Between Memory and a Late Understanding: Fragments

An assemblage of unreliable recollections from the first two years of the “reading group” that generated Theory and Criticism serves as a basis for some reflections on what was contingent and what was structural in the institutionalization of the journal, what we saw and what we failed to see. These reflections serve as a background for a tentative explanation of the critical element of the activity of critical thinking (hence also of “critical theory”). The movement of thinking is presented as an essential aspect of critique and one of its conditions of possibility. Limitation of this movement is interpreted as an act of sanctification – demarcation of a site which one is not allowed to (re)visit. This prohibition is not necessarily – under certain circumstances it can be justified. When such circumstances do not take place, however, the clash between critical thinking and the sanctifying forces is necessary, and ultimately unavoidable. And what is theory? A tool box that serves critical thinking on its move, an instrument one should never sanctify.