ABSTRACT

This essay intervenes in debates on the value of ‘postcritique’, countering concerns that the ‘postcritical turn’ represents a conservative abrogation of cultural inquiry’s political responsibilities. I suggest that conventional critical forms reproduce in the relationship between reader and text a quasi-imperialist power dynamic, complicity in which is inescapable regardless of the reader’s own political position, and that therefore postcritical approaches might in fact be of greatest political value and urgency in the treatment of literatures written from socio-politically marginal positions. I furnish this argument with a reading of Wilson Harris’ Palace of the Peacock (1960). Taking cues from Rita Felski’s invocation of phenomenology in her proposals for a postcritical practice, I deploy the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to demonstrate how Harris models stylistic and syntactic resistance to invasive forms of suspicious reading. Such resistance, I argue, constitutes a robustly political demand for the postcritical.

摘要

这篇文章介入了关于“后批判”价值的辩论，反驳了“后批判转向”代表保守地废除文化探究的政治责任的担忧。我认为，传统的批评形式在读者和文本之间的关系中再现了一种准帝国主义的权力动态，无论读者自己的政治立场如何，这种共谋都是不可避免的，因此后批评方法实际上可能具有最大的政治价值和紧迫性处理从社会政治边缘位置撰写的文学作品。我通过阅读威尔逊哈里斯的孔雀宫来提供这个论点（1960 年）。从丽塔·费尔斯基 (Rita Felski) 在她的后批判实践提案中援引现象学的线索，我部署莫里斯·梅洛-庞蒂 (Maurice Merleau-Ponty) 的工作来展示哈里斯如何模拟对可疑阅读的侵入性形式的文体和句法阻力。我认为，这种抵制构成了对后批评的强烈政治要求。