• 1 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 5.

3Today’s postcritical spirit has undoubtedly complicated our picture of these mechanisms. Rita Felski, a major proponent of postcritical approaches in humanities today, asks, “Why is it that critics are so quick off the mark to interrogate, unmask, expose, subvert, unravel, demystify, destabilize, take issue, and take umbrage?”1 Yet this question ought less to be posed to the critical theorists, as Felski does, than to the widespread swift reactions that dominate today’s postcritical media discourses, especially, though not exclusively, in social media. Paradoxically, this critique of critical theory as over-suspicious, paranoid, condescending, and patriarchal provided an alibi for the practice of hastily (without much hermeneutic effort) outing content that is racist, sexist, homophobic, or classist, in both the public discourse and works of art. Yet this is not the practice attacked by postcritics – it seems they rather shield it as an act of compassion, securing the gains of emancipation by eliminating discourses and representations that threaten it. These automatic critical impulses indicate that the gains of critical theory have been less undermined by postcritique than, firstly, they have been normativized, and secondly, they have entered a phase of hegemonic discourse. Felski and Elizabeth S. Anker present a fairly simplified overview of critical discourse methods in the introduction to Critique and Postcritique, as mainly based on strategies of suspecting, self-reflexive discourses, and meta-perspectives. As such, they are devoid of all that is considered the virtues of postcritique: ethical care, diverse forms of affect, civic engagement, a spirit of affirmation and speculative invention.

• 2 Sara Ahmed, “Open Forum Imaginary Prohibitions: Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures o (...)

4Sara Ahmed has called this phenomenon of conveniently positioning an opponent in order to strengthen one’s own position “inflationary logic.”2 She critiques contemporary strands of materialist feminism for similarly simplifying and misrepresenting the accomplishments of historical feminism as solely focused on cultural content, bypassing the biological and material aspects. Ahmed hazards a comparison with those who argue that telling racist jokes proves freedom of speech. These people situate themselves in minority positions, trying to grapple with what they believe is the dominant discourse of political correctness. The scholar finds a similar logic in ways of reading the history of feminism as a sphere to prohibit speech about biology, only to elevate the status of current projects that take a biological perspective into account. According to Ahmed, inflation is a power reserved for those who establish prohibitions. The more powerful the old prohibition, the greater the contribution of those now breaking it.

• 4 Jacques Rancière, Estetyka jako polityka [Aesthetics as politics], trans. Paweł Mościcki and Julian (...)
• 5 Jakub Dąbrowski and Anna Demenko, Cenzura w sztuce polskiej po 1989 roku. Aspekty prawne [Censorshi (...)

7It is a truism that aesthetic values are increasingly seen as a weak basis for defining and evaluating art. Even the appreciation of aesthetics in socially engaged art by Jacques Rancière or Claire Bishop hinges on political efficacy.4 The radical critique of the autonomy of art vis-à-vis other spheres of public life has become dogma within progressive art discourse. We might add that the autonomy of art is also often now perceived as a premise for legitimizing violence within art institutions, associated with a critiqued modernist model and the artist’s position of power. The myth of the autonomy of art might also be included in the inflationary logic cited above – it would be hard to call works of modernist art a domain of impunity. On the contrary, they are full of cases of censorship, penalization and exclusion. Jakub Dąbrowski and Anna Demenko have dispelled this myth, writing that “art or artistic activity in its broadest sense are not circumstances that preclude guilt,”5 while the counter-proposition that art is a circumstance that relieves one of culpability strikes at the principle of civil equality.

• 6 Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. To (...)
• 7 Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History, 255.

10The concept of emancipation, if subjected to critique, leads us to a range of contradictions and self-negations. It has its own history, encapsulated by Reinhart Koselleck in his article “The Limits of Emancipation.” Above all, we need to stress that at its source (Roman law) the verb “to emancipate” did not have a reflexive form – it was an empowered subject’s way of acting to free another subject, their subordinate, from dependency. Self-emancipation was not possible. Change only came, Koselleck says, in the Enlightenment. But Immanuel Kant, aware of the meaning of “emancipation” in Roman law, did not use it when writing about Enlightenment. To his mind, emancipation meant a state of dependency on a position of subordination, more than the possibility of the subjugated subject changing that state. Thus, instead of emancipation, Kant wrote of “a man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,” adding that people “nonetheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity.”6 From this point of view, the obstacle to emancipation processes is not only those who wield the power, but also those subject to it. Koselleck traces the semantic process by which the term “emancipation” lost its strictly legal meaning and gained the “status and force of a catchword, one that admittedly presupposed or evoked a minimal consensus about the equal rights of all human beings.”7

• 8 Wendy Brown, “Wounded Attachments,” Political Theory 21 (3) (1993): 390–410.

