Postcritique and the Leakiness of Spheres

• In the final essay in Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski's edited collection Critique and Postcritique from 2017, Eric Hayot summarizes the status of critique as it has presented itself in this volume: "What we know is that something has been lost, that literary criticism, today, floats adrift on an open, darkling sea, which the sailors search desperately for new compasses" (2017, 279). But what is it that has been lost exactly? I will suggest in this very brief intervention that perhaps it is not critique's usefulness to literary practice that has been lost. Neither, I will propose, is it the political import of critique that has been lost. Rather, I will argue, what are at stake are the forms—the spaces, the spheres—that make critique possible, visible, viable. At least if we follow the Kantian, Arendtian, and Habermasian traditions, critique and the public sphere are inseparable. From this perspective, it makes very little sense to discuss the one without the other. Failing to pay attention to the changing role of the public sphere, I suggest, constitutes a troubling feature of most literary debates on postcritique.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Literary Studies (hsv//eng)

Keyword

litteraturvetenskap

Literature

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

art (subject category)