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Terry Eagleton · Not Just Anybody: ‘The Limits of Critique’ · LRB 5 January 2017

lrb.co.uk · 3,092 words · saved by 1 readers

T he title​ of this book has an odd ring to it, since in Kantian philosophy the notion of critique is closely bound up with the setting of limits, distinguishing what a form of inquiry may legitimately address from what is off-bounds to it. Rita Felski’s bold, stylish new study, however, is about critique in the less specialised sense of critical analysis. It is not a work about the limits of setting limits but a critical view of the idea of critique, or at least of a certain widely accepted version of it. Felski finds this version churlish and mean-spirited, and the reader is likely to end up feeling that she has a point. The critical approach she has in mind is a form of what Paul Ricoeur calls the hermeneutics of suspicion. On this view, the task of critique is to dig out hidden meanings and concealed contradictions in a text, scanning it for those symptomatic points at which it falters, deadlocks, disrupts its own logic or threatens to come apart at the seams. The critical act is o

Vol. 39 No. 1 · 5 January 2017 Not Just Anybody Terry Eagleton Share on Bluesky Share on Facebook Share Email Print 2873 words The Limits of Critique by Rita Felski . Chicago, 238 pp., £17, October 2015, 978 0 226 29403 2 Show More Show More T he title ​ of this book has an odd ring to it, since in Kantian philosophy the notion of critique is closely bound up with the setting of limits, distinguishing what a form of inquiry may legitimately address from what is off-bounds to it. Rita Felski's bold, stylish new study, however, is about critique in the less specialised sense of criti

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