Yet for a long time now, Sedgwick argues, skepticism has been deemed the only ethical position for the intellectual to take with respect to the subjects ordinary attachments. Even Adorno, the great belittler of popular pleasures, can be aghast at the ease with which intellectuals shit on people who hold to a dream. Dreams are seen as easy optimism, while failures seem complex. Sedgwick writes against the hermeneutics of suspicion on the grounds that it always finds the mirages and failures for which it looks: she finds critics overdedicated to a self-confirming scene of disappointment. In this view the disappointed critic mistakes his act of negation for a performance of seriousness; perhaps he also elevates his thought by disdaining anything that emanates a scent of therapy, reparations, or utopianism. Berlant
Posted on: Mon, 04 Nov 2013 20:34:18 +0000
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