Felski - The Limits of Critique

This book is about the role of suspicion in literary criticism: its pervasive presence as mood and method. It is an attempt to figure out what exactly we are doing when we engage in critique and what else we might do instead. And here I take my bearings from a phrase coined by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur to capture the spirit of modern thought. What unites the writings of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, writes Ricoeur, is their conviction that radicalism is not just a matter of action or argument but also one of interpretation. The task of the social critic is now to expose hidden truths and draw out unflattering and counterintuitive meanings that others fail to see. The modern era ushers in a new mode of militant reading: what Ricoeur calls a hermeneutics of suspicion.

In the following pages, I pore doggedly over Ricoeurs phrase to clarify its resonance and relevance for the recent history of criticism. While coined to describe an earlier period of intellectual history, it seems all too prescient in capturing the mood of our own. Is it not evident to even the most guileless of graduate students that texts do not willingly yield up their meanings, that apparent content shrouds more elusive or ominous truths? Seizing the upper hand, critics read against the grain and between the lines; their self-appointed task is to draw out what a text failsor willfully refusesto see. Of course, not everyone subscribes equally to such a style of reading, but Ricoeurs phrase captures a widespread sensibility and an immediately recognizable shape of thought. As a result, it allows us to discern commonalities between methods that are often contrasted or counterposed: ideology critique versus Foucauldian historicism, forceful condemnation versus more suave and tempered modes of troubling or calling into question. The sway of such a sensibility, moreover, reaches well beyond the confines of English departments. When anthropologists unmask the imperialist convictions of their predecessors, when art historians choreograph the stealthy tug of power and domination, when legal scholars assail the neutrality of the law in order to lay bare its hidden agendas, they all subscribe to a style of interpretation driven by a spirit of disenchantment.

What follows, then, is neither a philosophical meditation nor a historical explanation but a close-up scrutiny of a thought style that slices across differences of field and discipline. I duly emphasize rhetoric and form, affect and argument. And while my focus is on literary and cultural studieswith occasional forays into other areasmany arguments in this book have a broader purchase.

My aim is not just to describe but to redescribe this style of thinking: to offer a fresh slant on a familiar practice in the hope of getting a clearer sense of how and why critics read. While the hermeneutics of suspicion has been amply discussed in religious studies, philosophy, intellectual history, and related fields, Ricoeurs phrase never took hold among literary critics, who preferred to think of themselves as engaged in something called critique. (Now that scholars are casting a more jaundiced eye on their methods, it is gradually entering the critical conversation.) As we will see, the idea of critique contains varying hues and shades of meaning, but its key elements include the following: a spirit of skeptical questioning or outright condemnation, an emphasis on its precarious position vis--vis overbearing and oppressive social forces, the claim to be engaged in some kind of radical intellectual and/or political work, and the assumption that whatever is not critical must therefore be