Emotional and verifiable truths are not strictly separate in social life. However, the assumed division of labour between the social sciences and the humanities, the idea that one deals with real life and the other only with the representations of that life, makes recognising this crossover challenging. As detailed in the previous chapter, several recent proposals have attempted to address this disjuncture. Though far from alleviating political contestation around what forms of truth-telling will be accepted, these academic eff orts are equally fraught with questions about whether a truth should be verifiable or emotionally resonant, whether a story is best told through critical or creative genres and who has the right to decide how the boundaries between these forms will be drawn.

The ‘critique of critique’ is one such proposal. Like ‘surface reading,’ this movement positions itself as an answer to the ‘recent calls for alternatives to critical hermeneutics’ and the perceived need to ‘suspend routine […] habits of paranoia and suspicion’ (Love 2010: 387). Setting affect theory as the antidote to critical analysis, pitting ontology against epistemology and lived experience against bookish knowledge, the critique of critique settles squarely within both old and new debates about truth and genre. However, as this chapter will illustrate, rather than challenging the terms by which this debate has been waged, the hierarchy drawn between critical and ‘new’ methods maintains a division between emotional or verifiable truths, or facts and values. In the turn from critique, facts are still divided into those that are felt and those that are foundational. The reproduction of this structure troubles scholars’ eff orts to engage with the complexities of how people account for and verify their lives, often in ways that do not conform to such a binary.

To consider how we might keep the question of evidence open while also acknowledging the challenges of method's social context, this chapter traces two proposals frequently cited as influential for the turn from critique toward affect theory and/or alternative methods. These are Bruno Latour's ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’ (2004) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's ‘You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Introduction is About You: Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’ (1997).