Haun Saussy
I owe a lot of my education to the 1980s Critical Inquiry. Then as now, I was in hot pursuit of theoretical models that might collide in unexpected ways with literary texts and common sense, and thus force a rethink. The Aporia Express! So an article with the title “The Epistemology of Metaphor” (1978) interpellated me, as we used to say. I didn’t know Paul de Man, I hadn’t been in a classroom with him yet, but I tracked down the articles that would later become chapters in Allegories of Reading, for example “Political Allegory in Rousseau” (1976). They were unlike anything else I’d read, even Derrida. A problem would be stated and a quest proposed, and along the way things would start to go wrong, or as de Man once put it, to “swerve away from” the problem we had started out with. With Derrida one started off in an antagonistic position to recognized means of sense-making; de Man pulled away the magic carpet when we were already in the air. I reread those articles until the journal numbers fell apart, allegorizing the suspension of narrative continuity.
Another way Critical Inquiry shaped me was its readiness to offer space to scholars and theorists who had encountered de Man and were not having any of it. If it was a “theory journal,” it knew that “theory” thrived in a contested space. Stanley Corngold and Raymond Geuss came out waving their hammers; de Man answered them, sometimes bluntly, as exemplifying the problem he was diagnosing. In my group, a critique that claimed to know what counted as real philosophy or real literary history was considered “stupid,” as missing the point. Critical Inquiry, confident enough to print the clangor, was taking a metacritical stand or possibly a long bet.
When de Man’s second death arrived, with the ignominy of his 1940s collaborationist journalism laid bare, some made excuses; some said “no, the real point is elsewhere”; some divided early de Man from late; others gloated; some were clearly out to settle scores. The autopsy was best and most honorably carried out by Critical Inquiry, which allowed de Man’s friends and enemies to show how they dealt with the unconscionable until, in 1989, the editors declared the issue closed. A performative declaration: but what if the whole subsequent history of Critical Inquiry were a doomed attempt to close the coffin on my quondam teacher?
I learned a lot else from the journal in the ensuing years, but an occasion like this makes one look to the beginning. My first rejection slip, in 1981 or so, was from Critical Inquiry. It seems I have been living in hopes of the journal’s attention ever since.
Haun Saussy is a coeditor of Critical Inquiry.
In the Moment 