Introduction: New Critical
Thinking – To Read so as to
Become Acquainted

Julian Wolfreys

. . . knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,

For the pattern is new in every moment

And every moment is a new and shocking

Valuation of all we have been.

T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (2015: 179)

To be really mediaeval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul.

Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband (2009: 109)

The ‘modern’ (das ‘Moderne’) . . . is as varied in its meaning as the different aspects of one and the same kaleidoscope.

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (1999: 545)

The title of the present volume might mislead you. Consider: a book appears to make a claim to offer the reader something ‘new’. Is there, any more, any new critical thinking? Have we not thought everything we are likely to think in the humanities already? Or are the chapters of this collection ‘new’ in the sense of being ‘inexperienced’ or ‘unaccustomed’? The answer to these questions is not a direct one. The very baldness of the title, which is also a boldness bordering on hubris (imagine, someone claims to have identified new thinking, finally we can do away with all the old thoughts), leaves open the door to all manner of ungovernable thoughts and suppositions on the part of the reader as to the contents, while equally leaving the editor hostage to fortune or accusations of recklessness.

It is the case though that if you can’t judge a book by its cover, you certainly should not do so by its title. Or at least, you should not let the title do your reading for you. The title in question signifies a much more modest purpose, even as it recognises the validity of T. S. Eliot’s observation in the Four Quartets. The essays gathered here are new in a few senses. Taking existing ideas, critical forms, approaches to criticism, they seek to introduce new perspectives, shifting the patterns and requiring valuation. They search for ways of making received wisdom a little unfamiliar or strange, so that the reader might take a new look at what he or she thought was known already. They offer the possibility of taking that which already exists and, in beginning to think once more, as if for a first time, about what is known, or believed to be known critically, about history, culture, ethics, textuality, art, poetry, film, photography, and so forth, and so imagine the experience of a reading that takes place as if for the first time. Far from being formulaic, predictable, programmed the contributors to New Critical Thinking invent critical thinking in a transformed and transformative manner, reinvigorating critical thinking in the process.

Why are transformative and reinvigorating processes necessary, or, at least, useful? In universities literary theory and critical thinking courses re-tread, year after year well-established, now canonical texts. This is a perfectly legitimate way to proceed of course, and has proved very successful. Foucault continues to appear every year, as do various other proper names, as privileged signifiers for ways of thinking, standing for those considered to be foundational thinkers; and of course, in some senses, they are; although this in itself plays, often unthinkingly and uncritically, and in a not very new way on metaphysical notions of origin, source, and so forth. Equally, there are those approaches to critical thinking that orbit around, or depart from large conceptual planets and constellations: postcolonialism, gender studies, ecocriticism, to name but three. Again, to point to this continuing trend is not to be critical of it. It is of course necessary to begin the education of undergraduates new to critical thinking, its modalities and interests, in some way, and the continuing employment of the two models I have briefly acknowledged are as good as their continued usage suggests.

Perhaps the problem though, if indeed there is one, is not with such approaches, but with thinking itself within the limits of the institution. The university today is a business; it always has been in some sense, but the nakedness of the market-driven model is more apparent than ever in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, and everything appears to need to justify itself in gestures of outward-facing accessibility and marketability, as well as being able to process its students, as efficaciously as possible, in order to justify a self-replicating machinic function we can define as business as usual. We need just enough thought, and we need that thought to be packaged in particular ways. Literary theory, literary criticism, critical thinking, critical theory – all have had, at what I am sure someone somewhere has described as the coalface of higher education, their thinking done for them and settled into the ebbs and flows of just enough fashionableness as the market will bear.

Now, it might be nice to dream of some genuinely ‘new’ critical thinking, but there is nothing that is absolutely new. If something ‘new’ were to emerge, this cannot be anticipated, programmed or determined ahead of the event. Critical thinking is not an experiment where the outcome is posited and a way of proceeding is sought so as to arrive at the desired goal. Going back to those modest definitions of the new, particularly that definition that stresses seeing or experiencing what already exists in a different manner, the motivation is to move, in however small a way, from thought to thinking, from product to process. Believing that it is better to travel hopefully, etc., the present collection of essays endeavours to foreground the ongoing and continuous necessity of acts of critical reading, engagement and exploration.

