Folie des critiques

Abstract

There is a certain kind of romantic mindset that regards literature as prophetic. Such a romantic would not be surprised that a text such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842) seemingly anticipates the lockdowns introduced to curtail the Covid-19 pandemic. Not only because, extraordinary as it might appear to us, Covid-19 is a pandemic like any other, but more specifically on account of what Christine “Xine” Yao, in another article in this special issue, has termed the “toxic positivity” of Prospero’s masquerade—an attitude that anticipates our own addiction to the pleasures of global capitalism. Yet, if the text “speaks” to our moment, its message is strictly speaking not inherent in the text itself but emerges only in the act of reading that actualises the text in any given present. This article seeks to actualise Poe’s text for my own present by integrating it into my work on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s and Walter Benjamin’s reception of Plato’s Symposium. This leads me towards the conclusion that criticism, far from being a linear ascent towards ever more knowledge about a text, is a kind of folly: an elaborate edifice of words conceived in madness.