The Task of the Critic
Poetics, Philosophy, Religion
This book can be opened with
Today’s critic must be something of a philosopher as well as a poet. Yet her work
remains above all that of the close reader, and the emergence of the values
embodied by the close reader to stand alongside those of the philosopher and
the poet may be one of the most significant intellectual developments to emerge
in the post–World War II years.
This book analyzes the language poets, Deleuze and Guattari, and above all
Benjamin and Derrida, to trace the various dimensions of the task of the critic.
It concludes with a major chapter on the significance of Derrida’s recent work
for the conceptualization of religion, and with an Afterword examining the
role of the Romantic discourse of the fragment in the archeology of all these
discursive strands.
The task of the critic, now invited to pass through the discourses of
philosophy, poetry, and religion beyond that of close reading, has never
been harder—nor have we ever been more in need of it.
...Sussman's book is a performance—a brilliantly performed work of criticism...
“What sets Sussman’s work off . . . is a remarkable warmth, generosity, openness,
and hopefulness. . . . along with what I can only call an ethical or even religious
earnestness. . . . I view the final chapter as a major contribution to Derrida
scholarship and to scholarship on the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam, as Derrida has ‘read’ them.”