This brings me to the subtitle of this volume: Criticism to Come. Some readers will recognise what is now a familiar critical locution, ‘to come’. It is a phrase, a translation, that in recent years has been taken up, from the work of Jacques Derrida and the distinction made by Derrida between two different French expressions of the future: futur/e and l’avenir. The context of the remark is a voice-over by Derrida near the beginning of the documentary Derrida (2002), though in Politique de l’amitié (1994) Derrida had already played on the ‘à venir’ that haunts, and so deconstructs ‘l’avenir’. In the film, the disembodied voice of Jacques Derrida comes – and returns – unexpectedly, over an initially blurry image of water, followed by railway tracks, the crossing of a river, some buildings, in the background of which are cranes; then we cross water once more:

In general, I try and distinguish between what one calls the Future [futur/e] and ‘l’avenir’ [the ‘to come’]. The future is that which – tomorrow, later, next century – will be. There is a future which is predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable. But there is a future, l’avenir (to come) which refers to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected. For me, that is the real future. That which is totally unpredictable. The Other who comes without my being able to anticipate their arrival. So if there is any real future, beyond the other known future, it is l’avenir in that it is the coming of the Other when I am completely unable to foresee their arrival. (Derrida 2002)

Derrida speaks French (with the occasional English word, ‘unpredictable’, ‘to come’); subtitles appear in English. More than one language, therefore, and certainly three texts, four if one includes the soundtrack (and one must) by Ryuichi Sakamoto. With the landscape in motion, the developing sound of the music, the movement of the subtitles and the ongoing voice, the audience/auditor/reader finds him- or herself involved in an intermedial space that does not come to rest, edit following edit, as word follows word, note, note.

My decision as editor to choose the distinction in Derrida’s thinking of the future, his differentiation between an authentic and programmed future, was not governed by the sense that, if critical thinking has the chance to be new, to find the unfamiliar, the unexpected, and so to begin to see from a position or positions, perspectives, other than those that are carefully programmed, it would have to be a critical thinking that was irreducibly more than one thinking, that it was not to be knowingly or consciously governed by schools, names, and so forth. The only chance of any new critical thinking was in the to come. The essays in this volume thus engage in a thinking, in multiple acts of thinking that do not strive for novelty, for making grand claims. Instead, they work patiently at thinking, at critical interventions, the hope of which is that something may always come, something unexpected may return, as if arriving for a first time, from another place, in turning to particular texts, wherein a different turn is taken, and thinking meets this unpredictable future. In this, critical thinking might, it is hoped, lead to other ways of thinking that are not simply governed or dictated by business as usual.

There is too another sense of the ‘new’: modern, a word the contemporaneity of which seems never quite on time, signifying as it does in Latin ‘just now’. This ‘just now’ signals a complex temporality that undoes from within any present moment as a myth of stable identification or reflection. However you are reading this, on a screen, on paper, there is already a challenging plurality, having to do with acts of reading, writing, pedagogy and critical thinking, underneath all of which is an implicit question articulated by Robert Gibbs in an article titled ‘Time and Pages’: ‘[a]s the humanities change, what is the changing interpretation of the future? Or how can we open a question about what kinds of futures are possible in the humanities to come?’ (Gibbs 2015: 241–2) Critical thinking implicitly engages with such questions, not as questions to be answered, but as the everyday work of thinking in the face of what Gibbs calls, in the context of university time scales, an ‘accelerated temporality of technology and capitalism’ (2015: 242). Critical thinking, ‘new’ or ‘modern’ critical thinking, it seems, under the accelerated, and constantly accelerating temporality in which universities willingly collude to (often very much) greater or lesser extents, is caught in a dilemma. Thinking takes time, but there is no time to think, time is not allowed for thinking, and the time of the university is such that it holds – or attempts to hold – sovereign sway over thinking by dictating its pace so that the ‘new’ is not the ‘just now’ but something not yet thought, yet desired with a somewhat febrile near-immediacy. Universities, no longer content with departments or schools, establish centres, presuming the centre has a function in solving a problem that is larger than the discipline associated with the centre. The Centre is charged with a demand for innovation, for a product that is capable of being commercialised (Gibbs 2015: 242). The modern is too old, too out of date. It must no longer be merely new, no longer simply just now, but a future, which, increasingly, within the sovereign (a)reason of the university, is guaranteed and always already about to arrive.

