The notion of criticism at the present time: from postcriticism to an ethics of reading well

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article reads Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015) as an exemplary effort to move beyond paranoid 'critique' in literary study – an effort that oddly echoes the ongoing intensification of postmodernity, or a socio-economic state no longer capable of imagining a future. Alternative modes of expression and identity are now only ever, in Mark Fisher’s terms, 'precorporated' – structured and anticipated by an always exploitative capitalist culture. Literary criticism’s on-going investment in micro-genres and increasingly atomized modes of criticism seems, in this sense, troublingly and paradoxically caught in the inertia of 'depthlessness.' The postcritical turn, more specifically, presents as both a consequence and an overt advocation of imprisoning surfaces. It strives to reclaim the experience of authentic expression and true, authorial affects by actively eschewing distance, or depth; but this refusal of distance and depth is tantamount to a refusal of otherness and incommensurable affect. To be affected by otherness is to touch upon what is unknown and unnamable. If we are to begin 'reading well' we cannot simply bask in the coherence of a surface. To 'read well,' we must instead tarry with the infinite potential of unmappable depth, a kind of Hegelian negative.