You’ve Heard This One Before

The rhetoric of harm is just that—a rhetoric. It does not really divide the world into victims and perpetrators of harm, either literally or metaphorically. Where is its army, its police? No, a rhetoric only tries to impose its categories on the world, and that—the failure of language to manifest what it names—is what deserves our critical attentio

Sedgwick, whose famous essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” proposed that academic critics should soften the defensive urge to pin their objects down in favor of a slower, open-minded willingness to “confer plenitude” on them.

I’ll tell you a secret: I am generally in favor of the artistic freedom to provoke and offend, except when I am not. I am generally opposed to the censorship of troubling or controversial speech, except for when I am not. How do I quarter that orange? Well, I exercise judgment, or at least I try to—which is to say, I gather the indeterminacy of a t