Projects and Interests

Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins

The book, published in 2024, emerges from the idea (an intuition, really) that to be adequate to the experience of art, criticism must itself be practiced poetically. What does it mean to do criticism poetically? Rather than remaining aloof like critique, poetic criticism participates in the life of its object. Rather than asserting mastery, poetic criticism seeks to speak from a place of vulnerability. And rather than hoping to have the last word, poetic criticism is most successful when it encourages more speech and more writing.

As I see it, poetic criticism has three main dimensions: 

Something speaks to me. 

I must tell you about it. 

But I don’t know how.

That is the heart of it—the heart of criticism and its difficulty, no matter its form, no matter its refinement: I watch, I hear, I read something, and suddenly there is an overflow of some feeling or thought that is too much for me, and I need you to know. But I don’t know what exactly to say or how, which is all the more reason why I must tell you. Reading (watching, hearing, …), I feel called. I also feel called upon: called upon to tell you, because only in telling you do I have a chance to learn how.

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Finding ways of thinking and writing that are alive to both poetic and philosophical dimensions has motivated my work for several decades. My books The Laboratory of Poetry and Thinking With Kant's Critique of Judgment are ways of engaging this challenge. It is at the heart of the work of the Center for Theoretical Inquiry in the Humanities, which a friend and I founded in 2009 and which I have directed since 2012. A research project at the Free University of Berlin, "The Philological Laboratory: Models of Criticism Beyond Critique," which I directed as Einstein Visiting Fellow from 2018 till 2023, aimed to give these questions historical depth and conceptual texture.

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Another book (on hold for the moment) is entitled Touch and Taste: Embodied Cognition and the Emergence of Aesthetics. It examines how various currents of European thought, from antiquity through the twentieth-century (with an emphasis on eighteenth-century aesthetic theories), imagine the senses and how these conceptions of the senses relate to ways cognition is thought to work. A description of the project can be found here. Part of a chapter examining the idea of skin through a discussion of the Laocoon debate was published separately (PDF).