Winter 2026 issue is here! Featuring essays by Yves Winter, Christopher Grobe, Esther Yu, Saul Nelson, Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, James I. Porter, Michael Dango, and Robert Mitchell, Orit Halpern, and Henning Schmidgen. criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/past_issues/...

Join us at the MLA for a roundtable discussion on journal publishing. Led by MLN managing editor @victoriajane.bsky.social with Laurence Roth, editor of Modern Language Studies and Hank Scotch, managing editor of @criticalinquiry.bsky.social @modernlanguage.bsky.social @hopkinspress.bsky.social

"Cultural AI is called out in the subtitle not as a plea to attend to AI’s better half but because culture has been detached from cognition for too long." New in review, Matthew Kirschenbaum on Leif Weatherby's Language Machines: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/matthew_kirs...

Winter 2026 issue is here! Featuring essays by Yves Winter, Christopher Grobe, Esther Yu, Saul Nelson, Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, James I. Porter, Michael Dango, and Robert Mitchell, Orit Halpern, and Henning Schmidgen. criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/past_issues/...

"Heebie‐jeebies also implies a kind of premonition or haunting: the 'apprehension' that intuits an invasive presence. This dis‐ease itself claims the body." From our Spring 2002 issue, read Brent Hayes Edwards's "Louis Armstrong and the Syntax of Scat": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

Looking for a quick holiday read, snuggle up and enjoy Lawrence Buell's glowing review of Amitav Ghosh's Wild Fictions: Essays on Literature, Empire and the Environment. criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/lawrence_bue...

"The film rehearses the ways in which capitalism continually offers up examples of sudden rises and falls, of the animation of things and the deanimation of humans." From Winter 2006, read Bill Brown's "Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

Looking for a quick holiday read, snuggle up and enjoy Lawrence Buell's glowing review of Amitav Ghosh's Wild Fictions: Essays on Literature, Empire and the Environment. criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/lawrence_bue...

"No historian that I know of has described with greater precision or sensory detail the lifeworld of communism." New in review, Andrew Pendakis reviews Karl Schlögel's The Soviet Century: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/andrew_penda...

"The film rehearses the ways in which capitalism continually offers up examples of sudden rises and falls, of the animation of things and the deanimation of humans." From Winter 2006, read Bill Brown's "Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"No historian that I know of has described with greater precision or sensory detail the lifeworld of communism." New in review, Andrew Pendakis reviews Karl Schlögel's The Soviet Century: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/andrew_penda...

"Alejandro and his pastor track down drug users, as if they are animals, to remind them, in classic Christian fashion, that they are human." From our Spring 2017 issue, read "On Hunting": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"Liberal democracies remain unable to address this oligarchization because they conceive their constituency as an undifferentiated people and cannot grasp or address its internal divisions." Mikkel Flohr on Camila Vergara's Systemic Corruption: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/mikkel_flohr...

"What is the other, or opposite, of knowledge? Ignorance? Uncertainty? Undecidability? Theory? Belief?" From our Summer 2006 issue, read Marjorie Garber's "Loaded Words": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"Vallor proposes an evocative central metaphor: AI functions less like an alien cognizer than like a mirror that both reflects and distorts our epistemic and moral practices." New in review, Jaehoon Lee reviews Shannon Vallor's The AI Mirror: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/jaehoon_lee_...

"This hermeneutics of love . . . depends on a fairly sharp distinction between seductions that lead toward the divine and those that lead toward the material world." From Spring 2007, read David Nirenberg's "The Politics of Love and Its Enemies": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"By what right or on what grounds do we arrogate to ourselves the almost exclusive claims to appropriate for human needs the biosphere of the planet?" From our Autumn 2014 issue, read Dipesh Chakrabarty's "Climate and Capital": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

"Palti’s study . . . places its author within the tradition of scholars who interrogate the conditions of possibility of their own discipline." New in review, Senida Poenariu on Elías J. Palti's Intellectual History and the Problem of Conceptual Change: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/senida_poena...

"For Arendt, justice, unlike politics, does not speak a language of persuasion and communication, but of analysis." From our Autumn 2003 issue, read Benjamin Robinson's "The Specialist on the Eichmann Precedent": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

Winter 2026 issue is coming soon!

"The riddle of the Sphinx is not merely apotropaic in its terrifying effects, but apocalyptic, as it combines the promise of revelation and the threat of annihilation." From our Winter 2008 issue, read Daniel Tiffany's "Rhapsodic Measures": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"The editors' main methodological achievement is their successful defiance of the ideological biases of the Cold War." New in review, Olga V. Solovieva on The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/olga_v_solov...

Winter 2026 issue is coming soon!

"The performance of voicelessness intensifies in Rourke's own films. In each he plays a character who seems at first more like a patchwork of fetishes than a human being." From Autumn 2010, read Keri Walsh's "Why Does Mickey Rourke Give Pleasure?": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"The kind of discursive monumentalizing the book performs is critical and reflective rather than self-aggrandizing, memorializing a defunct yet still painfully resonant phase of capitalism." New in review, Jacobé Huet on Zimmerman's Albert Kahn Inc. criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/jacobe_huet_...