Had the present volume been called Modern Critical Thinking, this would have been no less ambiguous, no less equivocal than the idea of the ‘new’ though it might have got everyone, from the contributors to the editors off the hook of coming up with novelty. Imagine it (it’s easy): a novelty that can be described as modern because it has happened; no longer new, it still remains, recently enough, to be termed in a somewhat old-fashioned manner, ‘modern’. How would one distinguish the ‘modern’, ‘modernity’? Would one wish to? Would there not be a question of defending such a choice, the defence requiring a greater vigour than ‘new’? And would ‘modern’ be opposed to something, not ‘old’ exactly, but perhaps ‘classical’? Modern, new-fangled critical thinking. More than modern, supra-modern. In a sense, thinking of the critical kind, as opposed to an uncritical thinking (which might just as well be non-thinking) is always ‘modern’, always just not-quite on time, always slightly behind the times and the experiences, the perceptions, apprehensions, that the thinking seeks to accommodate; hence its being just now, rather than now. For the humanities, and this is a particular crisis long in the making, is always the somewhat spectral site of what remains, in the grip of a hauntological accommodation. The humanities is a dwelling, giving place to dwelling on ghosts. Indeed, the humanities, in embracing what, for convenience’s sake we shall call ‘literary theory’ as a powerful and transitional force in its critical thinking, has been ‘remarkably modern’, to use a phrase of Oscar Wilde’s.

The humanities are, and have been just like Mabel: ‘a little too modern, perhaps. Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly’ (Wilde 2009: II, i). With its will-to-commercialisation, a kind of naked and somewhat venal greed, the university (in some parts of the world) has taken on the guise of Lady Markby; but unlike Mabel, the humanities has spent so much time trying to give itself relevance that it is no longer pretty, the one thing that would have kept it fashionable. The desire to ‘make it new’ on the one hand, and the fervour of modernity on the other has instituted a ‘moment of crisis’ (Gibbs 2015: 243), which has in fact stalled any proper temporality for critical thinking. Caught in a stasis of constantly renewing, we find ourselves in the midst of a strange aporetic experience. Yet, this aporia is perhaps the very space where critical thinking might take place – and I would argue does in the essays in this collection – against the accelerated temporalities on the one hand of the recent history of the humanities and on the other hand the pedal to the metal mentality of the ‘modern’ university. That’s a good thing too, the pause, the gap, between the event and the thinking of the event. In the space, there is the possibility of reflection as a beginning, and, with that, the arrival (the hope of the arrival) of that which can always come, that which is to come, though never as a certainty. Critical thinking of the right sort (something I think akin to good reading) allows for the indirect revelation of a deconstruction (if there is such a thing) in the process of authorised thinking. Too much in the humanities has served to reinforce the exclusions and contradictions in humanist discourse, while serving to blur the lines between a liberal humanist unreflective philosophy and the ethos of a neo-liberal marketplace. Thinking has delivered itself over into the service of universal goals ‘too much on the basis of an unstable present – one of totality [and of totalisation, of teleological thinking, of goals and aims, that have in their construction] . . . a presumption of [strategic] universality’, hiding the violence of its operations (Gibbs 2015: 269). To the contrary, a true critical thinking, one that revels in the just now, with the reflection of a sustained glance opens the door, suspends the moment, extends the duration, to welcome whatever might arrive. ‘New’, ‘modern’ critical thinking is just this, it has at least these possibilities: the suspended step, the invention of a duration, necessary to the task of thinking but not known ahead of the task.

I am playing with questions of time, I’m playing for time with this gesture of the ‘new’, and its uneasy companion, the ‘modern’. Both, I want to suggest, have about them something of the trace. Something in each suggests a pause, but also something that remains. The deliberate strategy of the reductive term, which says everything and nothing, everything and all the rest, is intended as a solicitation to thinking, and with that, an opening onto a thinking of the ‘infinitely calculable’ (as, in this volume, J. Hillis Miller says Derrida says, of the meanings of reste). That there is always the idea of the ‘new’, in every return to what is known, there remains in the infinitely calculable, the incalculable itself as the chance of an iteration beyond, an iterability to come.