11An interesting unfolding of Kant’s critique came two centuries later, in critical examinations of the topic of emancipation, born from within emancipatory movements that were already ripe. A highly apt formula for describing the basic contradictions of emancipatory practices was put forward by Wendy Brown in the early 1990s in “Wounded Attachments.”8 In creating this concept, Brown revitalized a Nietzschean critique of ressentiment in the spirit of a radical left-wing critique. Her ideas were picked up later by Lauren Berlant, as well as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri:

• 10 Peggy Phelan, “Tim Miller’s My Queer Body: An Anatomy in Six Sections,” Theater 24 (1993): 30.

12From this standpoint, the emancipating subject is not interested in closing the emancipation process, as this would mean losing the basis for their political claims that come with their position of imposed subjugation. Emancipation, which ought to liberate from dependency, and thus from one’s prior identity, becomes a tool for reinforcing identity. On the one hand, identity becomes a basis for empowering groups against systemic abuse; on the other, it leads to conflicts between emancipating subjects. For instance: the tensions between Jews and Blacks in American society are well covered, while the history of ideological struggles between the feminist and gay movements also goes way back. As a prime example, let us take Peggy Phelan’s harsh critique of My Queer Body by gay performer Tim Miller, an artist fiercely attacked by the right-wing media in the USA and subject to economic censorship. Phelan saw Miller’s performance, exposing his naked male body, as within the realm of phallocentric patriarchal cultural practices, denying his right to represent queer culture: “Tim Miller is not a lesbian. Nor is he a woman. (Or at least not in public.) As far as I know, he is not a transsexual or a hermaphrodite. The body performed and displayed in Miller’s My Queer Body is what would have been formerly called a young-white-gay-man’s body.”10 We can also refer to postcolonial studies for examples. Caliban – a symbolic icon of decolonizing struggles – is a rapist in Shakespeare’s drama, who sees the rape of a white woman as an act of rebellion against his captivity by the whites. In Amiri Baraka’s famous play Dutchman, the roles are reversed: in a New York subway, it is a white woman who stoops to violence against a random Black man. And the radical queer theatre of Jack Smith, based on Hollywood depictions of exotic Asian worlds, was suspected of perpetuating colonial clichés. We could go on listing examples of this sort of collision in the ideological, political and symbolic spheres, between various emancipatory movements.

• 12 Ibid., 356.
• 13 Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, trans. Laurent Boyer (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 47.
• 14 Ibid., 46.

15Hardt and Negri draw from Jean Genet’s last book, Prisoner of Love, an autobiographical tale of the author’s stay among America’s Black Panthers and in Palestinian fighter camps. They write that Genet was “captivated by the ‘style’ of these groups, by which he meant their invention of new forms of life, their common practices and behaviors, as well as their original set of gestures and affects.”12 Genet stressed that the Black Panthers’ arguments were not “drawn from the common fund of American democracy,”13 that this movement was driven by the dynamic of brutal phantasms, not a desire to negotiate a shared normative space: “what separates us from the Blacks today is not so much the colour of our skin or the type of our hair as the phantom-ridden psyche we never see.”14 Genet does not, therefore, advocate creating a utopian space for the harmonious connection of various emancipatory claims; he stresses difference as a challenge for projects of political change.

• 15 Wolfgang Iser, “Representation: A Performative Act,” in The Aims of Representation, ed. Murray Krie (...)

16Now let us turn to another concept – representation. This word is now quite distinct from one once taken for a synonym: mimesis. This matter was discussed in detail during Wolfgang Iser’s famous series of seminars on the issue of representation organized at the University of California, Irvine in 1983–84. Iser called attention to the fact that the term “representation” was semantically overloaded (Koselleck wrote about emancipation in a similar spirit). Representation, Iser posits, with reference to the German word Darstellung, is a kind of staging, an enactment, a performance, and not, like mimesis, a picture of something, a description of a state of things, an imitation of reality. The stress falls on the performative aspect of representation, which creates reality, rather than replicating it. Performativity is understood here, however, as a constant and inevitably unsuccessful effort to collapse the differences between the object of representation and the very process of portrayal. The result is deformity, a disruption of meanings, an “eventful disorder,” a network of links “evoking and simultaneously deforming extratextual fields of reference.” Thus understood, the act of representation forces the audience to suspend their “natural attitude to the thing represented,”15 recognizing the aesthetic dimension of representation. The world as an aside may resemble the world, but at the same time it is a world that has empirically never existed. The performativity Iser describes in no way recalls its simplified concept; it presupposes collapsing this duality, disrupting our everyday approach to the things depicted outside the frame of the performance.

• 16 Michał Paweł Markowski, “O reprezentacji” [About representation], in Kulturowa teoria literatury. G (...)
• 17 Robert Weimann, “History, Appropriation, and the Uses of Representation in Modern Narrative,” in Th (...)

