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When Nothing Is Cool

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 WHEN NOTHING IS COOL

by Lisa Ruddick

This is an abridged version of an article that appears in The Future of Scholarly

Writing: Critical Interventions, edited by Angelika Bammer and Ruth-Ellen
Boetcher Joeres (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Full citations for all quo-
tations in the excerpt below can be found in the original article.

I n the course of interviewing some seventy graduate students in Eng-

lish for a book on the state of literary criticism, I’ve encountered two types of
people who are having trouble adapting to the field. First, there are those who
bridle at the left-political conformity of English and who voice complaints famil-
iar from the culture wars. But a second group suffers from a malaise without a
name; socialization to the discipline has left them with unaccountable feelings
of confusion, inhibition and loss.
Those in the latter group share a quality of inwardness. In interviews, they
strike me as reflective, intuitive individuals, with English teacher written all over
them. These are the people who say that something in this intellectual environ-
ment is eating them alive. Gina Hiatt, the president of a large coaching service
for academic writers, tells me that many of her clients in the humanities have a
similar experience. She believes these clients sense “an immorality they can’t put
their finger on” in the thought-world of the humanities. They struggle as writers
because talking the talk would make them feel complicit, yet they cannot afford
to say, in Hiatt’s words, that “the emperor has no clothes.” Some keep their
best ideas out of their scholarship for fear that if they violate certain ideological
taboos, others will “hate” them (a verb Hiatt hears repeatedly). Hiatt describes
these individuals as “canaries in the mine.”
Is there something unethical in contemporary criticism? This essay is not
just for those who identify with the canaries in the mine, but for anyone who
browses through current journals and is left with an impression of deadness
or meanness. I believe that the progressive fervor of the humanities, while it

Published in The Point magazine, December 7, 2015

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 L I S a Ru D D I C k

reenergized inquiry in the 1980s and has since inspired countless valid lines of
inquiry, masks a second-order complex that is all about the thrill of destruction.
In the name of critique, anything except critique can be invaded or denatured.
This is the game of academic cool that flourished in the era of high theory. Yet
what began as theory persists as style. Though it is hardly the case that everyone
(progressive or otherwise) approves of this mode, it enjoys prestige, a fact that
cannot but affect morale in the field as a whole.
The reflections that follow focus largely on English, my home discipline
and a trendsetter for the other modern language disciplines. These days nothing
in English is “cool” in the way that high theory was in the 1980s and 1990s. On
the other hand, you could say that what is cool now is, simply, nothing. Decades
of antihumanist one-upmanship have left the profession with a fascination for
shaking the value out of what seems human, alive, and whole. Some years ago
Eve kosofsky Sedgwick touched on this complex in her well-known essay on
paranoid reading, where she identified a strain of “hatred” in criticism. also
salient is a more recent piece in which Bruno Latour has described how scholars
slip from “critique” into “critical barbarity,” giving “cruel treatment” to experi-
ences and ideals that non-academics treat as objects of tender concern. Rita
Felski’s current work on the state of criticism has reenergized the conversation
on the punitive attitudes encouraged by the hermeneutics of suspicion. and
Susan Fraiman’s powerful analysis of the “cool male” intellectual style favored
in academia is concerned with many of the same patterns I consider here. I hope
to show that the kind of thinking these scholars, among others, have criticized
has survived the supposed death of theory. More, it encourages an intellectual
sadism that the profession would do well to reflect on.
Why has it been hard for this community to shift away from norms that
make ruthlessness look like sophistication, even as dissenting voices are periodi-
cally raised and new trends keep promising to revitalize the field? The reflections
that follow, in proposing some answers, touch on the secret life of groups.

