September | 2023 | In the Moment
15 posts published by critinq during September 2023| In the Moment
Ana Cecilia Dinerstein In March 2025, Franco “Bifo” Berardi published an intervention in In the Moment, where he addresses the question of subjectivity in a time of depression and panic. He asks: “How to build a healthy subject starting from … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Dipesh Chakrabarty The twenty-eighth Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change – or COP28 for short – recently took place in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The negotiations that go on at these COP … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Maha Nassar 27 December 2023 On 31 October 2023, as Israel’s horrific bombing campaign on the occupied Gaza Strip entered its fourth week and as its ground incursion into northern Gaza entered its fourth day, a music video was released. … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Oren Yiftachel 15 December 2023 Below are early critical reflections from within on the recent upheaval in Israel/Palestine highlighting the disastrous consequences of Hamas’s “boomerang” insurgency, which triggered mass destruction and the deepening of Israel’s apartheid. Articulation of a joint nonviolent … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Anton Shammás 27 November 2023 Dear Critical Inquiry, Thank you again for the renewed invitation, and I find myself, again, asking you to please accept my apologies – if anything, my rage has been increasingly overwhelming, disorienting, smothering, and I really can’t … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Neta Stahl 13 December 2023 I was born and raised in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where my father, two siblings, and their families still live (or rather lived until 7 October). When I think about the attack, I think about it … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Orit Bashkin 11 December 2023 Shmuel Ben David, a Jewish Karaite from Crimea who went on a pilgrimage in 1641–1642, provides us with a vivid depiction of Gaza, praising the city for its beauty, its numerous mosques, its Jewish prayer … Continue reading →| In the Moment
This series includes entries by members of our scholarly community on the War in Gaza. CI has a long history of theorizing questions related to settlement, racism, colonialism, postcolonialism, and antisemitism in Palestine/Israel and elsewhere in the world. Over the … Continue reading →| In the Moment
In anticipation of our forthcoming blog forum, we’d like to share our archive of essays, reflections, and responses to the ongoing Israel/Palestine conflict. FREE ACCESS: In order to access any of the below articles for free, please open the following … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Peter Galison Five decades ago, Critical Inquiry was in its formative moment. Its editors identified a kind of exemplary triad—author, topic, writing—that should characterize the journal: We sought critics who value examination of the assumptions underlying particular discriminations about works … Continue reading →| In the Moment
James Chandler 1. Specific Intellectuals Twenty years ago, for its thirtieth anniversary issue, I compared the early history of Critical Inquiry to that of the humanities-centers movement. I noted that both had their take-off in the 1970s … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Harry Harootunian I served on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry for about ten of the fifty years now being commemorated. For me the time spent represented an ongoing education, a virtual work in progress, in disciplines, idea, and cultural … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Lorraine Daston Why is there no epistemology of the humanities that is even remotely comparable to the epistemology of the sciences? Why is it that humanists can gesture to only a handful of seminal works by philosophers (Wilhelm Dilthey on … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Thomas Pavel The Critical Inquiry essay that helped me most was Badiou’s Number: A Critique of Mathematics as Ontology (2011), coauthored by our former colleague David Nirenberg, intellectual historian, and his father, Ricardo L. Nirenberg, mathematician and writer. The topic … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Robert Pippin The fiftieth anniversary of Critical Inquiry happens to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of my life as an academic philosopher in the United States. We both began in 1974, and I recall beginning to read Critical Inquiry in … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Stanley Fish In this profession, you are ahead of the game if you have an idea. if you have an idea and a half, you are in rarefied territory; and if you have two ideas, you are Wittgenstein. I am … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Catherine Malabou Tom Mitchell once gave me a pink woolen cap as a present. It is a knitted cap, with large stitches. Maybe it’s crocheted. Its pink is comparable to the chewing gum in France called Malabar (note the phonic … Continue reading →| In the Moment
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 … Continue reading →| In the Moment
The fiftieth anniversary of Critical Inquiry marks more than the ongoing liveliness and longevity of one journal. It marks the ongoing importance of humanities journals tout court and the vitality of a field that persistently asks new questions and expands … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Dipesh Chakrabarty Critical Inquiry is fifty! I am sure there have been journals that have lasted longer. But what is remarkable is that CI – not the mouthpiece of a professional association but an in-house journal run by colleagues at … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Elizabeth Abel My life changed in 1979, when Tom Mitchell suddenly – inexplicably – invited me to become a coeditor of Critical Inquiry. Overwhelming as it was – I would be the only assistant professor and the only female coeditor … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Jerome McGann All the instruments agree that the day of its birth was a bright warm day. And all of us who learned to use Critical Inquiry during the next fifty years – to read it, to write for … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Michael Fried I’ve counted them up and it turns out I’ve published nine articles in CI along with several responses to critics. The earliest of the articles, on Courbet’s After Dinner at Ornans and Stonebreakers, appeared in 1982; those that … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Catharine R. Stimpson To steady my memories of the origins of Critical Inquiry in Chicago in the 1970s I consulted a magisterial book, John W. Boyer’s The University of Chicago: A History (20…| In the Moment
