Critical Inquiry
@criticalinquiry.bsky.social
Founded in 1974, Critical Inquiry is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal devoted to the best critical thought in the arts and humanities.
"Esports . . . are crucial in understanding the continuity between racialized, outsourced 'sweatshop' labor and high-tech but no less exploitative forms." From our new issue, read Tara Fickle's "Asian/American Esports": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
"Modern American poetry, she argues, reasons inductively rather than deductively, moving from particulars towards provisional generalities rather than letting a governing intuition shine through it." Sneha Chowdhury on Johanna Winant's Lyric Logic: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/sneha_chowdh...
Autumn issue is coming soon! Vilém Flusser on cover.
"The painting is calculated to engage our amazement . . . by its very immensity and boldness; it is spectacular, and we are enchanted by the spectacle." Remembering Joel Snyder: read "'Las Meninas' and the Mirror of the Prince," Free Access on CI: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
"If This Be Magic evinces a welcome and wholly unsubtle cosmopolitanism which is also on show in Hahn’s treatment of English as a multipolar language." New in review, Chenxin Jiang on Daniel Hahn's If This Be Magic: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/chenxin_jian...
"A specter is haunting the economy—Or maybe it’s a phantasm?" Read William Mazzarella's "What Economy?" on the CI blog.
What Economy?
William Mazzarella I might as well begin with two servings of fascist potatoes. The first comes from Wilhelm Reich, the great renegade psychoanalyst, who observed in 1934 that“Hitler’s gift of a sack of potatoes to every worker was ninety-nine percent ideology and only one percent practical value.” The second is from just a few years later, 1941, and appears in…
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"What unites counterrevolutionaries is not necessarily a shared political vision or ideological program but rather mutual opposition to egalitarian movements." Read Jason Frank's "Carnality and the Counterrevolution" on the CI blog.
Carnality and the Counterrevolution
Jason Frank Leading activists and intellectuals of the American far right have in recent years abandoned the language of conservatism for that of counterrevolution. There is agreement for many within the MAGA movement, as the title of an essay in the Claremont Review has it, that “‘conservatism’ is no longer enough.” “The urgent task for the political Right today,” …
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"The art of Rembrandt or Michelangelo can, for example, only be characterized by trying to qualify their position . . . outside the line of objectivism and subjectivism." Remembering Joel Snyder: Read "The Concept of Artistic Volition," Free Access on CI: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
"Trump arouses and manages his followers’ desire for revenge in a process psychoanalysts might describe as adjacent to jouissance." Read Lisa Wedeen's "Fascist Temptations in the Era of Trump" on the CI blog.
Fascist Temptations in the Era of Trump
Lisa Wedeen While the bulk of my empirical work has focused on authoritarian imaginaries in Syria and Yemen, here I want to take what I have learned in the Middle East analytically and use it to reverse relations and provincialize the United States.[1] No more in the US than elsewhere does it pay to ignore ideological investments and libidinal satisfactions when trying to understand what binds authoritarian-minded followers to their leaders.
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Over the next few days on the CI blog, we are presenting "Libidinal Investments in Fascist Politics," featuring essays by Lisa Wedeen, Jason Frank, and William Mazzarella.
Libidinal Investments in Fascist Politics
Libidinal Investments in Fascist Politics originated as a panel put together for a conference by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT) on authoritarian imaginaries. Part of a broader project entitled A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times, the themes of the November 2025 conference derived from the understanding that building an effective counter-imaginary requires addressing the formidable challenges to it.
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"He apparently excused his own haughtiness and abuses in the name of poetry rooted in the blood and ashes of fascism." New in review, Bruce J. Krajewski on Anna Arno's Paul Celan: A Life, translated by Soren Gauger: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/bruce_j_kraj...
