From Critique to Post-Critique. New Possibilities for Social Interventions of Literature in Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique

Abstract

The article discusses a groundbreaking post-critical project in Anglo-Saxon literary studies formulated in Rita Felski’s book The Limits of Critique. Tomasz Mizerkiewicz offers a comprehensive analysis of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” carried out by Felski, showing its numerous limitations. Felski argues that criticism – understood as an emotionally uninvolved reading of literature being part of the panoptic system of power that subjugates individuals – should be modified to embrace an affective quality and a new vision of the ontology of a literary work. Felski believes that thanks to Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, it is possible to begin to perceive the literary work as a causative non-human actor. The work then avoids participating in the sterile dispute between the idea of the autonomy of art and radical pragmatism, which assumes the full dependence of the meanings of this work on the context. Theorized in new phenomenological analyses, literature demonstrates a capacity to exert influence. At the same time, it does not do anything by itself, but in cooperation with other important human and non-human actors (readers, schools, reading family customs and others). The type of critique described in The Limits of Critique becomes a conscious participant in the social interventions of literature consisting in the joint discovery of the possibility of the emergence of new types of connections, networks and communities. Thus, critique and literature contribute to the development of particularly effective varieties of aesthetic, economic and political agency.