Critics should honor the intellectual tradition they are surpassing.

Evidence

In relation to the question of Cultural Studies, what is perhaps most striking is that Stuart is at pains here to recognize the significance of his own oblique debt not just to literary studies in general but specifically to the work of F. R. Leavis and what he calls the “moral seriousness of … [the] … attention to culture” at the heart of Leavis’s work. Later in the interview, in a different context, he talks of his intellectual concern to “always honour the moment that I am trying to surpass,” and this is an exemplary instance of his practice in this respect. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 898

Categorization

• APHORISMS: ‘Always honour the moment that I am trying to surpass’ reads as durable intellectual method advice: acknowledgement of debt precedes critique.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does this honoring-of-predecessors practice compare with the way postcolonial critics handle their own debts to Orientalist scholarship? Is acknowledgment itself an anti-othering gesture?