Critique has been central to feminist and queer engagements with politics and culture. Nonetheless, in the wake of post-critical turn, proposed by Felski, Sedgwick, and others, the very notion of critique has become associated with “a hermeneutics of suspicion,” which has “run out of steam.” This paper questions, however, whether hermeneutics of suspicion or a “paranoid reading” can reflect diverse feminist critical practices. To reconstruct a more capacious archive of feminist critique, I propose to reread Melanie Klein through the lens of feminist queer studies. I argue that Klein enables us to construct an alternative version of critique, which embraces methodologically heterogeneous elements of thought and imagination, play and pain, phantasy and a fragile co-creation of meaning. Rather than suspicion, such concern with the creation of a more meaningful life, for oneself and others, and the contestation of injustice in the world is at the core of different genres of feminist critique.

Ewa Plonowska Ziarek is Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature, an affiliate faculty of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Founding Director of the UB Humanities Institute. She is also a Senior Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor of Continental Philosophy, at the College of Fellows at Western Sydney University, Australia, and, since 2007, a Visiting Faculty in the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, University of Maine. In January 2016, she was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Philosophy Degree from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, University of Maine.

Her interdisciplinary research interests include feminist political theory, modernism, continental philosophy, ethics, and critical theory. She is the author of Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism (Columbia UP, Fall 2012); An Ethics of Dissensus: Feminism, Postmodernity, and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford 2001); The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism (SUNY, 1995); the editor of Gombrowicz’s Grimaces: Modernism, Gender, Nationality, (SUNY, 1998); and the co-editor of Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis (SUNY 2005) and Time for the Humanities: Praxis and the Limits of Autonomy (Fordham UP 2008) and Intermedialities: Philosophy, Art, Politics (Rowman &Littlefield 2010). She has published numerous articles on Kristeva, Irigaray, Derrida, Agamben, Foucault, Levinas, Fanon, feminist theory and literary modernism. Her work has been translated into Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, French, Polish, and Rumanian. Recently she has co-authored with Ros Diprose a book devoted to Hannah Arendt, Biopolitics of Natality (forthcoming).