Forum Introduction: The Postcritical Eighteenth Century

What does it mean to be postcritical? In her 2015 book The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski proposed the term as a catch-all for a group of recent methodological interventions and experiments in literary studies.¹ "Reparative reading," "surface reading," "thin description," "reading with the grain"—all such projects, Felski argues, spring from a widespread dissatisfaction with the mode of critique initiated by Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche and retooled for literary analysis by the successive waves of Marxist, psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, new historicist, feminist, and queer criticism to which they gave rise.² According to Paul Ricoeur's influential formulation, critique is characterized by a distinctive hermeneutics of "suspicion": rather than taking a literary or cultural text at its word, the critic deciphers it by exposing hidden meanings and secret motives that escape the notice of more casual or naive readers.³ Felski argues, however, that this method has now become routinized, predictable, and dogmatic and so dominant in literary studies that it is stifling other, equally illuminating, ways of interpreting texts. Although critique is often seen as synonymous with rigorous thinking, she wants to remind us that it is actually only one way of approaching a text and an eccentric, oddly antagonistic one at that. She compares the critic's scrutiny of the text to a detective's investigation of a crime scene or a doctor's examination of a patient. The text is treated as incriminating evidence of a ghastly political injustice or a symptom of some debilitating psychic or social pathology. Knowledge comes not from cultivating intimacy with the literary object but by establishing an attitude of cool detachment, which confines the critic to a narrow affective repertoire of skepticism, irony, irreverence, and vigilance to the point of paranoia. Being postcritical, however, should not be confused with being uncritical or being against critique as such. As Felski and Elizabeth Anker explain in their introduction to Critique and Postcritique, a recent collection of essays, the "post" in postcritique marks the project as "an attempt to find fresh ways of interpreting literary and cultural texts while acknowledging, nonetheless, its inevitable dependency on the very practices it is questioning."⁴

Scholars in eighteenth-century studies are well placed to contribute to these debates about the methods, goals, and affects of literary interpretation. As Simon During observes in his contribution to Anker's and Felski's volume, some genealogists of critique locate its origins not in nineteenthcentury Germany but eighteenth-century Britain. According to Reinhart Koselleck, critique emerged in early eighteenth-century Britain in opposition to the modern absolutist state. The absolute state's monopoly over political action, as Hobbes's Leviathan makes clear, was intended to limit its subjects' freedom to exercise moral agency to the realm of social relations and property ownership. The effect was to create the breach between public policy and private morality from which the practice of critique would emerge following the 1688 revolution.⁵ Elsewhere, Bruno Latour has also traced the origins of modern critique to Enlightenment Britain, although for him its pioneers were not the period's political pamphleteers but the pioneers of experimental science—Bacon, Boyle, and Newton—who sought to "demolish the illfounded pretensions of human prejudice" they blamed for philosophy's failure to advance humanity's knowledge of nature.⁶

This forum models a number of different ways that scholars of eighteenth-century literature and culture might address the postcritical turn. Jeffrey Galbraith sketches another possible chapter in the history of critique's origins in his exploration of the language of rhetorical "explosion" in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century polemic. To explode an argument or prejudice might seem at first to be a decisive act of debunking, but, as Galbraith shows in his account of Whig attacks on the Tories' revival of the doctrine of passive obedience, political and religious attachments die hard, and critique is rarely as effective as its practitioners pretend. Other contributors consider whether the postcritical turn opens new paths and accounts for new developments in the field. Scott Black wonders whether a postcritical eighteenth century might be "an eighteenth century without the novel" or...