This is, I have the feeling, precisely just the chance of reading, a reading not avoiding reading in being dictated by a model of critical process. Good reading, reading that chances on the new, is always a process, described by Heidegger as denkende Erfahrung – thinking experience. Experience emerges from the act of thinking. There takes place the emergence of a reading between a text, a work of art, a concept such as ‘the ethical’, in which reading an insight might come to arrive as intellectual experience. The good reader grasps a situation through a process of cognition, which is experiential, belonging to a discontinuous process, one of blindness and insight, the experience unveiling the ‘just now’ through this temporality that is most singularly the temporality of reading. Reading as the modern, never quite on time, opens itself to the remains of the new, that temporally, within the space of its inscription, countersigns, and so opens that which remains as a trace ‘just now’, while placing itself anew in order to invite what remains, whatever remains, to come. Critical thinking should thus pause (and all good critical thinking does), gathering what remains, and demonstrating a hospitality to what might come, through a challenge, implicit or explicit to the unstable present. What is, I would argue, new precisely in these essays, is a hospitality, a welcome to thinking, a welcome to be thought by every reader. The essays that make this volume New Critical Thinking take responsibility for thinking itself, giving place to a calling as ‘the Responsibility, which exceeds all responsibilities’ of the institution (Steinnes 2008: 117). It is only by putting into question that critical thinking makes possible that it becomes possible to think of a future that cannot be imagined, and it is only in a genuine openness to the question, the idea of question, that critical thinking might appear, contrary to an orthodoxy where a ‘given order of things . . . [expresses] pretentions to a mastery over the order of things in the name of knowledge’ (Peim 2013: 174). New Critical Thinking, as a single idea is unrealisable but necessary, it does not refer to a given state of affairs; instead it names the hope of a promise, and takes responsibility for where we are just now. As these essays might serve to illuminate for you, a new critical thinking, non-homogeneous, never reducible to an itself in itself, is a process of welcoming and working with all that haunts, being ‘open to rupture in the name of both critique and creativity’, to which in turn there is an ethical dimension. Critical thinking takes place therefore in suspension, in acts of reading that are acts of waiting, reflecting and dwelling, without hope, without expectation. It does so with a certain urgency in the face of present demands, having the courage often to resist such demands, ‘in the name of a certain emancipatory and messianic affirmation, a certain experience of the promise that one can try to liberate from any dogmatics’ (Derrida 1994: 89). In the present state of higher education, having no hope is better than false hope:

Open waiting for the event as justice this hospitality is absolute only if it keeps watch over its own universality. The messianic in its revolutionary forms (and the messianic is always revolutionary, it has to be) would be urgency, imminence, but irreducible paradox, a waiting without horizon of expectation. (Derrida 1994: 168)

One expression, if not exactly a form of being open and waiting, is the act of turning. In contradistinction to the turn made because one’s route is planned or as a result of some ‘autopilot’ such as a GPS system, is that turn that takes place as part of not knowing where the turn leads, virtually or really, as Mary Ann Caws argues. The first of three chapters that comprise the principal section of the volume, ‘Turnings and Re-Turnings’ initiates a sustained critical thinking on subjectivity, the natural world and its representation. In her essay, Caws investigates various types of turn; not just the linguistic turn or the philosophical turn, or any turn of events or serious paradigm shift, but rather – in keeping with the modesty of the notion of the new that informs this volume – she considers a modest and often merely metaphoric or visual bend in something as everyday as a road. Taking as an example, she reflects on Nicolas de Staël’s Road in the Vaucluse, which leads off the canvas into or onto somewhere else. One does not know where one is or one will go, or be led. Thus the critical voice takes a road less travelled, we might suggest, in order to see where the turn, and with it a rumination on the turn as the gesture of being open and investing critically in the open, the unexpected, first visual, then verbal and imaginative, might lead, taking in various literary turnings, including those in Virginia Woolf’s novels.

