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.
"Ideology, they argue, inhabits not only representational content: bias is 'embedded in the logic of representation itself.'" New in review, Chen Liying on Leonardo Impett and Fabian Offert's Vector Media: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/chen_liying_...
Read Anne Carson's "Stillness" in the Autumn 2021 issue of Critical Inquiry. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
"What constitutes human freedom in a world controlled by apparatuses that are increasingly autonomous?" From our new issue, read Martha Schwendener's "Technical Images, Operational Images": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
"One connection Tsarouchis’s painting forges, consciously or not, is to Duchamp’s inherently anachronic project of corporealization, of refiguration." From our new issue, read George Baker's "Yannis Tsarouchis and Anachronic Modernism": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
Rey Chow is coming to Chicago; join us on October 8th! Learn more about the lecture, and register: rey_chow.eventbrite.com
New on the CI blog! Read W.J.T. Mitchell's essay on Trevor Paglen's _How to See Like a Machine: Images after AI_ (2026).
Invisible Visual Culture: Paglen’s Paradoxes
W. J. T. Mitchell Trevor Paglen’s art has provided some of the deepest insights into world of contemporary technologies of spectacle and surveillance known to me. His large-format telephotographs of secret black sites have rendered these sinister locations in pictures that resemble abstract paintings, and his I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed By Me: Emblems from the Pentagon's Black World…
critinq.wordpress.com
New on the CI blog! Read W.J.T. Mitchell's essay on Trevor Paglen's _How to See Like a Machine: Images after AI_ (2026).
Invisible Visual Culture: Paglen’s Paradoxes
W. J. T. Mitchell Trevor Paglen’s art has provided some of the deepest insights into world of contemporary technologies of spectacle and surveillance known to me. His large-format telephotographs of secret black sites have rendered these sinister locations in pictures that resemble abstract paintings, and his I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed By Me: Emblems from the Pentagon's Black World…
critinq.wordpress.com
Rey Chow is coming to Chicago; join us on October 8th! Learn more about the lecture, and register: rey_chow.eventbrite.com
"It’s about nature itself apprehended through poetry, the nature of poetry as a verbal art, and, more generally, the deep entwinement of poetic making with the natural process." New in review, Feng Dong on Susan Stewart's Poetry’s Nature: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/feng_dong_re...
"The ongoing scholasticide in Gaza . . . threatens not only Palestinian education and cultural life but also the infrastructures through which Palestinians preserve, produce, and narrate their own history." Read Rula Shahwan's "Who Gets to Narrate the Story?" on the CI blog.
Who Gets to Narrate the Story? Tantura and the Politics of Palestinian Archival Authority
Rula Shahwan During my years as an archivist at the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation, I worked closely with researchers, filmmakers, and students searching for archival materials on Palestinian history. I became accustomed to requests for photographs, films, and documents that were often impossible to provide, not because they had never existed, but because many had been looted, destroyed, remained inaccessible, or hidden in Israeli archives.
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"With the two novels read together, we have the making, so to say, of a narrowly bounded and binary legacy in reflexive fictional options over the latest literary decade." From our new issue, read Garrett Stewart's "Reading Outside In": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
"Lim traces the entanglement of Nagasaki and Auschwitz through Maksymilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan martyred at Auschwitz who had earlier built a mission in Nagasaki." New in review, Md Imran Ali on Jie-Hyun Lim's Victimhood Nationalism: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/md_imran_ali...
"We might consider the documentary Tickled as an exploration not merely of sexuality beyond consent but sadism beyond sexuality itself. The key to such a reading is the anus." From our new issue, read Grace Lavery's "Vicissitudes of the Asshole": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
"Coleridge’s strong apprehension about the degraded mechanical fancy betrays a Promethean fear about autonomous memory technologies asserting too much arbitrary power over the mind." From our new issue, read Jessica Sherill's "Memory Machines": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
"Mania is, in this precise sense, the answer par excellence to the unrelenting demands of a certain authoritarianism without authority. " Read Simon Wortham's "Fascist Mania" on the CI blog.
Fascist Mania
Simon Wortham 1. Manic “Change Round” In Sigmund Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” the melancholic is in want of an object, never knowing exactly what they may have lost. Melancholy transforms the object-loss of mourning into an ego-loss; consequently, psychic conflict is internalized in the form of a splitting of the ego against itself, one part representing the lost object, the other seeking—however destructively—to end its reign over the self.
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"Ghatak's themes of colonialism, nationalism, war, ecological precarity, displacement, and the experience of time are very much with us today." Lucky Issar on Ritwik Ghatak: Occasional Essays for a 100th Birthday: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/lucky_issar_...
"Paralleling an exponential expansion of book knowledge, these specimens spurred a wholesale revamp of media systems for organizing, indexing, and storing samples and information." From our new issue, read Tung-Hui Hu's "Grids and Bags": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
"Magarik reads Adam, Raphael, and Michael as character-narrators whose fallible narration is an essential part of Milton’s project of accommodation." New in review, Eve Houghton on Raphael Magarik's Fictions of God: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/eve_houghton...
"A hybrid subjectivity is emerging on the horizon of the twenty-first century." Read Franco “Bifo” Berardi's "The Bitter Cup" on the CI blog.
The Bitter Cup: Notes about Artificial Intelligence and Natural Stupidity
Franco “Bifo” Berardi 1. Gethsemane Even if it is not reducible to humanism, the Christian cultural sphere—in all the contradictory complexity of its history—is the space in which the ethical and ontological autonomy of human action could be conceived. I am not a believer, yet there is a moment when I feel so close to Jesus that I am compelled to call myself a Christian.
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"Hooke’s complex engagement with obviousness directly informs his various declarations of intellectual property." From our new issue, read Violet Spurlock's "An Anatomy of Obviousness": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
Autumn issue is out now! Featuring essays by Violet Spurlock, Tung-Hui Hu, Jessica Sherrill, Grace Lavery, Garrett Stewart, George Baker, Martha Schwendener, and Vilém Flusser criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/past_issues/...
"Hooke’s complex engagement with obviousness directly informs his various declarations of intellectual property." From our new issue, read Violet Spurlock's "An Anatomy of Obviousness": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
"I do not think that the historical-political crisis that faces we trans people is merely allegorical; on the contrary, it is, always, embodied and symbolic, material and discursive." From our new issue, read Emily McAvan's "Off the Clock": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
"Their guiding question is how art and literature employ devices of both attraction and distance to induce empathic alignment with negative phenomena." Fredrik Renard on Stefano Ercolino and Massimo Fusillo's Negative Empathy in Literature and the Arts: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/fredrik_rena...
"The cis are anxious about the way the binary language of sex won’t stay put. To be trans is to confront them with that anxiety." From our new issue, read McKenzie Wark's "Miss Destiny": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
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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"Following 1948, the Palestinian narrative was largely based on describing the Nakba as a culminating event that destroyed an entire society in a single stroke." From our new issue, read Maurice Ebileeni's "Digital Palestine and the National Imagination": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
