"Elizabeth’s sudden decision to abolish the death penalty was an enigma both to her subjects and to foreign observers, particularly as it caused considerable logistical difficulties." From our new issue, read Boris Maslov's "An Incorporate Fellowship?": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"I have argued that Auerbach’s critique of Christian figuralism is Jewishly inflected. What about his remaining philology? What makes it Jewish too?" From our new issue, read James I. Porter's "When Is Philology Made Jewish?, Part 2": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"Beware those whose nostalgia is for gender itself, for a time where they imagine we trans people—and often we queers and we feminists, too—did not exist." From our new issue, read Emily McAvan's "Theses on the Future History of Trans People": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"Oysters . . . possess what Parker dubs a uniquely paranatural ontology: they live a 'double life,' existing as both discrete objects as well as agents of transformation." In review, Lida Zeitlin-Wu on Thomas R. Parker's Paranatures in Culinary Culture: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/lida_zeitlin...

"Though the archival turn is indeed still turning, the way that acts of translation have become enmeshed in poetics of the archive suggests a radical departure." From our new issue, read Maxwell Gontarek's "Writing a Book I Was Not Writing": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"But the urgent question for any human translator remains: How, after overcoming the shock of obsolescence, should this future be managed?" From our new issue, read Lawrence Venuti's "The Human Translator versus the Machine": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"This fresh view of history clarifies how traditions can sustain cultural legibility across centuries despite radical transformations." New in review, Susanna Sun on Casey Schoenberger's Music, Mind, and Language in Chinese Poetry and Performance: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/susanna_sun_...

"Instead of reading AI's hallucinations as an error in the system, it's time we read them as the electronic drive [trieb] of an emerging new unconscious." Read Johann Witz's "AI's Split Subjectivity" in the new issue of CI. criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/witz/

"Should we only bring texts together empirically based on family resemblances, falling back on a purely sociological or ethnological description of related practices?" From our new issue, read Alexandre Gefen's "Literature as Soft Power": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"What looks like objective detection is always embedded in institutional incentives—who benefits from exposure, who risks reputational ruin, and who gets to frame a narrative of deception." New in review, Zheng Wang on Roger Kreuz's Strikingly Similar: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/zheng_wang_r...

CI remembers Jürgen Habermas (1929-2026). Read his essay "Georg Simmel on Philosophy and Culture: Postscript to a Collection of Essays" (1996). www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Jürgen Habermas (1929-2026). Read his "Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective" in our 1989 symposium on Heidegger and Nazism. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

"That during their calculation words are not grounded by their extensions, however, does not necessarily mean that LLMs are to be dismissed—after all, it is also human to make mistakes." From our new issue, Mercedes Bunz's "On the Calculation of Meaning": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"That during their calculation words are not grounded by their extensions, however, does not necessarily mean that LLMs are to be dismissed—after all, it is also human to make mistakes." From our new issue, Mercedes Bunz's "On the Calculation of Meaning": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"Over the past two centuries it has become the predominant narrative mechanism by and through which we determine our affective and intellectual relations to others, both fictional and real." From our new issue, read Loren Glass's "Close Third": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

What a nice surprise: my review of @dcjenkin-smith.bsky.social's "The Rise of Office Literature" made it into the print version of Critical Inquiry -- and it's in great company! @bloomsburyacademic.bsky.social Have a look at the Spring 2026 issue:

Spring issue has arrived! Read new work by Loren Glass, Mercedes Bunz, Alexandre Gefen, Lawrence Venuti, Maxwell Gontarek, Emily McAvan, James I. Porter, and Boris Maslov. criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/past_issues/...

"Over the past two centuries it has become the predominant narrative mechanism by and through which we determine our affective and intellectual relations to others, both fictional and real." From our new issue, read Loren Glass's "Close Third": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

"Lebovic offers a compelling account of temporality as the shared substrate of living existence from which we might assemble alternative grounds for politics." New in review, Tsiona Lida on Nitzan Lebovic's Homo Temporalis: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/tsiona_lida_...

"This articulation of saint and nation, I would argue, began at the very end of the nineteenth century with the Cuban war of independence against Spain and the Americans." From our Spring 2009 issue, read Marc Blanchard's "From Cuba with Saints": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"In an era of ecological crisis, his patient efforts to reconstruct the dialectic of Enlightenment naturalism offer vital resources for reimagining our place in the web of life." Alex Betancourt on Richard J. Bernstein's The Vicissitudes of Nature: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/alex_betanco...

"The houses and squares of Cologne, the cathedral are seen as surface phenomena, as congealed, materialized masks, as a kind of archaeological kitchen trash." From our Winter 2005 issue, read Vilém Flusser's "The City as Wave‐Trough in the Image‐Flood": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"Every book I've written or every project I've undertaken – they have all started, unselfconsciously, from a sense of loss." Read Dipesh Chakrabarty's interview by Melanie Sehgal and Martin Mulsow. Now on the CI blog.

