes closely linked to an outward-looking critique that examines and pictures what human forms of life are in the process of making of themselves and challenges them, by reflecting upon what they can and what they should make of themselves. As a very widely diffused practice, however, critique may also become a self-affirming overarching end in itself. Key words: Affirmative critique, judgment, distinction, philosophy, reason, Enlightenment, Man, anthropology, Kant, Heidegger, Habermas, Foucault, Schlegel, Plato The article Raffnsøe: "What is Critique? Critical Turns in the Age of Criticism" has been published in Outlines. Critical Practice Studies here: http://ojs.statsbiblioteket.dk/index.php/outlines/article/view/26261

Criticism, 2021

Recent critical discourse on "critique" tends to betray a certain discomfort with critique's Enlightenment origins and its corresponding alignment with notions of autonomous subjectivity and universality. Especially since Bruno Latour's broadside against critical "anti-fetishism," supporters have been at pains to distance critique from the image of a self-satisfied vanguard chiding the unenlightened. This paper stages a defense of critique that reclaims its Enlightenment lineage in order to assemble, in Mark Hulliung's words, an "autocritique of Enlightenment." Reading Kant and Marx via Kojin Karatani and Slavoj Žižek, I trace a line of thought in which critique foregrounds the intersection between theory and practice. It is at that intersection that the fetish appears. In contrast to Latour and some of critique's defenders, I consider the fetish not a blind spot that immobilizes but a point of contact representing a practical commitment. Even Kant himself performs a "fetishistic disavowal" of sorts: I know very well that there is no empirical ground for metaphysical commitments, but nevertheless I will make them because it is the only way to live autonomously and foster others' autonomy. In the symbolic order of capitalism, such "faith without belief" loses its intentional character, crystallizing in commodity fetishism as "the religion of everyday life." Yet it also informs the Romantic view of the literary work as the site for a dialectic of truth and illusion, and Adorno's thesis that a "fetish character" inhabits artworks no less intrinsically than commodities. This fetish character makes the literary text, like ideology, a particularly fitting object of critique. Herein lies the parallel between literary reading and the critique of ideology, and the reason why critique need not subordinate one to the other in order to be properly critical.

Duke University Press eBooks, 2017

W hile this special issue of ELN on "After Critique?" can be read as both a verdict and a demand, there is more at stake in the conversation it stages than the mere taking of sides. For our part, we join those contributors who find themselves ready to take on the hegemony of critique and the inflated forms of critical sovereignty it delivers, as we too have experienced the frustration, disappointment, or sheer boredom at the force and dominance of critique's now familiar critical routines. But as much as we are exhausted by critique, we are also against the proposition that it is time to be after it, as if the ways that critique has been worn out or abused are its fault alone.This means that we are increasingly skeptical about those projects-surface reading, reparative reading, descriptive reading, distant reading, and weak theory-now heralded as the bright future of literary inquiry.i While these projects all offer significant challenges to the orthodoxies of critique, their commitment to feeling "good" about their objects of study sacrifices the necessary insecurity, even estrangement, that we find compelling about interpretative practice as the central activity of the humanities. In the end, we take their promises as various field-enhancing attempts to restore the critic's professional credibility.

Feeling Critical advances an account of critique via the practices of contextualization, demystification, and problematization. Over against postcritical objections to critique’s chronic dysphoria, its political overreach, and its overreliance on diagnostic modes of knowing, the story I tell about the turn away from critique has less to do with its affective, political, or epistemological inadequacies, than with our intractable and often disavowed attachments to its practice. Attending to the affective force of the desires and aspirations that critique magnetizes, I aim to illuminate why critique proved so compelling for so many literary scholars in the latter half of the 20th century. To this end, I offer a new staging of critique as an array of practice rather than a body of knowledge, developing a phenomenological idiom capable of registering the affective texture of its motives, its temporality, and its performativity. In these lights, each of the three practices I examine in this dissertation will be seen to reorganize our interpretive encounters with literary texts into scenes whose forms remediate critique’s political ambitions as aesthetic feeling. I contend that the appeal of contextualizing, demystifying, and problematizing practices owes to the manner in which they enable readers to inhabit a felt sense of literature’s social relevance, to experience ambient political frustration as the anticipation of an incipient utopian future, and to negotiate normative conflict by seeking out intersubjective attunements of intimate feeling. In tracing the allure of these critical practices to their virtual, affective realization of epistemological and political ambitions whose actual materialization has remained frustratingly out of reach, I am guided both by the wish to deshame literary criticism’s erstwhile attachments to critique, and to explain why they feel so difficult to give up.