M y fIrst focus is an article by Judith Halberstam that embodies a

certain bad-boy manner that was fashionable in the 1990s. I will then
describe some recent criticism that reflects the same style. Throughout I use
scholarly examples, rather than just generalize about the discipline, because the
patterns that concern me can be subtle and hard to spot. Without concrete
analysis, I would have little to offer those who sense that there’s something
wrong with criticism but (as Hiatt says) “can’t put their finger on” the problem.
Yet the examples are not intended to give the impression that individual scholars

2
are misbehaving. Everyone is responding to the same intellectual force field; the
problem is systemic.
Repeatedly, we will find scholars using theory—or simply attitude—to
burn through whatever is small, tender, and worthy of protection and culti-
vation. academic cool is a cast of mind that disdains interpersonal kindness,
I-thou connection, and the line separating the self from the outer world and the
engulfing collective. ultimately I suggest that within English as a human system,
this gestalt works to create a corps of compliant professionals. Novices sublimi-
nally absorb the message that they have no boundaries against the profession
itself. The theories they master in graduate school are such as to make their own
core selves—or what, within the lexicon of D. W. Winnicott, would be called
their “true selves”—look suspect and easy to puncture analytically. What by
contrast is untouchable, and supports a new and enhanced professional self, is

of theory itself.”
Halberstam’s article hardly represents the best theoretical work of the
1990s. I introduce this piece because it embodies, almost in caricature, a studied
coldness that enjoyed a vogue in that decade and has influenced subsequent
criticism. Readers who know the novel The Silence of the Lambs or Jonathan
Demme’s film adaptation will recall the murderer Buffalo Bill, who fashions a
cloak from the skins of his female victims. In a well-known reading of the film,
Halberstam suggests that Bill is as much “hero” as villain. For he “challenges the
... misogynist constructions of the humanness, the naturalness, the interiority
of gender.” By removing and wearing women’s skin, Bill refutes the idea that
maleness and femaleness are carried within us. “Gender,” Halberstam explains,
is “always posthuman, always a sewing job which stitches identity into a body
bag.” The corpse, once flayed, “is no woman”; “it has been degendered, it is
postgender, skinned and fleshed.” Halberstam blends her perspective uncriti-
cally with the hero-villain’s posthuman sensibility, which she sees as registering
“a historical shift” to an era marked by the destruction of gender binaries and
“of the boundary between inside and outside.”
In her more responsible, empirical work on gender identities, Halberstam
has described some of the ways in which society does “stitch” people into gen-
ders that are taken for natural. But here she reads a fictional text allegorically, to
suggest that there is no selfhood at all beneath our cultural stitching. For if Bill
pulls each victim apart without concern for what the article skeptically calls an
“inner life,” it is apparently because there is no such thing as an inner life. Not
only gender but also “identity ... proves only to be skin deep.” Bill “hates iden-
tity” and addresses his victims as “it.” He enacts “a carnage of identity.” Yet the
article gives us no terms in which to describe this as unhealthy or cruel behavior.

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an extensive academic conversation has, of course, questioned the ide-

als of the inner life and the bounded individual, on the strength of various
critiques of liberal individualism. Some of the most powerful scholarship of the
last decades is rooted in this more or less Marxist intellectual tradition.* among
other things, this work has shown how liberal theory, in presuming that “man”
is ideally self-possessed and autonomous, overlooks the shaping influence of the
market and of social relationships. Yet antiliberalism has many variants. In its
cool variant, it denies the value of human individuality and self-boundaries—an
attitude arguably remote from Marx’s own.†
In place of compassion for the fictional victim, Halberstam offers a heady
identification with the “hero” who dismantles the victim to the glory of a field-
honored theory about the artificiality of gender. The abstractions trump the
human realities: this is the mark of sexy academic thought. a reviewer hailed
Halberstam’s article as modeling “exciting possibilities for feminist and queer
criticism of contemporary horror films.” and the essay was well enough regarded
to have been reprinted in an anthology showcasing posthumanist criticism, and
again in the award-winning Transgender Studies Reader. The editors of the latter
volume introduce the essay not as an account of a peculiar fictional world but as
an important theoretical intervention, offering a new perspective on the actual
nature of subjectivity. They assert that “[Halberstam] looks beyond available
categories of gendered personhood and sexed embodiment to develop a new,
potentially post-human, construct of the self.” But what is a “construct of the
self” that suggests that beneath the skin, no one is home? While I would hardly
say that theoretical work like this should be excluded from the conversation, it
seems fair to ask why it should be overvalued.
Let us assume a proposition that most american psychoanalysts would
find uncontroversial, namely that human beings have inner lives—ideally rich
ones—and a degree of self-cohesion.‡ as students are brought into our profes-
sion, they typically learn to see this view as that of “mainstream psychology,”
which in turn is fraught with bourgeois ideology. Their theoretical training,
as a rule, gives them scant exposure to the many contemporary theories that

* an example is N. katherine Hayles’s “The Illusion of autonomy and the Fact of Recursivity:
Virtual Ecologies, Entertainment, and Infinite Jest,” in New Literary History (Summer 1999). I
select this article, amid countless possible examples, for its insightfulness and for its concision in
summarizing certain standard arguments against the liberal idea of “individual self-possession.”