Another aspect of being open, and awaiting the event, the to-come that cannot be seen is explored by Monika Szuba, in ‘“Peering into the dark machinery”: Modernity, Perception and the Self in John Burnside’s Poetry’. Szuba attempts to draw out that which is ‘not-yet-seen’ and the limits of what can be known. The chapter reads various aspects of exteriority and interiority in John Burnside’s poems. It argues that the particular preoccupation with surfaces in Burnside’s work foregrounds the tension between the visible and the invisible, the outside and the inside, presence and absence. Peering, in order to pierce the invisible, gazing in the hope of seeing ‘the not-yet-seen’, Burnside’s speakers attempt to probe the condition of modern being. The increasingly insistent self-gaze is an attempt to understand oneself, to grasp a sense of self. Further, gazing upon himself, the poetic subject self-reflexively looks into the nature of selfhood. The self becomes an object of obsessive introspection or reflexive action. Inheritor of a dualistic vision of the self, the speaker emphasises the discontinuity between body and mind, demonstrating persistent mindedness, yet striving to reach beyond. This self-mirroring is thus an attempt to obtain a more profound self-knowledge through immediacy of experience. Scepticism towards hyperrationality accompanies a possibility of a nondualistic, embodied understanding of subjectivity. As the unfulfilled promise made by modern science to explain the world is sensed ever more acutely, in his writing Burnside often demonstrates the influence of progress on the individual. Despite the advances of modern technology, the limits of knowledge – and knowability – are deeply experienced by Burnside’s speakers. The poet challenges the incontestability of facts and the certainty of vision. The latter proves to be an insufficient method of knowing, and only foregrounds the sense that reality constitutes merely a confusing collection of dispersed and unintelligible signs.

Following Szuba’s interrogation of subjectivity in the world of Burnside’s poetry, in ‘Modernity’s Sylvan Subjectivity, from Gainsborough to Gallaccio’ Catherine Bernard examines how, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to J. W. Goethe, William Wordsworth or John Clare, the sylvan world is perceived as the locus of reflexiveness and introspection. The definition of modern subjectivity, she argues, is symmetrically associated with the aestheticisation of nature. The rational instrumentalisation of the forest world and the rise of modern phenomenology may thus be seen as the two symmetrical facets of the birth of the modern subject: rational and sensitive, disciplined and expansive. Thus, in this light, Bernard suggests, the rational instrumentalisation of the forest world and the rise of modern phenomenology may thus be seen as the two symmetrical facets of the birth of the modern subject: rational and sensitive, disciplined and expansive.

Yet, she avers, the symmetry may be deceptive. The chapter thus aims to explore the sylvan imagination of modernity from a longer view in order to take a new turn, and open up what is not yet seen. Focusing both on visual arts (from Eugène Delacroix or Thomas Gainsborough, to contemporary installation artist Anya Gallaccio), it explores modernity’s conflicted relation to the forest. As much as fetishes inscribed with man’s nostalgic yearning for a lost relation with nature, trees should be read as both allegories of modernity and lived sites of phenomenological experience. In these paradoxical ‘quasi-objects’, as defined by Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, is thus crystallised the paradoxical economy of modernity’s experimental/experiential reason, a reason that is both self-divided and dialectical.

From matters of subjectivity and phenomenological perception addressed in the first essays of New Critical Thinking, what follows addresses history and historicity, and from there to questions of ethics; in truth, the divide is not clean, good reading and critical thinking refusing to remain politely in methodological boundaries. Thus in formal terms, the presentation of chapters is not divided into sections. It is important to read between and across the collection.

To think historicity, to engage with the past in a meaningful manner beyond some arid contextualising exercise, critical discourse has to remember the subject’s experience of the past. It also has to read, and read through, the aesthetic experience of history’s texts, where reading and critical discourse might take into account what Sarah Pardon calls, in her examination of texts concerning the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the beginning and end, the limits, of the mediation process of reading historical representations.

Starting from Keith Jenkins’s concern about why we still write, study and theorise about history if we have arrived at the realisation that it is a linguistic reconstruction much like any other type of text, Pardon argues that we first need to move away from a discussion about the multiple interpretations of the word ‘fiction’. Instead, she insists, we need to emphasise that both history writing and fiction are equally concerned with evoking images of the past in our minds (concerns that will be addressed in a different manner also in Christine Berberich’s chapter). From this, Pardon treats the representation of historical figures such as Kennedy or Lee Harvey Oswald as historical experiences that each ask for their own set of formal representations, similar in both fictional and factual texts. It is not, she continues by averring, just the ontological status of a text that determines the choice of representation. The need for an authentic experience of a historical figure also influences the selection of formal representations that critical readers would find credible in both fictional and factual representations. Her aim is thus to show through the reading of the reading process how we can begin anew to analyse the actualisation of an absent past.

