At its root, criticism is a vicious act. The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius once remarked that ‘a statue has never been set up in honour of a critic’. Yet insofar as ‘criticism is as inevitable as breathing’ (T. S. Eliot), each and everyone of us is haunted by the spirit of an inner contrarian. After all, the Greek verb krinein simply means ‘to discern, to distinguish, to sieve’, i.e. to separate the chaff from the wheat – an unexpectedly disquieting reminder that we cannot but impel a crisis whenever we mark a difference, no matter how trivial or slight it might seem. Merely picking x over y implies a judgment, as if the act of choosing to wear yellow socks before biking to work were an ever-provisional solution to a profound ethical dilemma with far-reaching consequences. Ridiculous though it may seem, preferring something – anything – implies the elimination, no matter how fleeting, of everything that it is not. Consciously or unconsciously, whenever we single some ‘thing’ out of the throng, we engage in a critical act.
This process is insuperable and universal. What the professional and/or academic critic does is formalize it until it turns on itself. Criticism is the ultimate double-edged sword: within the confines of its jurisdiction, everything is held up to scrutiny and nothing goes without saying, including criticism itself. From a would-be mathematical perspective, this self-reflexive negation cancels itself out, producing a kind of neutral plateau or degré zéro of placidity, spelling a theoretical end to criticism’s bellicose relentlessness. In practice, however, the exact opposite occurs: the plateau is never a plateau and neutrality turns out to be more unattainable than ever. At odds with itself and doomed to choose, the human subject is thus perpetually thrust into an acutely critical situation that bears more than a passing resemblance to so-called ‘radical freedom’, with the proviso that our options, while very much real, are ultimately so limited as to amount to a stunted parody of free will. Put differently, we are simultaneously finite and free. And as Hegel so thoroughly demonstrated, the work each one of us is called to ‘freely’ complete in order to survive is necessarily predicated on the negation of other beings, living or nonliving, i.e. on the hindering of others’ freedoms – others who are endowed with existence like me, and who therefore hinder my freedom just as I hinder theirs.
(A possible definition of biological life: the tragedy of transitive consumption. The log cabin is built out of the tree’s corpse.)
In writing this, I am not merely recalling a doubtless unsolvable philosophical conundrum. I am also speaking of myself, of my own concerns as a pseudo-critic and pseudo-academic. The kernel of my bread and butter, despite its laughably limited factual and sociological import, is destruction. Indeed, in thinking, reading and writing, I am tasked with destroying or, at the very least, dismantling every word and concept within my path in hopes of finding some irrefragable fragment that, by definition, cannot exist in the world of phenomena and whose closest linguistic equivalent is the divine. This is quite the paradox, since critical theory as we understand it today is very much the outcome or aftereffect of God’s passing, and one way of interpreting the predicament we now find ourselves in is to hypothesize and perhaps even pave the way for a redemptive event that would not only make up for God’s irrecoverable loss but also render him obsolete once and for all. Such a ‘thing’ is unimaginable yet I consider it to be criticism’s very linchpin, the imaginary centre or periphery – either of which edges us closer to nothingness’s essential placelessness – around, through and within which it performs its interminably self-defeating tasks.
For the critic, that ‘nothing’ is an alluring vortex, a Sirens’ call. The more radically you undermine your own position and that of others, the more you edge closer towards a free fall that is as enlightening and liberating as a hankered-after suicide, and just as terminal. When taken to its logical extreme, criticism becomes a death wish that hinges on the belief that solely the dead know the truth while we, the living, must scrape by on speculations and approximations. I do not wish to discount the possibility that this may well be the case – in the Apology, Socrates argues that ‘[n]o one knows whether death happens to be the greatest of all goods’ – but there is definitely something to be said for Derrida’s late rejoinder that we ought to ‘prefer life, always’. Even writing, in spite of its proverbial nearness to death, requires a living hand. And at the risk of sounding hopelessly outmoded, I think it also requires a spirit, failing which we revert to Descartes’s mechanical animal, or at the very least to a neutral symbiosis with nature that excludes everything that makes us human: our essential lack of neutrality, i.e. our propensity to exceed and transgress essence.
In the past, I would have subsumed that spirit into nothingness. Today, I am not so sure. Perhaps being haunted by ‘the spirit of criticism’ – l’esprit critique – isn’t simply a matter of attempting to exorcize it by frantically or methodically demolishing every single extant thing until it slips back into the void whence it came. Perhaps there is also a kind of ‘positive’ (yet by no means positivistic) destruction, similar in a sense to Keats’s negative capability in that it derives its strength from nothing: ex nihilo, regardless of whether the begetter is a God or a soon-to-be ghost. In other words, nothingness doesn’t need to be perceived as a bottomless chasm into which everything necessarily dissolves. Why not compare it, instead, to Christian Orthodox theology’s ‘uncreated energies’, which at least imply the possibility of making something out of the world’s unmaking? Nor would such a gesture require us to reject entropy, for what I call ‘spirit’ merely doubles it, endowing it with a measure of mystery that still turns our ‘ontically’ critical mind against itself, yet allows for the possibility of another turn still – not for purposes of annihilation but of affirmation, pointing toward a strange kind of indestructibility, even an undeconstructibility.
All of this risks coming across as ludicrous until you begin to feel the need for such transcendence. Of course, I can always blame myself for not having gone far enough, for having averted my eyes from nihilism’s light-absorbing core. Being the harshest of taskmasters, the spirit of criticism continually demands that we entertain such doubts (and I am more than ‘happy’ to oblige). But there is a fundamental difference between this approach and that of the typical theist insofar as the latter grounds all reality in faith– the precritical denial of criticism – whereas I view faith as a Kierkegaardian last resort, an option that arises only when all other options have been exhausted: an option that may well not be an option at all. I am reminded here of Jean-Luc Nancy’s marvellous linguistic trouvaille, which is impossible to adequately render into English. He speaks of ‘une foi de rien du tout‘, simultaneously foregrounding faith’s paradoxical grounding in nothing – the axiomatic leap across the abyss – and its utter insignificance, ‘de rien du tout‘ indicating a meaningless trifle. If this is a credo, it’s a creedless one.
To drown in the abyss or to fashion a ship out of it – such is the dilemma. Either way, it is better to act poetically and not arch-critically, even if ‘all’ it changes is ‘nothing’.
cosmin toma 