299 Critique and Its Explosions JEFFREY GALBRAITH I n The Limits of Critique, defnition is liberating. Early in the book, Rita Felski frames her efforts to rescue scholarship from the constraints of skeptical interpretation by redefning her central term. If the tradition of critique that emerges from Kant and Marx has monopolized the norms of interpretation, Felski argues for “redescribing critique as a hermeneutics of suspicion.” 1 This act of redescription, she explains, “downgrades [critique’s] specialness by linking it to a larger history of suspicious interpretation.” 2 For Felski, critique is best understood as an affective stance, a particular orientation to the world, with manifestations ranging from skepticism to paranoia. She opts to “redescribe rather than refute” critique in this way, on the assumption that mounting a critique of critique would merely intensify its normative grip. Redescribing the sense of the word, by contrast, provides an opportunity “to gaze at [critique] from several different angles, to capture something of the seductive shimmer and feel of a certain sensibility.” 3 Felski’s move to destabilize is effective though not unfamiliar. The appeal to redescription recalls a common rhetorical strategy in the literature of Restoration and early eighteenth-century controversy, which wrangled over the meaning of hot-button words such as obedience and resistance. 4 To understand what The Limits of Critique offers eighteenth-century scholars, it is worth exploring this point of connection with Felski’s argument through a brief look at the verb to explode. To explode refers to the action of rejecting or exposing an argument. The term provides insight into the “moods and metaphors” of Restoration