Sublime

Criticism is crucial, but pessimism – “a tendency to see the worst aspect of things or believe that the worst will happen; a lack of hope or confidence in the future” – is actively harmful on both individual and societal levels.

For all its good intentions, art that tries to minister to its audience by showcasing moral aspirants and paragons or the abject victims of political oppression produces smug, tiresome works that are failures both as art and as agitprop. Artists and critics—their laurel bearers—should take heed.

A principle that progressives approve of is frequently followed by positive exclamations like “This isn’t hard!,” whereas a bad principle is “silly” or “simplistic.” Radical ideas are “innovative” when they pass muster but “crackpot” or “paranoid” when they don’t. Similarly, if ideas are simply being used as postulates for further analysis, they’re

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As the critic Saba Mahmood says: “To critique a particular normative regime is not to reject or condemn it; rather, by analyzing its regulatory and productive dimensions, one only deprives it of innocence and neutrality so as to craft, perhaps, a different future.”