17Outlining Iser’s concept, Michał Paweł Markowski writes that the basic task of representation is “convincing us of its importance.”16 Robert Weimann, who also participated in this seminar series, saw the contradiction between the established order and the performative one as a fundamental source of the crisis of representation in modernity, manifesting itself in increasing efforts to make the audience believe that what is being performed also has a constative value.17 Weimann calls this phenomenon a culture of useful illusions, seeking to legitimize our performances. The modernist concept of art as domains of autonomy and aesthetics was less a way of resolving these contradictions than of avoiding them. Thus conceived, art, Weimann suggests, frees itself and its audiences from the duty of representation. Representations devoid of aesthetic value become bearers of unambivalent and self-exposing ideological content.

• 18 LaCapra, “Criticism Today,” in The Aims of Representation, 235–36.

18Another participant in the Irvine seminars, Dominick LaCapra, notes that the crisis of Marxism as a critical theory was chiefly tied to three issues. First: making the proletariat the force bringing salvation to history (a temptation of all collective subjects of emancipation). Second: the shift of the Marxist critique toward positivism. Third: putting the stress on the exchange value and the functional value of the representation.18 LaCapra suggests that an excessive critique of fetishism leads to leveling all representations, which then always reveal the same thing – how the system of oppression operates. The fetishism introduces an added symbolic value, however, that points to something else – something that was missed in the representation, which is not representative or harms representativeness. The concept of representation in psychoanalysis had a similar critical value – the representations available to the consciousness are, according to Freud, partial and distorted, often fetishistic, formed more from what they omit than what they include.

• 19 Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ (...)

19Queer theory gives us the most cogent warnings against excessive positivist and affirmative practices of representation, which emerge under the pressure of group emancipatory aspirations. Heather Love praises “backwardness,” which, read in our day, full of progressive and reparative practices in art, seems quite bold. Writing on lesbian literature, she defends dark representations and destructive and anti-communal emotions. In the midst of the praise, she formulates this view: “camp, for instance, with its tender concern for outmoded elements of popular culture and its refusal to get over childhood pleasures and traumas, is a backward art.”19 Heather Love stresses that her book on backward feelings owes a great deal to a long tradition of queer negativeness, such as Lee Edelman’s No Future or the works of Leo Bersani. José Esteban Muñoz, in turn, creates a queer concept of disidentification, which shatters the moral categories of “good” and “bad” representations:

• 21 Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 201 (...)

21In Freud’s concept, every mental representation is ruled by two processes at once: primary and secondary. The former is based on a constant inflow of energy, images and meanings, taking the shortest path to “hallucinatory reproduction of those ideas upon which the original experience of satisfaction has conferred a special value.” The latter process pertains to functions like “attention, judgement, memory, the replacement of motor discharge by an action aimed at an appropriate transformation of reality.”21 There is no representation without censorship, says Freud. Censorship creates its dynamic and complexity. Our task, however, is to discover the covert activity of the censoring mechanisms which, above all, conceal themselves from sight.

• 22 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or: You’re So Paranoid You Probabl (...)

23Contemporary postcritical theory keeps its distance from these psychoanalytical traditions. The concept of censorship and dynamics of unconscious processes affecting the shape of representation has been attacked and undermined as part of a phenomenon to which Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick attached the lethal moniker “paranoid criticism.”22 One would have to be paranoid to suspect that a good representation is perhaps not good. Yet Freud often behaved this way. Here, I believe, is the reason why the concept of censorship has been cut from liberal/leftist self-critical discourse. The limit of reality is set by the appointed guardians, after all. Performances involved in the emancipatory process, trusting only the mechanisms of the secondary process, are forever recreating this boundary and will not let it be crossed. On the other hand, they offer their audiences a utopia of normative dimensions and protection from destructive phantasms. Discarding the category of censorship as a self-critical tool causes moralizing, idealistic, programmatic and authoritarian standpoints to be inflated in its judicature.

• 23 David Barnett, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the German Theatre (New York: Cambridge University Pres (...)
• 24 Judith Butler, “Ethical Ambivalence,” in The Turn to Ethics, ed. Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen (...)