Bill Brown Raymond Saunders sure is having a moment. At the age of ninety-one. Last year, two Manhattan galleries, David Zwirner and Andrew Kreps, jointly exhibited Raymond Saunders: Post No Bills.…| In the Moment
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun Our moment seems marked by cruelty: from best-selling books warning Christians against “toxic empathy” towards immigrant families to online trolls who gleefully torture their v…| In the Moment
Franco “Bifo” Berardi A few days ago I received an invitation from an American association that invited me to take part in a convention to be held in Chicago in April. The theme of the …| In the Moment
Ryan Banfi In “Chris Ware’s New Yorker Covers: Reading the School Shootings Triptych,” I wrote about Ware’s visual exploration of school gun violence through the medium of the comic. I sent him my essay and asked if I could interview … Continue reading →| In the Moment
"How can we avoid thinking that this nation is a danger to the survival of humanity?" Read Franco "Bifo" Berardi's "The American Unconscious and the Disintegration of the Western World" on the CI blog. … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Franco “Bifo” Berardi The wars of the twenty-first century are fought less and less by human beings. Human beings are the victims, but the perpetrators of the extermination are machines. These machines are driven less and less by humans because … Continue reading →| In the Moment
We are pleased to present a book forum on Fredric Jameson’s The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present, featuring posts by Bill Brown, Jonathan Culler, Emily Apter, John Brenkman, and Bruno Perreau. Read . . . Bill … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Bruno Perreau Translated by Susannah Dale Fredric Jameson, literary critic, Marxist philosopher and Knut Schmidt Nielsen Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University, has published the transcripts of the graduate seminars he led in the spring of 2021 exploring … Continue reading →| In the Moment
John Brenkman In April I was thrilled that he was celebrating his ninetieth birthday. When contacted by Critical Inquiry in June I was amazed to learn that he had a new book on French theory coming out. And then on … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Emily Apter Fredric Jameson died in Killingworth, Connecticut, a town near one I was staying in when I learned the news. The physical proximity makes the feeling of loss especially poignant – I regret I hadn’t managed to visit him, … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Jonathan Culler Given the thousands of pages that have been written about French theory, it seems surprising that Fredric Jameson’s The Years of Theory stands alone. There are many books about modern critical theory in general, about structuralism and/or post-structuralism, … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Bill Brown Fredric Jameson (1934-2024) held a seminar—remotely—in the Spring of 2021, the record of which now appears as The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present. Last spring we proposed that we feature the book of lectures as … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Franco “Bifo” Berardi We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself. . . . We constantly lose our ideas. . . . We ask only that our … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Bill Brown For those inhabiting the world of literary theory and cultural criticism, the loss of Fredric Jameson (1934–2024) comes as a disorienting blow like no other. In part this is because his vitality proved unwaning, because he kept publishing … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Liron Mor 1. This is the time of inqisām. A time of severance, of breaking apart, of the utter destruction of Gaza, the dissolution of its inhabitants, its communities, and its infrastructures, of …| In the Moment
Karl Baldacchino: Your book Disertate (2023), forthcoming in English as Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression (2024), treats the subject of desertion or quitting, which according to you is congr…| In the Moment
Ryan Banfi Last spring marked the tenth anniversary of Patrick Jagoda and Hillary Chute’s special issue for Critical Inquiry, “Comics & Media,” which followed the May 2012 “Comics: Philosophy a…| In the Moment
Adam Almqvist This quarter, I taught my class, The Comparative Politics of the Middle East, which includes extensive discussions on Israel and Palestine. I came away with a bitter taste of the curr…| In the Moment
Kim Kolor As people assembled the Dr. Hammam Alloh Medic Tent, the Refaat Alareer Library, and the beginnings of what would become a legendary twenty-four-hour food tent, administrators arrived and encircled the UChicago Popular University for Gaza. One began directing: … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Hoda El Shakry On 23 May, members of the UChicago Popular University for Gaza organized a graduation ceremony for students, faculty, staff, family, and community members. After the event, we all ga…| In the Moment
Christopher Iacovetti I want to begin these reflections with an episode I experienced as part of the UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP) negotiating team. Sitting across the table from President Paul Alivisatos, our team was asked what the university administration … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Jessica H. Darrow In the wake of the razing of the encampment on our quad, many of us are asking ourselves about our relationship to the University of Chicago and the university’s relationship to the wider world. The encampment and … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Itamar Francez In the days leading to the shutting down of the encampment, in discussions and debates among faculty, some colleagues expressed the view that the encampment should be shut down, offering the familiar narrative of disruption. They argued that … Continue reading →| In the Moment
Eman Abdelhadi In the Muslim tradition, jinn (think genie) are beings made of fire who live in a parallel universe to our own. The jinn are shape shifters, who can appear to humans or retreat…| In the Moment
Over the past month, students on college campuses around the country have launched encampments to protest Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza. On 29 April, a student-led encampment organized by UC…| In the Moment
Lila Abu-Lughod 12 December 2023 I would like to focus on some concerns I have as a feminist scholar with close personal connections to Palestinian feminist colleagues.[1] Their situations and thei…| In the Moment
Ted Underwood 29 June 2023 A graduate student who fell asleep in 1982 and woke up in 2022 might see large language models as a triumph for cultural theory. It is hard to imagine a clearer vindicati…| In the Moment
