The Limits of Critique Quotes

“What if we refused to be railroaded into the false choice between the critical and the uncritical? How might argument and interpretation proceed if critique were no longer our ubiquitous watchword and ever-vigilant watchdog? What other shapes of thought could we imagine? And how else might we venture to read, if we were not ordained to read suspiciously?”
― Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique

“Education is not just about acquiring knowledge and skills but about being initiated into a certain sensibility.”
― Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique

“Even if we are all products of the cultural blender, each mixture of influences, vocabularies, memories, orientations, and temperament possesses a distinct and unmistakable flavor. We make ourselves out of the models we encounter; we give ourselves a form through the different ways we inhabit other forms. And we bring these differences to the event of reading, even as we are reoriented— sometimes subtly, sometimes significantly— by the sum of what we read.”
― Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique

“What has become of critique … when French villagers know that 9/11 was really an inside job and an entire industry is devoted to showing that the Apollo Program never landed on the moon”
― Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique

“Literary theory, especially, cast its lot with a spirit of ceaseless skepticism and incessant interrogation; modeling itself on Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, it was “der Geist, der stets verneint”—the spirit that always negates.”
― Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique

“The difference between a hermeneutics of restoration and a hermeneutics of suspicion, we might say, lies in the difference between unveiling and unmasking. Here”
― Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique