Scholars across the social sciences and humanities have increasingly questioned the meaning and purpose of critique. Contributing to those conversations, some geographers have advocated for affirmative or reparative practices such as reading for difference or experimentation that seek to provoke more joyful, hopeful, or enchanting affects, as alternatives to what they perceive as a prevailing forms of ‘negative’ critique. In response, others have re-emphasized the centrality of negativity and revalued negative affects in the context of regimes of racialization, heteronormativity, and coloniality. Rather than taking sides in a debate thus framed, this article develops an ambivalent position that foregrounds multiple senses of difference that exist within affirmative and reparative projects. Drawing on feminist and queer geographic work, the explicitly political and difference-oriented writing of Sedgwick and Deleuze, and queer and postcolonial affect scholars, we argue for critique characterized by an ambivalent and pluralistic attitude toward feeling. Joining those arguing for a pluralization of the moods and modes of critical work, our readings suggest the necessity of a pluralism that refuses any escape from the ‘negativity’ of the social field in favor of an affectively ambivalent engagement with the inherent politics of critique in a plural and uneven world.

社会科学和人文学科的学者越来越质疑批判的意义和目的。为促进这些对话，一些地理学家提倡采取平权或赔偿性做法，例如阅读差异或进行实验，以寻求激发更多快乐，希望或迷人的情感，作为他们认为是普遍的“消极”批评形式的替代方法。作为回应，其他人在种族化，异规范性和殖民主义制度的背景下，再次强调了否定性的中心性，并重估了负面影响。本文并没有站在这样一个辩论的立场上，而是提出了一种矛盾的立场，这种立场凸显了肯定性和修复性项目中存在的多种差异感。利用女权主义和酷儿的地理工作，塞奇威克（Sedgwick）和德勒兹（Deleuze）明确地以政治和差异为导向的著作，以及古怪和后殖民的影响学者，我们主张以对情感的矛盾和多元态度为特征的批评。与那些主张批判性工作的情绪和方式多元化的人一起，我们的阅读表明，多元化的必要性拒绝了从社会领域的“消极”中逃脱的任何支持，而主张情感上矛盾地参与了批判性工作的内在政治。一个多元而又不平坦的世界。