† For a survey of divergent scholarly understandings of Marx’s attitude toward human individual-
ity, see Chapter 3 of Terrell Carver’s The Postmodern Marx.

‡ as originally published on this site, this sentence contained, at this point, the phrase “unless
autistic or seriously troubled.” But an online commenter pointed out, quite validly, that autistic
people do have inner lives. I regret my original formulation, and have deleted the phrase.

4
validate the human potential for inwardness and psychic integrity.* Instead,
they are assigned theories arguing, at an extreme, that the very border between
inner and outer worlds is (as Judith Butler has argued) “maintained for the
purposes of social regulation and control.” They will also occasionally encoun-
ter work that uses the profession’s radical critique of interiority and autonomy
to make the shattering of selves look edgy and progressive. I nowhere mean to
suggest that the profession does not offer good criticisms of u.S. ideology. The
problem is the scorn for self-cohesion that has wound itself in with the project
of social critique.
as I have already intimated, an intellectual regime so designed discour-
ages initiates from identifying with their own capacity for centered, integrated
selfhood. Some will identify instead with the aggressor, turning against the soft
“interiority” that the profession belittles. as a more moderate option, scholars
can adopt a neutral historicist voice that allows them to handle the inner life—
someone else’s—as a historical curiosity, without attributing value to it. (as one
of my interviewees ruefully remarked, “You can write about anything so long as
it is dead.”) Either way, the distanced attitude toward inwardness takes a toll.
The management scholar ann Rippin, borrowing an image from a fairy
tale, describes the “silver hands” with which organizations endow their mem-
bers. Recruits to professional organizations, Rippin writes, are trained in glossy
but dehumanized ways of speaking and feeling. The work they learn to do “is
silver service done at arm’s length, hygienically, through a polished, highly
wrought intermediary instrument.” In time, many of those so socialized “report
feeling unable to bring their whole selves to work, [and] being obliged to dis-
member or disaggregate themselves, having to suspend feelings, ethics, values
on occasion.” I think our profession has its own version of silver-handedness,
exacerbated by theoretical orthodoxies that suggest we never had a “whole self”
to lose in the first place. Nothing inherently makes the theories that dismiss the
idea of integrated selfhood better than the alternatives; they are just preferred by
this academic community.†
I believe that when a scholar traffics in antihumanist theories for purposes
of professional advancement, his or her private self stands in the doorway, lis-

* Object relations psychoanalysis—not to mention its descendant, relational theory—is just one
perspective that offers a strong alternative to poststructuralism in this regard. It has made some
inroads into contemporary criticism, but its more or less “humanist” feel has kept its status low
in our field.

† For a fine study that, from a clinician’s perspective, weighs the theory of the decentered sub-
ject against competing theories that view self-cohesion as a strength, see the chapter on Lacan
and Winnicott in Jane Flax’s Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the
Contemporary West.

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 L I S a Ru D D I C k

tening in. When it hears things that make it feel unwanted—for example, that
it is a “kantian” or “bourgeois” fantasy—it can go mute. I have spoken with
many young academics who say that their theoretical training has left them be-
numbed. after a few years in the profession, they can hardly locate the part of
themselves that can be moved by a poem or novel. It is as if their souls have gone
into hiding, to await tenure or some other deliverance.
The poststructuralist critique of the self, though associated with progres-
sive politics, has an unobserved, conservative effect on the lived world of the
profession. It protects the institutional status quo by promoting the evacuation
of selves into the group. In the story behind the story, the decentered subject is
the practitioner who internalizes the distaste for the inner life and loses touch
with the subjective reserves that could offset his or her merger with the profes-
sion. What is correspondingly strengthened is the cohesion of the collective.
For our profession, alienated in various ways from the american mainstream,
needs members who will band together. One way to get members to commit to
the group and its ideology is to make them feel ashamed of the varied, private
intuitions and desires that might diversify their interests.

