Critical Inquiry

10/24/2025

"The biography, though it gestures toward structural inequities in the publishing world—particularly those limiting writers marginalized by gender and sexuality—demonstrates that such setbacks rarely influenced Swenson, who chose to frame her life not in terms of complaint or resistance but through absolute commitment to her art."

New in review, Lucky Issar on Margaret A. Brucia's The Key to Everything: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/lucky_issar_reviews_the_key_to_everything/

10/21/2025

"Trumpian decision is 'fascisizing.' It stirs reactive tendencies, spreads and amplifies them, ascribing enemies, hardening borders against them, and priming for outbursts of attack. It is a lightning rod for fascisizing tendencies. Under the right conditions, at a certain confluence, the tendencies can cross a tipping point to a full-fledged fascism."

From our new issue, read Brian Massumi's "Some Points about Contemporary Fascism": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/737027

10/17/2025

"The principle of regulated hatred, like objective hatred, is not antipathy but endurance. Because, as the SNL sketch underscores, we do not live in a world where we can risk complete honesty, we need compensatory forms to corroborate the reality of our opinions. Austen’s iconoclasm, for Harding and other acolytes, is premised on the possession of a supreme, tactical clarity about how to go on living in your precise situation."

From our new issue, read Wendy Anne Lee's "Hate, Consent, Play": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/737013

10/17/2025

"Suther’s Karl Marx is thoroughly Hegelian. But what distinguishes Suther’s Hegel is how embodied this most absolute of German Idealisms appears: rational and conceptual all the way down—yet thoroughly biological."

New in review, Christopher Gortmaker on Jensen Suther's True Materialism: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/christopher_gortmaker_reviews_true_materialism/

10/13/2025

"Blaue’s sea chart is but one detail in Vermeer’s complex scene of a geographer deep in thought, yet it stands as a synecdoche for the navigable logics inflecting the entire painting. Chief among them, the sea chart introduces a combinatorics of perspectives within a single image, rendered intelligible and addressable through a proliferation of instruments and techniques capable of world inspecting."

From our new issue, read Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan's "The Navigable Image": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/737081

10/10/2025

"The concrete, day-to-day operations of the Virginia Company raised broader moral and political questions that could not satisfactorily be addressed via the Western philosophical paradigms available in 1620. To do his job, therefore, Hobbes had to improvise novel rhetorical strategies and conceptual schemes in real time. These innovations required by his plantation practice later reemerged, in abstracted form, as bases of his political philosophy."

From our new issue, read Jennifer Rae Greeson's "Thomas Hobbes, the Virginia Company, and the Invention of Corporate Sovereignty": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/737061

10/10/2025

"One could argue that Holland’s linking of Derrida with film is itself a kind of improvisation: he proceeds with no predetermined program, no entrenched scholarship to guide the way. In this sense, Holland’s book stands as a model for scholarship at a time in which the conditions of possibility for thought are growing narrower and more elusive."

New in review, Erin Graff Zivin on Timothy Holland's The Traces of Jacques Derrida’s Cinema: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/erin_graff_zivin_reviews_the_traces_of_jacques_derridas_cinema/

10/06/2025

"Rational matter exhibits properties that align with the spirits and souls of rival ontologies, but with the crucial distinction that Cavendish insists that its subtle workings are organically embodied; she therefore faces head-on the materialist problem of dissolution and seeks out correspondingly materialist solutions."

From our new issue, read Anne M. Thell's "'I Am Restless to Live, As Nature Doth'":

10/03/2025

"Jacobson illuminates how an industrial film about tungsten both represents the step-by-step process by which the raw material is made useful and demonstrates its usefulness by providing light for the film’s production and projection. This becomes a complex instrumentalization process that Jacobson argues extends to public interest as an essential component of the world-making endeavor."

New in review, Parker Stenseth on Brian Jacobson's The Cinema of Extractions: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/parker_stenseth_reviews_the_cinema_of_extractions/

09/26/2025

"We must be clear about this. The Jewish people are headed toward a genuine schism." Read Annie Cohen-Solal's "Against the Irreversible" on the CI blog.

Annie Cohen-Solal Translated by Jerome Charyn and the author “There is no point searching for words to describe the details of our catastrophe. . . . In a black and white rectangle with the look of…

09/24/2025

"With an emotional register ranging from petulance to narcissistic neediness, the book dissects the field of the minor affects with discomfiting precision. The book is doubly expansive in this sense: What if poetry were more like a script in the making, or the end-stage documentation of an artworld performance?"

New in review, Tan Lin on Steven Zultanski's Help: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/tan_lin_reviews_help/

09/22/2025

"We could say that if machines listen, they listen operationally—not in order to understand, or even necessarily to facilitate understanding, but simply to do something within an automated system: to identify, to monitor, to trigger, to intervene."

From our new issue, read James E. K. Parker's "The Planetization of Machine Listening": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/737056