With such ideas in mind, Páraic Finnerty examines Emily Dickinson’s representations of past experiences and her exploration of forgetfulness in the context of Frank Ankersmit’s ideas about the role forgetting plays in humanity’s experience of the past. For Ankersmit, historical writing stems from and attempts to remedy humanity’s separation from the past and its desire for access to this foreclosed realm. The division between the past and present becomes most pronounced and undeniable at moments of social and political upheaval, when a past identity, life and worldview must be collectively abandoned or forgotten as a response to such dramatic rupture or transformation. What is forgotten becomes experienced in its absence, associated with a mythic world that is forever lost, and sublimely encountered as an epistemological and conceptual challenge to a current worldview. Finnerty’s essay uses Ankersmit’s ideas to offer a new way of understanding much-discussed features of Dickinson’s work, especially her preoccupation with past events and experiences, loss and memory, and, most strikingly, her couching of these in imagery and language associated with the sublime and in relation to psychological self-division and incomprehensible states. These elements of her writing along with her recurring figurations of death, violence and revolution are indicators of what Ankersmit terms sublime historical experience. They are markers of her position as a poet writing in the aftermath of the American Revolution and during a shift within her Anglo-American culture involving the loss of a former identity centred on religious belief, and the designation of a new secular and sceptical identity in terms of that which has been forgotten and renounced.

Knowledge of the past from philosophical perspectives is also the focus of Anton Froeyman’s ‘Reading Microhistory: Three Layers of Meaning’. Drawing also on Frank Ankersmit’s philosophy of history, and the epistemological challenges Ankersmit issues to the orthodoxies of certain Anglo-American historicisms, Froeyman argues that, analysed from a cognitive point of view, if microhistories have a contribution to our knowledge of the past in the same sense as physics contributes to our knowledge of physical reality, they only do so in a very limited and at best derivative sense. He then contests that what is primarily at stake is the creation of a feeling of being there, or of historical experience. In the third part of his analysis, Froeyman suggests that this feeling is not there just for its own sake, but also for ethical reasons, in a double way. First, microhistorians promote an emancipating agenda with respect to their contemporaries. Second, they also are driven by a sense of ethical commitment, of responsibility towards the past itself. Revitalising the past is not just relevant for our time, it also creates a sense of historical justice, which fits in a view of ethics as an ethics of recognition and representation.

The sense of an ethical commitment and, with that, the feeling of historical experience pervades Christine Berberich’s discussion of Holocaust Fiction, ‘Writing Fiction, Making History: Historical Narrative and the Process of Creating History’. Almost seventy years on from the end of the Second World War, she argues, the Holocaust still holds considerable cultural capital. Even though the numbers of actual survivors of the atrocities are now inexorably diminishing, new publications on the Holocaust appear almost every month. In lieu of survivor accounts, the ethically troublesome genre of Holocaust Fiction is gaining ever more ground. Occupying the grey zone between memoir and fiction, Holocaust faction is also getting increasingly popular. As such, critics and readers have seen the appearance of works of fiction enhanced by factual research on the one hand, and works of factual research more problematically manipulated by fiction on the other as writers try to engage with the Holocaust from ever-changing and challenging perspectives.

One of these perspectives is that of the perpetrator – a topic long shunned but now increasingly coming to the fore. Apart from the biographical accounts of children and grandchildren of the real perpetrators, there is now fiction about imagined perpetrators (Jonathan Littell’s vastly influential though no less troubling The Kindly Ones, for example) as well as imagined narratives about ‘real’ perpetrators. Berberich’s chapter offers a critical discussion of the narrative strategies employed by Patrick Modiano’s The Search Warrant (1997) Laurent Binet’s HHhH (2009). Both texts offer ‘factional/fictional’ writing on the Holocaust and its aftermaths that challenge traditional history writing. Both Modiano and Binet interweave their historical narratives with highly self-reflexive accounts about their own research, their writing strategies and their concerns about the ‘veracity’ of the history they present. In his account, Binet focuses on the Czechoslovakian assassins of Reinhard Heydrich whose story, however, is constantly overshadowed by that of their ‘victim’, Heydrich himself. A story about resistance heroes is thus turned, problematically, into a story foregrounding the perpetrator.