I recently surveyed the last nine years of publication in the

journal ELH: English Literary History to check my sense of the field against
a core sample of contemporary criticism. I chose ELH for review because it is
a distinguished, mainstream academic journal, one that does not have biases
marking it off from the discipline of English as a whole. (as my colleague W. J.
T. Mitchell writes, “ELH has been the gold standard of literary scholarship for as
long as I can remember.”) More, it is a journal I have long admired myself. The
work it selects has a literary-critical delicacy, an erudition, and a relative lack of
cant that make for interesting, often surprising reading. I reasoned that if there
was an ideological problem in English—pervasively—I would find its imprint
even in the best, most flexible (top) journal I could identify. and if I did not find
the problem here, that would be informative as well.
What I found was that within the nine-year span, a small but annually
growing number of articles challenge the high-theoretical pieties, a pattern that
suggests that the much discussed death of theory is not entirely illusory. But if
high theory is dead, it still speaks from the grave, determining which ideas go
without saying and which by contrast require cautious, rigorous defense. as to
the question of selfhood, I found that the work published in ELH largely defers
to the field-honored notion that selfhood and privacy either are illusions or are
actual experiences that reflect a worthless bourgeois ideology. Correspondingly,

6
we find a left-inflected approbation for whatever is collective and anonymous,
sometimes conjoined with a postmodern affinity for what is flat or depthless.
ELH contains many articles—often superb ones—on questions unrelated
to the nature of subjectivity. But where psychological life is concerned, the prem-
ises of high theory still prevail. In the meantime, the occasional article uses the
profession’s skepticism about interiority as a pretext for idealizing interpersonal
violence. In what follows, I can point to these patterns by way of some represen-
tative examples.
In a piece that offers the critique of personhood in stark form, the prose
romances of William Morris are praised for modeling a society devoid of private
property and of individual human personalities. The article suggests that in
Morris’s “grim present”—the actual social world of late Victorian Britain—the
“individual idiosyncrasy” of human beings was “overvalued.” Further, the feel-
ing of “personal identity” enjoyed by the Victorians was a species of “portable
property,” like the other kinds of “private property” enjoyed by “disaggregated
liberal subjects.” Morris’s socialist fiction, by contrast, offers a scheme for a
society whose members would lack a “durable sense of self” and even any “dif-
ferentiation between persons.”
The people in Morris’s alternative world are so interchangeable that none
retains his or her “affinities” for loved ones even for the duration of a trip away
from home. The article calls this lack of human imprinting an “enviable forget-
ting.” Characters kiss and hug “so indiscriminately” that the line differentiating
persons “blurs,” marking the end of “selfish individual desire.” as an account of
Morris’s peculiar social vision, the essay is valid and interesting. But it troubles
me to see Morris’s extreme worldview held up uncritically, and its characters’ de-
personalized condition called “enviable.” We read, further, that Morris’s books
have “the power to persuade readers” that their culture overvalues “cultural
durability, like individual idiosyncrasy,” and that Morris evokes, for those in his
“grim present,” “the hope of a shared vision.”
The dismissal of personal identity as a form of private property is an inheri-
tance from high theory. a similar rhetoric appeared, for example, in an article in
which Fredric Jameson suggested that “bourgeois” individuals experience their
“ego” as “secur[e],” feel they have a “unique personal self,” and believe in “some
unique life or destiny that [one] might claim as a privilege (or indeed as a form
of spiritual or existential private property).” The words “bourgeois,” “privilege,”
and “private property” cast the taint of middle-class entitlement on anyone who
hopes for a stable sense of self. The general academic distaste for the “ego” is

