ABSTRACT
In this paper, I propose a specific relation between criticism in modernity and the formulation of the emergent nation-state. The argument is that criticism as we know it depends upon an attitude which is, tacitly, nationalist in fact and origin. Further, the political nationalism in question is profoundly allied to an aesthetic or cultural theory whose determinant formation is that of tragedy, and specifically that aspect of tragedy usually identified in the concept of terror. The consequence for criticism and theory, ignoring its own topographical locatedness and its own debts to a tragic consciousness, is the occlusion of the object of criticism in the interests of the production of what is fundamentally (if silently) a nationalist identity for the subject, the critic herself or himself.
