Critique and Its Explosions

Abstract

Critique and Its Explosions Jeffrey Galbraith (bio) In The Limits of Critique, definition is liberating. Early in the book, Rita Felski frames her efforts to rescue scholarship from the constraints of skeptical interpretation by redefining her central term. If the tradition of critique that emerges from Kant and Marx has monopolized the norms of interpretation, Felski argues for "redescribing critique as a hermeneutics of suspicion."1 This act of redescription, she explains, "downgrades [critique's] specialness by linking it to a larger history of suspicious interpretation."2 For Felski, critique is best understood as an affective stance, a particular orientation to the world, with manifestations ranging from skepticism to paranoia. She opts to "redescribe rather than refute" critique in this way, on the assumption that mounting a critique of critique would merely intensify its normative grip. Redescribing the sense of the word, by contrast, provides an opportunity "to gaze at [critique] from several different angles, to capture something of the seductive shimmer and feel of a certain sensibility."3 Felski's move to destabilize is effective though not unfamiliar. The appeal to redescription recalls a common rhetorical strategy in the literature of Restoration and early eighteenth-century controversy, which wrangled over the meaning of hot-button words such as obedience and resistance.4 To understand what The Limits of Critique offers eighteenth-century scholars, it is worth exploring this point of connection with Felski's argument through a brief look at the verb to explode. To explode refers to the action of rejecting or exposing an argument. The term provides insight into the "moods and metaphors" of Restoration [End Page 303] and eighteenth-century controversy, while also presenting an opportunity to reflect on the specific power of critique.5 In The Reasonableness of Conformity to the Church of England (1703), Bishop Benjamin Hoadly indicates how the term was used to signify critical rejection. Hoadly reminded readers who voiced criticism of the Act of Uniformity (1662) that some had favored such legislation before they opposed it. "There was a time," he wrote, "when such Arguments for a separate Ministry were rejected, and exploded by your selves."6 To explode an argument, as Hoadly's interlocutors had done, was to expose it as erroneous.7 The kind of rejection denoted by the verb could serve as shorthand for modernity, as in the English translation of Pierre Bayle's Miscellaneous Reflections Occasion'd by the Comet (1708). The translation's title page heralded the advance of critical reason with its claim to "explode Popular Superstitions."8 Usage of the verb to explode most often appeared, however, in claims that a belief or argument had already undergone rejection at some point in the past. The non-juror Charles Leslie used it in this way in a 1698 pamphlet against Deism: "tho' they have some Inroads among the Hotentots, and some other the Brutal part of Mankind," he remarked, "yet are [these arguments] still exploded, and Priests have and do prevail against them."9 As in this instance, such usage typically sounded a note of redescriptive triumph. Exploded, applied in the past tense, implied that the argument had been found to be an illusion, no longer possessed of any power to convince. Whereas the principal sense of explode associated critique with reason, an etymological sense of the word conjured a more hostile scene. This sense of "explode" drew its meaning from the Latin explōdere, which was associated with the disruptive practice of "hiss[ing] (a player) off the stage."10 The poet Abraham Cowley used this sense metaphorically in reference to Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector of England: "If you ask me why they did not hisse, and explode him off the stage," Cowley wrote, "I can onely answer, that they durst not do so, because the Actor and the Door-keepers were too strong for the Company."11 In his play The Author's Farce (1730), Henry Fielding used the critical explosion of hissing to describe a scornful, undiscerning audience. In conversation with the playwright Luckless, the character Witmore refers to the hissing of the audience as a form of damnation: "I tell you the town is prejudiced against you and they will...