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due partly to the influence of Lacanian theory on this community.* Yet ego
functioning is an essential human capacity, without which no one would be
able to keep a promise or take responsibility for his or her behavior. Too often,
literary criticism conflates this capacity with the illusion of rock-solid selfhood
that modern capitalist societies arguably encourage in their members.
also attributed to an oppressive bourgeois ideology is the human capac-
ity for self-organization and self-regulation. For example, and still within ELH,
we find an article describing how the mid-Victorian “discipline of the nervous
body” encouraged a form of self-regulation based on “modern modes of regu-
latory order, efficiency, and rational self-control.” another piece suggests that
“self-reflecting individuality”—the sense of having a distinctive inner life that
one can reflect on—is a product of the “individualism” promoted by “indus-
trial capitalism [and] middle class enterprise.” and the very sense of having a
self with boundaries—however flexible—appears in ELH largely in its negative
version. For example, bounded selfhood is associated with the “imperious self-
containment” proposed by humanism, or (different article, same paradigm) “the
masculine, self-contained, ‘Western individual.’” Perhaps the most suspect of all
the ideas connected with selfhood is that of “self-cultivation,” which another
article conflates with the kind of personal “development” that creates “upward
mobility” and lands a person “squarely in the professional middle class.”
Yet there is a near silence as to whether there exist any positive, beneficial
forms of self-organization, individuality, inwardness, or self-boundaries. The
stigma of “humanism” has made these ideals look retrograde. Those pieces in
ELH that do speak affirmatively about inwardness tend to take a muted, histori-
cist approach. I think, for example, of a lovely article about the Quaker “inner
light,” which, alas, views the latter as an effect of “early modern masculinity,”
something contemporary academics would hardly identify with. By contrast,
those who think little of interiority can reject this concept outright, with de-
cades of theoretical opinion behind them. They can say, for example, without
spending time defending their views, that “the truth of inner life” is a construct
of “enlightenment thinking about selfhood” and an extension of “humanist”
and “Christian” ideology.
Very occasionally, an article within the nine-year sample does suggest that
differentiated selfhood has something to recommend it. according to an unspo-
ken rule, a scholar can risk entertaining such a humanist idea if he or she is writ-

* For a clarifying analysis of the issues, which attributes the problem not to Lacan but to those
who have misunderstood him, see Joseph H. Smith’s “Ego Psychology and the Language of Lacan:
Transference and affect” in Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought (1990). “Lacan’s work need
not be taken as opposed to ego psychology. His thought is not in contrast to ego psychology but
to defensive ego functioning.”

8
ing about a socially marginal or oppressed group. an example is a thoughtful
article on Wilde that proposes, against the theories of Judith Butler, that there
exists “some perdurable form of selfhood that performative acts can neither
contain nor efface.” More simply, it is valuable to have “a coherent sense of self.”
Because the focus is on Wilde and homoerotic desire, the supposed conserva-
tism of the ideal of self-coherence is offset and the article is viable. On the other
hand, unlike scholarship that dispenses with selfhood, this piece (again) engages
meticulously with opposing opinion.
Our profession’s devaluation of selfhood, passed from one generation to
the next, softens members up for the demands the profession makes on their
own selves. If it is “bourgeois” to care about your identity and your boundaries,
perhaps you might throw your own identity and boundaries on the altar of your
career. I am struck, too, by the fact that current scholarship reflects a strong bias
toward noncommittal sex. Our journals offer scant encouragement either for
communion with oneself or for abiding connection to a partner—both experi-
ences that could offer leverage against the encompassing group.
In the pages of ELH, we read for example that “free love” is a “radical” an-
swer to the monogamy that serves “a capitalist and patriarchal sense of property
and propriety.” Or we find that in the Restoration, “resistance” to the bleak “dis-
ciplinary” regulation of sexuality was found in “egalitarian” public spaces where
“Individual women’s bodies … all blend into one another, ultimately signifying
only a space to divest one’s bodily fluids and slake sexual desire.” In another
piece, we learn that a particular character’s rejection of “jealous, obsessive mo-
nogamy … challenges naïve notions of the endurance or singularity of … love.”
When the focus shifts to attached couples, high marks go to “depersonal-
izing [sexual] intimacies” devoid of “meaningfulness and personal relation.” In
the meantime, there are many negative or skeptical representations of commit-
ted pairs. To select from a myriad illustrations, we read that “abstracted het-
erosocial coupling” is one of the requirements of “a sentimental polity,” and
elsewhere that “Home is, of course, a disciplinary mechanism.” Or we read of
“couplehood’s little platoon,” set within “the defensive provincialism of the
family group.” Or again, within the “the middle-class home” one finds “the
domestic sanctum of bourgeois order.” Correspondingly, the rare articles that
view sustained romantic commitment as offering something positive to at least
some individuals take a defensive tone, acknowledging all the standard critiques
of “bourgeois romantic love.” alternatively, they assume a safely historicist pos-
ture. Milton thinks that “sexual relations touch the soul as well as the body”; but
then again, this idea falls within “the humanist understanding of companionate
marriage.”