If ethical thinking is as inescapable and difficult as it is necessary, in the regard one turns to the past or towards the other, then an ethics within the limits of a mere humanism, then the question of witnessing and attestation, seen already in a number of ways in this volume – through the interrogation of subjectivity, through the interrogation of the experience and memory of the past, and through the reflection on forms of identity – must turn to environment, through what Kelly Oliver in this volume calls a response ethics in ‘Witnessing, Recognition and Response Ethics’. While she agrees that the ideal of mutual recognition is admirable, Oliver’s central argument is that in practice, recognition is experienced as conferred by the very groups and institutions responsible for withholding it in the first place. In other words, recognition is distributed according to an axis of power that is part and parcel of systems of dominance and oppression. Taking up more recent attempts to link recognition to vulnerability rather than to self-consciousness, Oliver both challenges the concept of vulnerability as exclusive to, or constitutive of, humanity, on the one hand, while criticising the concept for levelling differences in degrees of vulnerability, on the other. In this regard, vulnerability, she contests, could be seen as the flip side of political recognition. Some people or animals are given political recognition while others are made vulnerable.

In the second part of her chapter, Oliver proposes witnessing, grounded in response ethics, as a supplement to recognition models of political and ethical subjectivity. In conclusion, she relates witnessing and response ethics to an ethics of earth grounded on our shared bond to our singular home, planet earth. Rather than start with our recognition of ourselves as self-conscious human beings, or recognition of our shared vulnerability as human beings, she asks what happens when we see ourselves as earthlings who exist by virtue of our ability to respond to the call of others, including our environments. Moving beyond the humanism of most theories of mutual recognition of either self-consciousness or vulnerability, Oliver argues for a response ethics grounded on our singular shared bond to the earth. Witnessing as ongoing address and response between earthlings and their environments cannot be reduced to recognition, mutual or otherwise.

Underpinning all the essays commented on thus far are, implicitly, ideas of the modern, a modernity irreducible to a single definition but seen, received, understood and felt. The final section of New Critical Thinking: Criticism to Come considers aspects of the modern and modernity, through matters of gendered identity in the context of the modern city, new ontologies and challenges to reading afford through formal experiment, the question of the subject’s engagement with radical textualities, and the experiment with the self that the proper name puts into play. In each case, with the four chapters of this section, there is the reading of an experience of expropriation, or of a certain give and take between expropriation and exappropriation (as I explore in my essay on Derrida and experiment).

In ‘A Norwegian Abroad: Camilla Collett’s Travelogues from Berlin and Paris’, Tone Selboe concerns herself with the gendered experience of a woman on the streets of Berlin and Paris. Camilla Collett spent the latter part of the nineteenth century travelling in Europe. She was an observant commentator of a wide range of topics, from the French Revolution to urban planning and city life in Paris and Berlin. In essays and travelogues she compares what she observes abroad with conditions in the Norwegian capital, Kristiania (later Oslo). Thus, Selboe suggests that while Collett was part of a particular European, modern context, she came at the same time, through the reflection that the travelogues afforded, to be intensely concerned with the question of national identity and Bildung. Focusing on Collett’s travelogues from Berlin and Paris, with a special emphasis on her discussion of life on streets and in parks, and the possibility for women walking the streets alone, Selboe explores Collett’s experience of the self as other through a reading of how daily life in Berlin and Paris is compared, by Camilla Collett, with the dreariness of Kristiania, her texts being striking examples of how a writer from the margins of Europe is in dialogue with the contemporary European scene.

In many ways, if Collett comes as the outsider from central Europe, a European other exploring the cultural identity of a cosmopolitan modernity, while reflecting on the gendered, marginal self, Alfred Jarry is the very apotheosis of that urban modernity. Jean-Michel Rabaté illustrates through a reading of ‘Alfred Jarry’s Nietzschean Modernism’ how Jarry, a radical Nietzschean with anarchist leanings, was a living bridge between late symbolism and futurism. More than his plays (the Ubu cycle), his novels, too rarely discussed, serve for Rabaté to exemplify the inception of French modernism – this modernism being defined by Rabaté as the splicing of the old and the new in a context defined by stylistic experimentation, sexual explicitness, and the creation of a new ontology in which humans and machines exchange their properties.

