Theory Attachment

"Anyone who attends academic talks," Rita Felski observes in The Limits of Critique (2015), "has learned to expect the inevitable question: 'But what about power?'" "Perhaps," she continues, "it is time to start asking different questions: 'But what about love?' Or: 'Where is your theory of attachment?'"¹ Leaving aside that the only plausible sounding answer to the question "Where is your theory of attachment?" is something like, "under my Freudian slip?," I want to use this question as a prompt to think about the postcritical perception that critique doesn't adequately account for our attachment to literature. In what follows, I'll identify some problems in the way postcritique characterizes critique's relationship to attachment and gesture to some eighteenth-century examples that I think offer a more nuanced account of how aesthetic attachment works, in particular because they register the role that aggression and separation play in attachment and the ways in which attachment has as much to do with the form as with the content of affective experiences.

In order to understand the postcritical relationship to attachment, we first have to understand how postcritique envisages critique. Critique, as characterized by its (post)critics, is part gothic villain, part survivalist, holed up in its heavily fortified castle. The critiquey critic "dig[s] wide moats—of history, ideology, formal analysis," and "erect[s] thick conceptual walls," according to Michel Chaouli.² Extending Chaouli's metaphor, Felski adds that "the critic feels impelled to beat off the barbarians by raising the drawbridge" (LC, 28) and retreats behind the "barbed wire" of suspicion, which "holds" her back and "hems" her in (LC, 12). If the critiquey critic ventures out, she "advances holding a shield, scanning the horizon for possible assailants" (12). Clad in "the straightjacket of suspicion" (56, 184) (which must surely make holding a shield quite challenging), the critiquey critic's gaze is "sharp-eyed and diligent" (37), her posture "guarded, tense, wary, defensive" (38), her attitude "vigilant" and "mistrustful" (188), her demeanor "hardheaded and dispassionate" (25). In sum, the critiquey critic's ethos "blocks" and "inhibits" (188); it "narrows and constrains"; it "highlights the sphere of agon (conflict and domination) at the expense of eros (love and connection)" (17). Critique is a language, in short, for "repudiating … aesthetic attachments" (181).

While Felski asks, rhetorically, "Who would want to be associated with the bad smell of the uncritical?," after reading The Limits of Critique it's the scent of critique that seems more noxious (LC, 8). Who would want to be tainted by association with a crowd that "scan[s] the text for weak spots and vulnerable areas that will yield to [its] critical probes and pliers"; that will readily "take a hammer … to the beliefs and attachments of others," as if in compensation for its own "affective inhibition" (111, 129, 188)?

By contrast to sad, cynical, lonely critique, the postcritique gang are adorably entangled. Sure, they're messy, "enmeshed in a motley array of attachments and associations," but it's in an endearing way (LC, 170). The postcritics are continually "rubbing against" each other and producing generative frictions (184), riding their hobby-horses off into the sunset as if they, like Tristram Shandy, understand that it's "by long journies and much friction" that lasting attachments are made.³ But, rest assured, it's a gentle and consensual friction: the postcritics don't "probe" texts but rather allow them to "gradually yield" themselves (33). In short, where critique is aggressive, dispassionate, detached, and guarded, postcritique is receptive, passionate, attached, and generous. What is wrong with this vision? Felski wants us to have a less impoverished vocabulary for discussing aesthetic attachment. But this zero-sum game vision of how attachment works—you're either detached and aggressive or attached and loving—feels overly stark and also at odds with what we know about how attachment actually works.

Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that postcritique wants to talk about attachment but, leery of the results produced by critique's prior entanglements with psychoanalysis, is hesitant to theorize it, recalling, perhaps, how an earlier iteration of critique found itself...