The Limits of Critique

## Citation

Felski, Rita. *The Limits of Critique*. University of Chicago Press, 2015.

## Introduction

Acknowledging contemporary discontent with critical theory, questioning its uses and transformative ability

* "Critique is not only a matter of method but of a certain sensibility - or what I will call 'critical mood'" (6)

## The Stakes of Suspicion

Assessing suspicion as mood and method

* Paul Ricoeur on the "hermeneutics of suspicion" (see esp. 30-31)
* Against pathologizing (paranoia)

## Digging Down and Standing Back

Taking up and knocking down the spatial metaphors for reading/textual engagement

* Digging down presumes a Freudian approach, looking for hidden root causes
* Standing back presumes a Foucauldian historicist approach, looking at context

## An Inspector Calls

The affordances and limitations of detective fiction as metaphor for critique

* Metasuspicion - critique turning (in) on itself (commentary on commentary)
* Shift to identification with the criminal over the detective
* Critique as play of game (110)
* Against idea of reading as violence to a text (cf. Michel de Certeau), guilt that attends reading (113)

## Crrritique

Difference between critique and criticism: The "everydayness" of criticism vs. the presumed intellectualism of critique? (135) Criticism moves with the grain, critique moves against.

Five qualities in the current rhetoric of critique:

1. Critique is secondary
2. Critique is negative
3. Critique is intellectual
4. Critique comes from below
5. Critique does not tolerate rivals

## "Context Stinks!"

Following Latour, towards an Actor-Network Theory of postcritical reading

Insights from ANT:

1. History is not a box - why do texts have affective power across time? How can we move beyond binary between text and context?
2. Literary texts as nonhuman actors - no binary between heroic and passive. "To describe such disparate phenomena as actors is not to overlook the salient differences between things, animals, texts, and people, nor is it to impute intentions, desires, or purposes to inanimate objects. Rather, an actor, in this schema, is anything that modifies a state of affairs by making a difference. Nonhuman actors do not determine reality or single-handedly make things happen" (163)
3. Postcritical reading - after the critical, but not uncritical; attentive to affect, reading as embodied attentiveness; interpretation as reinvention.

Felski's undergraduate course design: "The first part of the course - effectively an induction into various styles of suspicious interpretation - remains gratifying to teach. Besides introducing my students to current debates in literary studies, it is, for some of them, their primary exposure to Freud, Foucault, feminism, and other major strands of modern intellectual history. And yet I have come to feel that a course devoted entirely to critique is an exercise in bad faith in skirting or simplifying the question of why literature matters. Devoting the second half of the course to postcritical reading forces the class to grapple with tough questions." (180)

## In Short

"Having clarified, to the best of my ability, the reasons for my dissatisfaction with critique, I want to move on: to try different vocabularies and experiment with alternative ways of writing, to think in a more sustained and concentrated fashion about what other moods and methods might look like. The point, in the end, is not to redescribe or reinterpret critique but to change it." (192-193)