Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism

PREFACE

xi PREFACE For literary critics these are the very best of times—and the worst of times. The reach of criticism knows few bounds, and there is little that resists its ever greater expansion. What was once a narrow canon of consecrated works has become a whole Babelian library, a vast audiovisual archive, a proliferating digital complex. Detective fiction, unpublished masterpieces, pulp romance, oral narrative, soap operas, forgotten memoirs, cartoons, fragmentary epics, blockbuster movies, private letters, intimate journals, abandoned or rejected poems, laundry lists, and juvenilia: all these, and more, now have their official commentators , charged with the mission of finding cultural value in the hitherto most unlikely or unpromising places, identifying what is true in this or that text, its context, history, and situation, and promoting or demoting it accordingly in order to give it its rightful place in the universal pantheon . There is no doubt that this evolution, which shows criticism engaging with the vital needs of the present, should be applauded. But it is only part of a much larger story. For the growth of academic criticism, together with the professionalisation which is one of its most characteristic defining features, has been accompanied in recent decades by an increasing reliance on a sequence of more or less easily defensible interpretative commonplaces embodied in a series of more or less established critical methodologies. Such developments are inevitable, and few are the readers who would want it otherwise. But as one rival approach follows upon the heels of another in the marketplace of ideas, it is sometimes as though criticism in the end is little more than a matter of applying more or less intelligently, more or less reductively, this or that new set of theoretical norms which it has become necessary to invoke in order to lend proper legitimacy to the act of criticism itself. As the net of possible approaches has widened, it has become less a case of xii Preface inquiring into the purpose of criticism, more one of finding ever more compelling ways of extending its authority over texts, writings, and signatures . Those who regret this state of affairs sometimes conclude that if criticism is moribund, it is because literary theory has all but killed it, and it is then an easy step to yearn for earlier times when it fell to a social and intellectual elite to set the cultural agenda and determine the value of artistic production and the values it was held to embody. Those days, however, are long gone, not least because in many cases the values in whose name judgements were made have themselves become threadbare, the casualties of interpretative obscurantism and the violence of history, the victims of an economic system in which nothing has value, but everything its price. And even when criticism has acknowledged its loss of belief in past values, it has often been simply to respond to the present as merely a reverse image of what prevailed in the past, thereby remaining all the more dependent on receding norms, or in the face of such changes to opt instead for objective description, forgetting that descriptive criteria are themselves only an expression of inherited values in disguise, or in the end to envisage replacing older verities with newer, better ones, omitting to consider the implications of the very possibility of any such substitution. This too is one of the sources of the malaise affecting criticism today. Even as it finds itself unable to subscribe wholeheartedly to the values of the past, so it is often unable to renounce them either. But the fact is, so long as it is subordinated, directly or indirectly, to the task of attributing value or values to the work, however credible, consensual, or admirable the ethical, moral, or political imperatives expressed in this way, criticism cannot be other than negative, reductive, and normative, radically jeopardising not only its ability to address the future of the work it takes as its object but also its chances of responding to its own possible or impossible future. How, then, is criticism to answer this predicament? There is no return to past values that, in the end, does not culminate in prejudice, dogma, or simply nostalgia, and it is plainly not enough to reverse past norms or replace them with contemporary-sounding alternatives, for in either case the only outcome is complacency, not to say leaden conformism . And there can be no question of renouncing literary theory, which would be tantamount to a...