Critica e Seduzione

A review of Rita Felski’s recent book, Hooked: Art and Attachment (The University of Chicago Press, 2020, pp. 199). Felski is a leading voice in the current debate on “postcritique” in the Anglophone world and this review is an attempt to draw out some points of contact between postcritique and the phenomenon of Italian Theory or, as some prefer to call it, Italian Thought. Discussion focuses on Felski’s argument for a rethinking of critical method as it was handed down with poststructuralism and especially as applied in the field of literary modernism with the aim of responding to the current crisis in the Humanities. I show that Felski shares with Italian Thought a refusal of dichotomies and of an epistemological model that tends to privileges the analytical plane too often disregarding the affective plane. However, while Felski’s attachment theory is propelled by a residual oppositional stance against institutional settings, Italian Thought (especially Roberto Esposito’s work) invites a revision of the notion of institution and our relation to that notion in the direction of renewal rather than againstness.