Critique of Critique of Critique: Review of Roy Ben-Shai’s Critique of Critique

Abstract

Critique of Critique of Critique: Review of Roy Ben-Shai’s Critique of Critique O. L. Silverman (bio) Roy Ben-Shai. Critique of Critique. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023. 238 pp. $28.00 (pb). ISBN 9781503632684. The title of this review writes itself. This is precisely the guiding concern of Roy Ben-Shai’s Critique of Critique. CoC attends to the pervasiveness and automaticity of critique as an orientation of thought. Critiquing critique as a modality of thought does not mean negating, debunking, or objecting to it. Ben-Shai follows Kant’s sense of ‘critique’ in The Critique of Pure Reason; to critique critique means to articulate the conditions that give rise to (critical) knowledge. CoC aims to inhabit the paradox of its own enterprise. If critique is the act of pointing, Ben-Shai points both at the hand of the finger that is pointing and its environment. The book aims to bring the structural premises and essential features of critique into view to limit its scope, which Ben-Shai fears has become relentlessly repetitious and blind to its own repetitions. In associating the ubiquity and limitlessness of critique with prevailing cultural exhaustion, CoC joins a clade of recent works1 that sound critique’s shortcomings. These post-critical works did not escape criticism2 and are now known as another camp in the method wars of literary studies. Because critique is “a perennial and irreplaceable mode of thought,” there will be no utopia of post-critique (3). This book clarifies the limits of critique to clear a path for other orientations of critical thought. Orientation is, in fact, a central term of art in the book. “By orientation,” Ben-Shai means “not only a way of thinking but a way of being as well. An orientation is not only a way of being and thinking in the world but an orientation of the world itself” (6). Although critique has become the dominant mode of thought, especially in the humanities, it is nevertheless just one possible orientation. Orientation implies that reality can be “accessed in more than one way” (200). The orientation of critique is spectatorial, that of the viewer or judge, rather than, for example, that of the actor or the victim. Inhabiting the orientation of critique, the thinker is a passive viewer who relates to the world as a spectacle, and in doing so, is positioned toward the world in just this way. CoC begins with an overture that demonstrates the time-bending pleasures of philosophical reading as a full section tarries with a single Horkheimer sentence. The sentence is treated as a skeletal emblem of all critique’s structure. Critique’s orientation presumes that the world is in a sordid state, and its task is to perceive that state, organize the facts, and produce a theory. For Ben-Shai, the irrepressible wrongness of the world is constituted by the orientation of critique, for critique is precisely the vantage that can only perceive the wrongs of the world. Critique’s disposition is one of moralism, and its epistemology is a “staunch realism” that presumes “perception to be separate from reality” (27). The book is divided into two sections: “Aporias of Critique” and “Architectonics of Critique.” Part One aims to demonstrate the “constitutive reversibility [End Page 780] at the heart of critique itself” (18). Naming the spectacle, power, injustice, and external authority as objects of critique, Ben-Shai argues that the objects of critique are also its conditions of possibility. Critique depends on injustice because the spectatorial orientation of critique is the optic through which injustice is viewed. The work consciously aims to lead the reader into this whirlpool of aporia. Part Two, “Architectonics of Critique,” explores the ontological structures that sculpt critique’s frame. Critique possesses a unique orientation with ontological, epistemological, moral, and political entailments. Broadly, the ontology of critique is defined as a monocular orientation of the spectator in opposition to the world. In this section, Heideggerian etymological webs illustrate critique’s ontological orientation of spectatorship. To object is wedded to objectivity; the term accusation (ad causa) is bound to an argument about cause. In objection, critique incredulously testifies to an objective reality, rather than...