"Although both multistable images . . . are ambiguous, they seem to observe the gestalt principle of exclusive allocation: it is impossible to see both images at once." From Winter 2008, read Ingrid Monson's "Hearing, Seeing, and Perceptual Agency: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"Every book I've written or every project I've undertaken – they have all started, unselfconsciously, from a sense of loss." Read Dipesh Chakrabarty's interview by Melanie Sehgal and Martin Mulsow. Now on the CI blog.

"The first chapter, on Bosch, is not only the longest but the beating heart of the book, pumping agonistic blood into the whole." New in review, Andrei Pop on Joseph Leo Koerner's Art in a State of Siege: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/andrei_pop_r...

"Abstraction is a metaphor, not a style; the connection of one abstract work to another is by family resemblance, in Wittgenstein's sense." From our Spring 2013 issue, read Charles Bernstein's "Disfiguring Abstraction": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"Panofsky's worry about Heidegger is a concern about the risks of what he interprets as an underlying lack of interest in constraints." From our Spring 2012 issue, read Jaś Elsner and Katharina Lorenz's "The Genesis of Iconology": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"Joyce Suechun Cheng discovers the movement’s iconography of 'masks,' which act as a kind of carapace, alternately protecting and disclosing the surrealist subject." New in review, Jacob Stewart-Halevy on Joyce Suechun Cheng's The Persistence of Masks: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/jacob_stewar...

Spring 2026 issue is coming soon!

"The suicide weapon can be ruthless and terrifying. It can be callously exploited by older men who have no intention of doing the killing themselves. It can be used by anyone, anywhere." From our Autumn 2008 issue, read Ian Hacking's "The Suicide Weapon": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

Spring 2026 issue is coming soon!

"Streaming music from mood-based and activity-based playlists whittles down the anxiety of excessive choice and retains the element of music discovery." From our Summer 2015 issue, read Paul Allen Anderson's "Neo-Muzak and the Business of Mood": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"This book . . . asks how the invisible immanence of whiteness is '"recognised or misrecognised"' and how it shapes social and political power." Adin E. Lears on Wan-Chuan Kao's White before whiteness in the late Middle Ages: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/adin_e_lears...

"I am interested in the analytic limitations of forming categories through peer imitation or why algorithmic collection makes for poor theory." From our new issue, read Michael Dango's "Taxonomic Criticism": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"We have two kinds of evidently deep and consistent Jewish identification in Auerbach’s self-presentation: religious (whether or not Auerbach was observant) and cultural or ethnic." From our new issue, James I. Porter's "When Is Philology Made Jewish?": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"Emerling approaches the task of the historiographer as being identical with a charge of fidelity to the event." New in review, Kyle Sossamon on Jae Emerling's Transmissibility: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/kyle_sossamo...

Very, very grateful to 𝘊𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘐𝘯𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘳𝘺 for giving me space to sing the praises of Chase Gregory's 𝘈𝘴 𝘐𝘧!, a much-needed book about the limits of identity-based scholarship:

"Suppose a technique of criticism that allows the critic to cast the work of art as one possibility among many. Suppose Picasso’s variations as a model for literary criticism." From our new issue, read Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld's "Supposing . . .": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"Gregory calls into question the idea that 'stable political identities' are necessary to the cohesion of 'identity knowledge' fields such as queer studies." New in review, Patrick Kindig on Chase Gregory's As If!: Queer Criticism Across Difference: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/patrick_kind...

"It is as powerful a statement of the inadequacies of traditional painting to render contemporary experience as this century has yet produced." From our new issue, read Saul Nelson's "Manet and Neoliberalism": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"Endless first-person writing had the effect of creating . . . the continual hum of mental presence and sensory awareness that would soon be designated as consciousness." From our new issue, read Esther Yu's "The Novel as Practice of Consciousness": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"The collection of corporations, startups, and nonprofits that make up the titular complex have captured not only the markets but the means of value transaction." Cole Sansom on Alessandra Mularoni and Nick Dyer-Witheford's Cybernetic Circulation Complex: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/cole_sansom_...

"The first efforts to create planetary experiments in the mid-nineteenth century focused on the dynamics of phenomena that themselves encompassed the planet." Read "The Planetary Experiment" by Robert Mitchell, Orit Halpern, and Henning Schmidgen: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"Both Baker and Crow emphasize the timeliness of a reassessment of Marat for current times. Yet they differ radically as to what that timeliness consists in." Colin Jones on Jean-Paul Marat by Keith Michael Baker and Thomas Crow's Murder in the Rue Marat: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/colin_jones_...

"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...

"How did the imaginary transmogrify from an individual into a collective category?" From our new issue, read Yves Winter's "What Is an Imaginary?": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

Interesting @criticalinquiry.bsky.social piece on the "planetary experiment" from the 19th century Magnetic Crusade through the Trinity test to the 21c digital twin. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"It is a performance of supremacy (flesh over metal) ready and able to be coined into acts of racial supremacy (white over Black)." From our new issue, read Christopher Grobe's "Botface": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....