"The kind of discursive monumentalizing the book performs is critical and reflective rather than self-aggrandizing, memorializing a defunct yet still painfully resonant phase of capitalism." New in review, Jacobé Huet on Zimmerman's Albert Kahn Inc. criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/jacobe_huet_...

"Benjamin conceptualized his thinking-in-images as the epistemological principle of modernity." From our Winter 2015 issue, read Sigrid Weigel's "The Flash of Knowledge and the Temporality of Images": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"Amos makes her lyrical you, also blurrily the me of those lyrics, register simultaneously as the special, singled-out you (potentially any of us) in the darkened crowd." From our Summer 2013 issue, read Nick Salvato's "Cringe Criticism": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"And that’s what makes AI so scary, why . . . we fear it so: what was once a brushed-metal cyborg now manifests as workplace and state bureaucracies of containment and control." Matthew Kirschenbaum on Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer's Why We Fear AI: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/matthew_kirs...

"Benjamin conceptualized his thinking-in-images as the epistemological principle of modernity." From our Winter 2015 issue, read Sigrid Weigel's "The Flash of Knowledge and the Temporality of Images": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"And that’s what makes AI so scary, why . . . we fear it so: what was once a brushed-metal cyborg now manifests as workplace and state bureaucracies of containment and control." Matthew Kirschenbaum on Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer's Why We Fear AI: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/matthew_kirs...

"Psycho marks the emergence of the modern horror film’s generic privileging of sensation and affect over deep modes of classical spectatorial absorption." From our Summer 2017 issue, read James J. Hodge's "Digital Psycho": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"Instead of romanticizing hardship or dramatizing her life, Brucia presents Swenson as a writer defined by resilience and intelligence." New in review, Lucky Issar on Margaret A. Brucia's The Key to Everything, from @princetonupress.bsky.social: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/lucky_issar_...

"He does not do legitimation. He takes license. He takes license based on his personal exceptionalism: 'Only I can do it.' Trump is the law." From our new issue, read Brian Massumi's "Some Points about Contemporary Fascism": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"What grammars of interaction guide our daily behavior? Who set these rules, how do they become visible, and what are the costs of defection?" From our new issue, read Wendy Anne Lee's "Hate, Consent, Play": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"He does not do legitimation. He takes license. He takes license based on his personal exceptionalism: 'Only I can do it.' Trump is the law." From our new issue, read Brian Massumi's "Some Points about Contemporary Fascism": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"What distinguishes Suther’s Hegel is how embodied this most absolute of German Idealisms appears: rational and conceptual all the way down—yet thoroughly biological." New in review, Christopher Gortmaker on Jensen Suther's True Materialism: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/christopher_...

"Why, however, must visual reality correspond to actually existing and physically embodied entities and materials?" From our new issue, read Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan's "The Navigable Image": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"What grammars of interaction guide our daily behavior? Who set these rules, how do they become visible, and what are the costs of defection?" From our new issue, read Wendy Anne Lee's "Hate, Consent, Play": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"What distinguishes Suther’s Hegel is how embodied this most absolute of German Idealisms appears: rational and conceptual all the way down—yet thoroughly biological." New in review, Christopher Gortmaker on Jensen Suther's True Materialism: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/christopher_...

"He . . . gained his corporate experience with plantation business predicated upon expropriation of inhabited American lands" From our new issue, Jennifer Rae Greeson's "Thomas Hobbes, the Virginia Company, and the Invention of Corporate Sovereignty": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"Why, however, must visual reality correspond to actually existing and physically embodied entities and materials?" From our new issue, read Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan's "The Navigable Image": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"As Holland points out in his impressive excavation of the archives, Derrida did not want to sacrifice or stain his own experience as a cinematic spectator." New in review, Erin Graff Zivin on Timothy Holland's The Traces of Jacques Derrida’s Cinema: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/erin_graff_z...

"He . . . gained his corporate experience with plantation business predicated upon expropriation of inhabited American lands" From our new issue, Jennifer Rae Greeson's "Thomas Hobbes, the Virginia Company, and the Invention of Corporate Sovereignty": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"Cavendish espouses a materialist universe but habitually ponders, hypothesizes, and imagines how individual creatures might escape finite embodiment." From our new issue, read Anne M. Thell's "'I Am Restless to Live, As Nature Doth'": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"As Holland points out in his impressive excavation of the archives, Derrida did not want to sacrifice or stain his own experience as a cinematic spectator." New in review, Erin Graff Zivin on Timothy Holland's The Traces of Jacques Derrida’s Cinema: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/erin_graff_z...

"Jacobson promotes an unsettled perspective on the relationship between the film text and its mode of production." New in review, Parker Stenseth on Brian Jacobson's The Cinema of Extractions, from @columbiaup.bsky.social: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/parker_stens...

"Cavendish espouses a materialist universe but habitually ponders, hypothesizes, and imagines how individual creatures might escape finite embodiment." From our new issue, read Anne M. Thell's "'I Am Restless to Live, As Nature Doth'": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"Jacobson promotes an unsettled perspective on the relationship between the film text and its mode of production." New in review, Parker Stenseth on Brian Jacobson's The Cinema of Extractions, from @columbiaup.bsky.social: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/parker_stens...

"We must be clear about this. The Jewish people are headed toward a genuine schism." Read Annie Cohen-Solal's "Against the Irreversible" on the CI blog. critinq.wordpress.com/2025/09/26/a...