What was Then, This is Now: Writing and Teaching in the 1990s

We can no longer assume that what we are in our present, in our actuality, is given to us either through tradition or through transcendence of our capacities of our faculties with respect to tradition. (Michel Foucault¹). I can't help thinking of a critic who would not try to judge, but bring into existence a work, a book, a phrase, an idea. He would light the fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, snatch the passing dregs in order to scatter them. He would multiply, not the number of judgements, but the signs of existence; he would call out to them, he would draw them from their sleep. Would he sometimes invent them? So much the better. The sententious critics puts me to sleep. I would prefer a critic of imaginative scintillations. He would not be sovereign, nor dressed in red. He would bear the lightning flashes of possible storms. (Michel Foucault¹).