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 L I S a Ru D D I C k

Each of the articles just cited has serious value as literary criticism. Yet
when one masses all the work in ELH together, it is clear that our profession—
for purposes of print—has a bias against one-on-one attachment. This attitude
springs, of course, from a perceived need to question the privileging of the mar-
ried couple within modern societies. But one possible real-world outcome of the
steady stream of “depersonalizing intimacies” in our publications is to depress
readers’ faith in the loving attachments that might give them some distance on
their professional identities.
I am aware of possibly sounding like a tub-thumper for monogamy. But
the profession’s cynical attitude toward love is just one small aspect of its drive
to flatten anything (except politics) that might nourish a human being with its
aliveness. Our journals subtly discourage readers from believing that the world
offers them a range of “integral objects”—a term the psychoanalyst Christopher
Bollas uses to describe any entity or experience whose unique form and vitality
enrich our inner world.
To elaborate, our profession often speaks affirmatively of sex when it either
“shatters” a person or violates social norms.* any one lover could presumably be
traded for another, so long as the requisite effects occurred. What is discounted
is the idea of valuing a lover for the one being he or she is, with the inner rich-
ness and consistency that could make for an “integral” relationship. and while I
have focused on the academic devaluation of love, I could as easily have consid-
ered the ways in which current criticism discourages readers from experiencing
poems as integral objects, the ways in which it occludes the author’s mind as
a potential integral object, and the ways in which it discounts the invaluable
human capacity to experience life itself as an integral object.†
The greedy institution has a stake, altogether, in impoverishing its mem-
bers’ object worlds. It promotes a hollowness, which can then be compensated
with the satisfactions of status and affiliation within the group. Perhaps this is a
tendency of all professional life. But when, as has happened in English, the soul-
sapping quality of professional collectives finds an alibi in the anti-individualist
ideology of left postmodernism, we have the conditions for quite a bit of mysti-
fication and malaise.

* See for example Leo Bersani’s influential “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in October (Winter 1987).
Within ELH, see for example anahid Nersessian, “Radical Love and the Political Romance: Shel-
ley after the Jacobin Novel, ” which relies on Jean-Luc Nancy’s “account of love as an experience
of being shattered.”

† On the capacity to experience life as an integral object, see Christopher Bollas’s Cracking Up:
The Work of Unconscious Experience.

10
 Finally, a small subset of work in ELH glamorizes cruelty in the name of
radical politics, though this motif abates after 2006, perhaps because of a change
in editorial leadership. The piece I find most troubling is an article on a short
story by Henry James. This article proposes that if one faces a choice between
having sex with children and protecting them, “perhaps one should let oneself
desire the child, and—relinquishing the gratifications of protection—let the
child die.” Sexually precocious children should “perhaps” be allowed a death of
“innocence” that will supplant the pleasures of childhood with “other pleasures”
delivered by adult lovers. James’s short story supposedly conveys this moral. But
the lesson is said to apply in real life as well, wherever adults might be tempted to
issue “calls for the protection of children.” The story is said to reveal “the dire re-
sults of protecting children from desire”—anywhere. For today’s anti-pedophile
perpetrates the “potential violence” of “speaking on [children’s] behalf.”
There is a place in academe for scholarship that responsibly weighs the
benefits and costs to children of sex with adults. But the present piece offers
no empirical findings. Instead, it manipulates postmodern commonplaces to
argue that people who try to shield children from “the depredations of influ-
ence and seduction” are imputing to children boundaries that they do not have.
Children cannot be “corrupted” sexually because no child has a core of selfhood
that has not already been thoroughly penetrated or “influenced” by society and
language. We are asked to acknowledge “selves’ constitutive corruption.” For
the mere phenomenon of influence is apparently so destabilizing that it “throws
into question the attribution—particularly to oneself—of substantive depths, of
‘inner’ selves or meaning behind appearances.” a haze of familiar antihumanist
abstractions thus eases in the practical conclusion as to the pointlessness of
trying to protect children’s “‘inner’ selves” from violation.
One wonders who really believes in this kind of thinking. (and I would
hardly assume that the author himself inhabits, for purposes of real life, the val-
ues here expressed.) But when the author’s book-length treatment of the same
ideas appeared, even more explicit in its brief against the criminalization of
pedophilia, colleagues did not criticize it in print. The book was evidently a hot
potato, as it went virtually untouched by reviewers, pro or con. What would be
so bad about saying that something is wrong here?