24To conclude, in place of a summary, a few remarks on Rainer Werner Fassbinder. I once, in the 2021/22 academic year, explored his work during a dramaturgy seminar at Krakow’s Academy of Theatre Arts, no doubt as a form of ideological sabotage and as an invitation to disarm today’s dogmatized fields of artistic practice within the theatre. The film director, who emerged in the German counterculture movement, experienced various attempts to censor his work. The most famous event was the aborted Frankfurt premiere of his play Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod under his direction in 1975. Fassbinder was accused of antisemitism at the time. A character in the drama is called the Rich Jew, and is indeed a rich Jew, earning on investments leading to the gentrification of various districts of Frankfurt. Many antisemitic remarks in the play are aimed at him: “I’d sleep better if he was gassed,” “he drinks our blood,” “he sucks everything out of us.” It is hard to describe the extent of the media storm Fassbinder created with his attempt to stage the play. It was claimed that the author had crossed every line, that he was perpetuating racial stereotypes, spitting in the faces of Holocaust victims. The chorus of disapproval was mighty and unanimous – it crossed the whole political spectrum of Germany at the time, from left to right. Yet no one analyzed the play particularly carefully. No one asked who was making the antisemitic statements, nor what politics were behind the events in the drama. It was not conceived that Fassbinder was exposing the covert antisemitism of Germany’s respected citizens. The participation of Jewish businessmen in the project to rebuild Frankfurt was a fact, but behind it was cynical calculation by the local government: If they involved them in the investment, it was believed no one would dare to reveal the corrupt relations between the politicians and the businessmen, fearing accusations of antisemitism, which could only mean civil death in Germany at the time. Fassbinder dragged the biggest secret of post-war West German life into the light of day, with all the dissonance between the official anti-antisemitism and privately acknowledged antisemitism.23 Attempts were made to disarm his radical political provocation, unprecedented in the German theatre of the time, with accusations of regurgitating antisemitic cliches. The Fassbinder case illustrates perfectly how a critique of representation from the tool of emancipation can easily transform into an instrument of censorship in the hands of conservative and reactionary forces and how the ideologies of emancipation, foregrounding moral concerns, are helpless against more complex mechanisms in political life. Judith Butler pointed this out, writing that a “return to ethics” often means an escape from politics.24 Fassbinder was conscious of drawing from antisemitic cliches, but he also knew that the anxieties about them that were key to a public existence were cynically exploited in a political game raking in huge economic profits. The disgust dished that Fassbinder’s play encountered made it impossible to perform it in German theatres even a decade later, in the mid-1980s.

• 25 Al LaValley, “The Gay Liberation of Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Male Subjectivity, Male Bodies, Male (...)
• 26 Ibid., 110.

25Yet it was not only this play that caused Fassbinder to come under attack. His work probing the consciousness of the German society – bold, uncompromising, artistically innovative – was accused of misogyny, homophobia, racism, and glorifying violence. The “negative” representations that staged resistance against the collective “positive” liberation ideologies were hard to digest. The list of incriminated works is long. I will mention only one – The Law of the Strongest. This film portrays a wealthy homosexual community who cause the downfall of a young boy from a working-class background, also gay, having relieved him of his lottery winnings. We need not think hard to imagine the accusations that were made here. Firstly, perpetuating social stereotypes of rich and immoral middle-class gays that harmed the cause of emancipation; and secondly, the film’s refusal to portray the discrimination against homosexuals that was rife in Germany at the time. This critique was based on criteria developed in the gay liberation movement, which was by then already becoming an institution. The famous film critic Al LaValley stepped up to defend Fassbinder, without obscuring the fact that his films were a form of conscious resistance against certain aspects of the gay liberation movement. Yet he did stress one point: Fassbinder appeared in his own films as a gay man, often nude, in intimate scenes with his lover, as a radical kind of artistic coming out – an unprecedented move at the time. By presenting the lives of gay men as evident and real without stressing their suffering, LaValley believed the director was effectively striking out at bourgeois morality and homophobia. And most importantly, Fassbinder did not hide the brutal phantasms a gay life can hold. His films, LaValley writes, “perform an act of resistance and utopian questing, but they also explore the often troubled world of gay desire and relationships, masochism and conflicting emotions, the persistence of patriarchal patterns and loss of power, domination and submission, separation and mourning.”25 He also recalls that the large Fassbinder exhibition in Berlin in 1992 tried to whitewash the gay content from his films, thus removing “an essential and radical component from his work.”26 This kind of censorship, also extending to the artist’s biography, was, LaValley thought, a condition for reintroducing Fassbinder’s work into public circulation after the unification of Germany. This is another example of the ties between an emancipatory critique of representation and institutional acts of censorship.

• 27 Ibid., 112.
• 28 Ibid., 112.

26LaValley stressed that the utopian aspects of Fassbinder’s work can be found outside the “negative narrative trajectories.”27 He joined Thomas Elsaesser in stating that “what counts most in Fassbinder is not narrative solution but identification, the relationship of the filmmaker to his material and his and our identification with the characters.”28 LaValley points to new ways of reading Fassbinder’s work from a queer perspective that focuses not on negativity, but on seeking solutions through acceptance of the masochism that is the libidinal drive of his films. The key is what breaks out of the narrative to support the powerful presence of bodies. It is worth recalling LaCapra’s arguments here about the necessity of protecting fetishism to resist the dominant exchange and functional values governing what representations get circulated in culture.