The clinamen is that figure of the unpredictable swerve, first identified and so named by Lucretius. It figures as the ‘discursive necessity of play in the canon’. It is the ‘play of canonicity’ (Barker 1989: 72) – or what Jarry termed la bête imprévue – an interest shared, albeit in very different ways, between Nietzsche, Jarry and Jacques Derrida. The clinamen is just this turn, this opening, the ‘radical beast’ of an unexpected event, giving on to invention, which opens thinking to itself. After Jarry’s publications, there is arguably no more radical a ‘beast’ textually speaking than Jacques Derrida’s Glas, a text of which it might best be said that we are very far from beginning to think towards it, much less with it. The very question of a reading is called into doubt on opening the book, as J. Hillis Miller confesses in his essay, which attempts to ‘read’ the first page of Jacques Derrida’s Glas. At the same time Miller seeks to report as best he can what actually goes on when he makes this effort of reading. He tries to exemplify in detail his claim that what goes on in reading is much stranger and more complex that one might think, recalling an intricate series of events that took place when he first received Glas in the mail and opened it, reading first the single-sheet insert and then looking at the cover, the title page and, finally, the first page of the text proper. In Miller’s case, at least, in addition to trying to make sense of the words on the page, all sorts of somatic and affective responses were involved, as well as a constant unsuccessful attempt to create a coherent mental image based not only on the way the words are arranged on the page (in two columns), but also on the bewildering complexity of what the words say.

One might suggest that Miller’s essay is an experiment in thinking reading, or just reading; or just thinking in the face of a text that appears from the get-go, experimental, inventive. Reading must needs be inventive also, it must acquaint itself as if for a first time with what takes place when one thinks (one reads) and when one (thinks one) reads. Reading of the good kind is, like a true critical thinking, an experience, an encounter, harbouring the possibility for an event, for something to come. It is thus an invention, a searching after something already there. It is also an act of becoming acquainted. Experiment and experience are close relations of course, both having to do with acquaintanceship, of making something known. To acquaint is to make known, but there is a question perhaps as to whether this is a conscious act or whether that which makes itself known in acts of reading and thinking is that which arrives out of an unexpected turn, where something is invented (found) through this experience of and experiment in a critical reading.

In the final essay in the collection, I ask the question of whether Jacques Derrida experiments. Specifically I question whether there is an experiment taking place in Derrida’s texts in the proper name, in his call to, response to, experience of, the proper name. At the same time as pursuing this reading, I suggest that critical thinking should always be, after a fashion, a small experiment, especially around that experimentation and experience of the proper name. In the experience of a critical thinking various modalities of experience arise: response, avoidance, engagement, and so forth. I examine certain of these experiences (experiences of reading and non-reading, thinking and non-thinking) in the name of Jacques Derrida, turning to consider, beyond naming, citation, reference, allusion, calling, bearing witness, leading in conclusion to a realisation of the experience in the name of the name that might stand in for the possibilities of a new critical thinking itself, as that which always strives to exceed and escape systematisation, totalisation, so that what is to come, what remains to come in the name of a critical thinking is something that speaks through the experience of what Derrida, with reference to the proper name, calls ‘a universal pronoun, but of so singular a universality that it always remains precisely singular’ (Derrida 1984: 281). Or in other words, a true critical thinking, always new, always remaining to become acquainted with, so singular is its universality.

WORKS CITED

Barker, Stephen (1989), ‘Canon-Fodder: Nietzsche, Jarry, Derrida (The Play of Discourse and the Discourse of Play)’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 4: 1 (Fall), 69–83.

Benjamin, Walter (1999), The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Derrida, documentary, directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman. USA: Jane Doe Films, 2002.

Derrida, Jacques (1984), Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, Jacques (1994), Politiques de l’amitié, Paris: Galilée.

Eliot, T. S. (2015), ‘East Coker’, from Four Quartets, in The Poems of T. S. Eliot Vol. I, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, London: Faber & Faber, pp. 177–211.

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Peim, Nick (2013), ‘Education, Schooling, Derrida’s Marx and Democracy: Some Fundamental Questions’, Studies in Philosophy & Education, 32: 2 (March), 171–87.

Steinnes, Jenny (2008), ‘Transformative Teaching: Restoring the Teacher, under Erasure’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 41: 2 (August), 114–25.

Wilde, Oscar (2009), An Ideal Husband, ed. Russell Jackson, London: Methuen.