Reading with care

“At some level we have not demanded even of ourselves that we ascertain whether we believe this hypothesis to be true; we have felt that there was so much to learn first by observing the automatic nervous system of a routinized dismissal of it in terms of today’s Theory.  The moralistic hygiene by which any reader of today is unchallengeably entitled to condescend to the thought of any moment in the past (maybe especially the recent past) is globally available to anyone who masters the application of two or three discrediting questions.  How provisional, by contrast, how difficult to reconstruct and how exorbitantly specialized of use, are the tools that in any given case would allow one to ask: What was it possible to think or do at a certain moment  of the past that it no longer is?  And how are those possibilities to be found, unfolded, allowed to move and draw air and seek new voices and uses, in the very different disciplinary ecology of even a few decades difference?”

-Eve Sedgwick, on reading Silavan Tomkins, 2003 (Touching Feeling. Durham NC: Duke.  Pgs 117-8.)

Reparations

…”it’s often the ludicrous anachronisms within a given object or practice that operate as portals to other uses [...] like what Sedgwick means by reparative criticism: that because we can’t know in advance – we can know only retrospectively, if even then – what is queer and what is not, we gather and combine eclectically and idiosyncratically, dragging a bunch of cultural debris around with us and stacking it in eclectic piles [... A]esthetic objects – especially outdated ones – ‘make time appear’ in ways that contest dominant modes of writing and feeling properly historical: they demand that we read, and they themselves write, historiographically aslant.  The apprehension of thus requires a certain stillness.”

-Elizabeth Freeman, 2007 (“Still After.”  South Atlantic Quarterly 106(3). Pg. 497-9.)

to deface is to know

“this notion of criticism as defacement would seem to get something right about the nature of the complicity between the critic and the object, because defacement succeeds to the degree that it engages with internally with the object defaced, enters into its being, we might say, no matter how crude or offensive, subtle or witty, the defacement may be.  By virtue or disvirtue of such mimetic and metonymic engagement, the energy emerging from defacement is an energy flowing from an active and activated object of critique and not from a corpse on the dissecting table”

-Michael Taussig, 1999 (Defacement.  Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.  Pg. 43)

Dialectic of Conjuring-Obfuscation

“The fact that the 18th century failed to note any connection between the critique it practiced and the looming crisis – no literal proof of an awareness of the link could be found – this very fact led to our thesis: that the critical process of enlightenment conjured up the crisis in the same measure in which the political significance of that crisis remained hidden from it.  The crisis was as much exacerbated as it was obfuscated in the philosophy of history.  Never politcally grasped, it remained concealed in historico-political images of the future which caused the day’s events to pale – events that became so much less inhibited in heading for an unexpected decision.”

-Reinhart Koselleck, 1959 (Critique and Crisis.  Cambridge MA: MIT. Pg. 9)

A Task

“People thinking in the forms of free, detached, disinterested appraisal were unable to accommodate within those forms the experience of violence which in reality annuls such thinking. The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us”

-Theodor Adorno, “Johnny-Head-in-Air”, 1951 (in Minima Moralia: reflections from damages life New York, NY: Verso. 2005. Pg 56)

Critical Pens

“The echo is heard immediately: but always as a ‘critique’…The work never produces an effect but only another’ critique ; and the critique itself produces no effect either, but again only a further critique…At bottom, however, everything remains as it was…The historical culture of our critics will no longer permit any effect at all in the proper sense, that is an effect on life and action…But their critical pens never cease to flow, for the have lost control of them, and instead of directing them are directed by them.  It is precisely in this immoderation of its critical outpourings…that the modern personality betrays its weakness”

-Friedrich Nietzsche, 1874 (“On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” Untimely Meditations.  Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. 1983)
87

Books, Babies

“Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.”

-Walter Benjamin, #10 of ‘The Critics Technique in Thirteen Theses’,  1926.  (in “One Way Street”. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1 1913-1926.  Cambridge MA: Harvard.  1996.  Pg 460.)