f ar afIeld of the academic humanities, I have come across references

to a human capacity called the inner teacher. Maria Montessori built her
educational theory on the belief that instructors must “give priority to the inner
teacher who animated” the child. Tibetan Buddhists refer to wisdom as an inner
teacher that sits at our hearts. Recently the psychoanalyst Donald Carveth has

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offered a rich theoretical account of a mental structure he calls conscience, a

“still small voice” (distinct from the punitive superego) that represents the moral
center of the personality. But if the inner teacher exists, it appears in our own
profession’s discourse largely in the aspect of its ignominious doubles, such as
bourgeois common sense and kantian reason.* I believe that under such condi-
tions, the faculty of moral discernment gets weakened through a sheer lack of
affirmation. When people encounter vicious ideas veiled in political radicalism,
they start subordinating their inner teacher to an inner censor that tells them
how “conservative” and “moralistic” they will look if they protest.†
Yet in closing, I want to acknowledge the very occasional article in ELH
that does argue for an ethical faculty belonging to the private self. In particu-
lar, a beautiful piece on the fiction of Samuel Richardson, published in 2012,
is perhaps—if one can read small signs—indicative of a growing conceptual
freedom. This article makes a circuit through the theories of Hannah arendt
to validate the subjective domain that Richardson calls the heart. This is the seat
of conscience, a place of private judgment and self-reflection that is meaning-
fully autonomous, though formed in intercourse with others. The article, true
to pattern, dutifully engages with opposing postmodern opinion, according to
which its own arguments could be criticized as embodiments of “the humanist
sublime.” Nonetheless this is a daring, interesting piece of scholarship, whose
publication is cheering. In advising our own students, we would do well to en-
courage more work like this, which does not see the threat of being called a
humanist as a reason not to press forward conceptually.
I sometimes think that many academics of my own boomer generation,
awakened as young people to the greed and violence of modern society, reacted
as monks do who flee to the cloister to purge themselves of all that the world
cherishes. If the capitalists valued aesthetic pleasure, we academics would take
no pleasure in the beauty of the books we taught. If those in power used moral-
ity as a pretext for spreading social stigma, we would renounce the idea of the
inner teacher. If the same people cherished home and family above the larger
community, we would spurn home and family. The deprivation of inwardness
that I have just noted in the pages of one of our journals is due partly to a
poignant asceticism.
But life moves fast in academe. We do not teach our recruits any of the con-
templative practices that might help them to keep their self-compassion intact in
the face of such an abasement of self. under such conditions, the asceticism of

* For a brilliant defense, however, of what goes by the name of kantian reason, see John Brenk-
man’s “Extreme Criticism” in Critical Inquiry (1999).

† I owe the idea of an inner censor to a conversation with angelika Bammer.

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 academia has become twisted and mean. The revulsion against human evil has
devolved into a name-calling that rules out much of what makes life meaningful.
at the same time, our finest inner promptings come under discursive attack as
something we should be embarrassed to own. I imagine that some of the schol-
ars who turn up in Gina Hiatt’s practice with writer’s block are people who have
been unable to sustain themselves in such a punishing environment.
The only way now to replenish academic discourse is through innumerable
tiny acts of courage in which people say the uncool things, as the last scholar
cited above does. It will doubtless feel uncomfortable to do so. But the next big
thing in theory, whatever it may be, is not going to cleanse the fear out of this
environment. I believe we have to face it down ourselves.

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