"Had Velazquez stood peering into the room exactly opposite the doorway figure . . . he could not possibly have seen himself in the mirror." Remembering Joel Snyder - read "Reflexions on 'Las Meninas,'" Free Access at CI: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
"Had Velazquez stood peering into the room exactly opposite the doorway figure . . . he could not possibly have seen himself in the mirror." Remembering Joel Snyder - read "Reflexions on 'Las Meninas,'" Free Access at CI: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
"There is something charming and yet nasty about the belief in the special relation of picture to world." Remembering Joel Snyder - From our Spring 1980 issue, read "Picturing Vision," Free Access at CI: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
"Colonizing Palestine . . . challenges the assumption that 1947–1948 is the starting point for Palestinian dispossession." New in review, Amahl Bishara reviews Areej Sabbagh-Khoury's Colonizing Palestine: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/amahl_bishar...
"Thus the photograph is not a substitute for vision, not even a modified or extended form of vision, but simply the inevitable outcome of a certain series of events." Remembering Joel Snyder: read "Photography, Vision, and Representation" Free Access: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
"We might wish to imagine the shape of things to come . . . but our own critical practices tell us that we can’t and with good reason." Remembering Joel Snyder (1940-2026): From our Winter 2004 issue, read "Notes from the Ground" Open Access: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
"Seeing a body as a beacon, or a stone as a limit, means learning to see contiguity, paratactic besideness, as a form of semantic collapse." From our new issue, read Luke A. Fidler's "Paratactic Boundaries": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
Summer is here! Read essays by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Luke A. Fidler, Tara Fickle, Alexander Freer, Hannah Cohen, Chris Reitz, Maurice Ebileeni, and critical responses from McKenzie Wark and Emily McAvan. criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/past_issues/...
"This value given by humans of all color and creed to human longevity could never be apprehended as merely ideological. This desire is now part of the human condition." From our new issue, read Dipesh Chakrabarty's "Questions Concerning Longevity": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
Summer is here! Read essays by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Luke A. Fidler, Tara Fickle, Alexander Freer, Hannah Cohen, Chris Reitz, Maurice Ebileeni, and critical responses from McKenzie Wark and Emily McAvan. criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/past_issues/...
"Failure, he claims, must be thought of as failure, not as a resting place on the way to success, not as a moral lesson, not as enlightenment." New in review, Jack Halberstam on Irving Goh's Living on After Failure: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/jack_halbers...
"The history of French Algerian liberalism provides a crucial and much‐neglected context for understanding Derrida's philosophy of deconstruction." From our Winter 2010 issue, read Edward Baring's "Liberalism and the Algerian War": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
"In order for the extermination of civilians to be validated as an atrocity, passive suffering had to be paired with indignation." New in review, Sayan Parial on Bruce Robbins's Atrocity: A Literary History: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/sayan_parial...
Read W. J. T. Mitchell's “'Why Would You Want to Say That?' Remembering Joel Snyder" on the CI blog.
“Why Would You Want to Say That?” Remembering Joel Snyder
W. J. T. Mitchell It is a fixed convention of the academic obituary to reflect on how difficult, if not impossible, it is to pay adequate homage to a departed colleague, much less to write amidst the grief that goes with their passing. You must consider this as merely a first draft in the assessment of Joel Snyder’s life and academic career.
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"The new forms were, to a great extent, brought into being through the frustration felt by generations of artists with the limitations of the depictive arts." From our Summer 2012 issue, read Jeff Wall's "Conceptual, Postconceptual, Nonconceptual": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
"A constant repositioning of what life could be—and the form it might take—is a feature in astrobiological discourse." From our Summer 2011 issue, read Stefan Helmreich's "What Was Life? Answers from Three Limit Biologies": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
"An Introduction to Contemporary Italian Thought . . . stands as a contribution to the field in its own right." New in review, Karl Baldacchino on Tim Christiaens, Joost de Bloois, and Stijn De Cauwer's An Introduction to Contemporary Italian Thought: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/karl_baldacc...
"The promise of instruments to register a reality that could not otherwise be known was central to the enterprise of psychic research in this period." From our Summer 2016 issue, read Jeremy Stolow's "Mediumnic Lights, Xx Rays, and the Spirit Who Photographed Herself":
