Reparative Reading and Christian Anarchism

Abstract

Writing by anarchists is particularly resistant to coherent critical reading: they tell us to take their estimates of human nature on faith, but then arrive at radically different political views. This makes them, however, interesting for reparative reading. As Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, the difficulty of reading the classics creates a good deal of their value. In this article we take up the confounding final work of one of his heirs, the charismatic American Christian Anarchist Ammon Hennacy (1898-1970). At the outset of reading Hennacy‘s One-Man Revolution in America (1970), we understood that we had to find a position within what Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski have called the “method wars” between the proponents of critique (Marxist-inspired or poststructuralist) and a diverse field of scholars seeking for more capacious and enchanted modes of engaging with literary texts. The debate in itself is not new – Susan Sontag had already written against interpretation in 1966 – but it has become a focus of intense conversation within literary studies since the 2000s. What has come to be called postcriticism raises important points. Many of the established critical gestures have become predictable and unilluminating, dismantling the text without sufficient attention to its aesthetic qualities and readerly pleasure (Anker & Felski 15–16; Felski, Uses of Literature). The meaningful politics of critical reading have also been lost, because of the formulaic nature of many analyses, and politics are particularly important to the text that we needed to tackle. If politics is reduced to the mere identification of an underlying ideology, without fresh insights about the power of the text to engage and change the reader, the critical gesture loses force. Felski has been especially concerned about the dominant metaphors of depth and distance that make scholars seek hidden layers, to expose the text and thereby to assert their own superiority over it, the author, and the common reader. Different critics have enumerated the shortcomings of critique: negativity, pessimism, vigilance, diagnostic gaze, suspicion. Rita Felski seemed to be describing some aspects of our reaction to Hennacy: