Flat condemnation of all institutions aggrandizes the critic and abandons critiquing itself

Evidence

A vision that paints every human formation since the beginning of Western inscription with the same condemnatory brush can have as its only outcome the aggrandizing of the critic. In perpetrating these indistinctions, criticism forswears its task of cutting, instead rhapsodizing dismantling when it could be honing the mantle of emancipatory structuration. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 311

Categorization

• XREF: Same logic as Kornbluh’s insistence that mediation and form are politically necessary — the ‘task of cutting’ is the function of theory she defends against her Antitheory interlocutors.
• SEED: Angle: ‘Criticism as cutting’ — making the knife the governing metaphor for what theory does, against flat nihilistic negation.