Eds. Michel Chaouli, Jan Lietz, Jutta Müller-Tamm, and Simon Schleusener De Gruyter | 2021 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688719 Poetic critique – is that not an oxymoron? Do these two forms of behavior, the poetic and the critical, not pull in different, even opposite, directions? Taking Friedrich Schlegel’s idea of "poetische Kritik" as its starting point, this volume reflects on the possibility of drawing these alleged opposites closer together. In light of current debates about the legacy of critique, the essays here gathered explore the poetic potential of criticism and the critical value of art and literature. Contents Michel Chaouli, Jan Lietz, Jutta Müller-Tamm, and Simon Schleusener What Is Poetic Critique? | 1 Jennifer Ashton Why Adding ‘Poetic’ to ‘Critique’ Adds Nothing to Critique | 7 Michel Chaouli Schlegel’s Words, Rightly Used | 19 Amit Chaudhuri Storytelling and Forgetfulness | 35 Jeff Dolven Poetry, Critique, Imitation | 45 Alexander García Düttmann “Echo Reconciles” | 57 Jonathan Elmer On Not Forcing the Question: Criticism and Playing Along | 65 Anne Eusterschulte La Chambre Poétique | 79 Joshua Kates The Silence of the Concepts (in Meillassoux’s After Finitude and Gottlob Frege) | 105 Bettine Menke Theater as Critical Praxis: Interruption and Citability | 125 Walter Benn Michaels Historicism’s Forms: The Aesthetics of Critique | 145 Yi-Ping Ong Poetic Criticism and the Work of Fiction: Goethe, Joyce, and Coetzee | 155 Simon Schleusener Surface, Distance, Depth: The Text and its Outside | 175 Contributors | 203

PMLA, 2010

The fuTure of liTerary criTicism will be DerriDean, or iT will noT be. anD if iT is noT, iT will have been DerriDean, since iT was he who first envisioned critically the possibility of a future from which literature-and, a fortiori, literary criticism-might be absent. Derrida noted that the exceptional fragility of literature would become manifest in the event of a nuclear, biological, or nanotechnological holocaust ("No Apocalypse" 27). One can imagine a holocaust survivor producing an epic poem or a lyrical outburst, but literature will have vanished with no hope of ever being reconstituted. Derrida distinguishes literarity, the use of stylized language, which may be as old as civilization, from literature, by which he means the historical institution that began at the end of the seventeenth to the beginning of the eighteenth century in Europe, an industry of authors and publishers, readers and booksellers-and literary critics. It is on the grounds of the institution of literature that we academic critics continue, more or less tenuously, to survive. The fragility of literature, its susceptibility to being lost, is linked to its having no real referent. The representations of literature are inherently unreliable; they are not even always fictional, sometimes factual but unreliably. Literature conforms to no referent from which it could be reconstituted if its canons were lost, the way chemistry might in a postnuclear age be rediscovered. It depends for its existence exclusively on the preservation of the archive. The archive consists, Derrida reminds us, not only of physical books or bits and bytes but also in its systems of organization, which create the conditions for and guarantee the chances of intertextuality, the possibility of texts' referring to other texts, as in citation, quotation, allusion, influence between and among texts. Intertextuality was often deemed in the twentieth century to be the essential characteristic of literature, its determining feature, sine qua non, and the specific object of literary criticism. It follows that our principal, our principial duty as literary critics is to preserve the archive, not only as a physical entity but also as practices of reading and commentary richarD Klein is professor of french at cornell university. he is the author of Cigarettes Are Sublime (Duke uP, 1993) and Jewelry Talks: A Novel Thesis (Pantheon, 2001).

Platonic Occasions, 2015