>Felski attacks critique’s stature as the most radical form of thought. Here she draws on the work of Bruno Latour, a French anthropologist and sociologist. Lat

>Felski attacks critique’s stature as the most radical form of thought. Here she draws on the work of Bruno Latour, a French anthropologist and sociologist. Latour questions the assumption that being suspicious and critical makes you a progressive thinker, in contrast to the purportedly credulous and complacent masses. He points out that conservative thinkers are now just as likely to draw on the forms of suspicious questioning associated with critique. Think of climate-change deniers, or all those Trump voters so deeply suspicious of elites. Ah, I see one reason why this might be finding favor. Claim to have found the source of the Trump voter's paranoid way of thought, and you have everyone's attention. Claim you know how to defeat it, and the grants line up for you. >Ruddick interviewed about 70 young academics, mostly Ph.D. students, at seven major research universities. She found that two types of scholars tended to be satisfied: those with a political commitment to an issue favored by the field of English, and those who, not especially stirred up by theory, study literary-historical questions Literary history scholars being happier is interesting, but it seems potentially flawed to rely on self-reporting to determine political alignment. Two students, both committed Marxists. One is cynical, depressed, and hates his Ph.D program, the other is loving his program and life, and has enough energy to be an activist as well. Which one is going to tell you he's a Marxist? Hopefully it was more systematic than "interview" suggests. I'll try and make the case of Felski's skeptics, based on my experience with post-critical academics in multiple disciplines. The hopefully obvious counterpoint to Felski and others who seek to depoliticize criticism is that their supposedly apolitical stance is in itself political. By being "post-critical", you abandon a defined political reading and attempt to triangulate either the perspective of the author or what you perceive as the perspective of the casual reader, in order to avoid the messy, critique-y situation when your perspective and the author's perspective aren't compatible. For example, and since I watched The Crying Game last night, a queer viewer could conceivably take issue with how Dil is written in "The Crying Game" because she sees the reality of the straight writer, not her own. The queer critic tries to deconstruct (sorry) the the elements of the script and why she believes it doesn't do a good job of showing how Dil experiences the story. But if that viewer identified as a post-critical critic, she would shy away from diving too deep into the topic. The post-critical critic is trained to avoid the impulse to critique, and instead must search for a meaning that, to put it bluntly, won't offend anyone who loves The Crying Game and doesn't like anyone skeptically picking apart bits of it. The instinctual reaction to deconstruct (oops, did it again) an idea or representation that rings false or is just plain interesting is suppressed, because the post-critical mind must be along for the ride and try to derive ideas from the author's conclusions. It's interesting, but I wouldn't describe it as being liberated from "the barbed wire of suspicion". This is only looking at one element of post-criticism that I particularly dislike, and of course their perspective has some value. I just wanted to push back on the idea that these people are the vanguard of intellectual freedom.