What happens when you try to critique a paradox by using a paradox? This is the mesmerizingly encyclopedic project of Elizabeth Anker’s On Paradox. Reading her book is like entering a haunted hall of mirrors: You get sudden insights down infinite hallways, deep into some tangle of theology, aesthetics, and politics—you run after them, and then you turn around to find them right behind you. Paradoxes are weirdly charismatic and slippery in this book: They are not mere figures of speech but rather powerful spirits that simultaneously connect, mystify, reveal, and paralyze. When you try to critique them, they turn against you, like magic spells that undo their enchanter.

Here’s another analogy: Reading this book feels like a psychoanalytic self-analysis in which the 21st century tries to work through the most high-theoretical tools inherited from the 20th: Frankfurt School culture critique, deconstruction, the ontology of political oppression. Which of them are still useful in an age when violent reaction no longer needs to hide behind democratic norms? Which have become false gods? How can we work through this legacy while still acknowledging that the figure of paradox actually helps us understand most of theology, half of aesthetics, and a good quarter of political theory? And, more practically, which are actively blocking political action?

I see On Paradox as part of a larger “touch grass” moment in contemporary cultural theory that combines a genuine commitment to the work of abstraction with a critique of the contemporary tendency to political doomerism. Anker’s work resonates interestingly with two other recent works of theoretical iconoclasm: Caroline Levine’s The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton, 2023) and Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy or, The Style of Too-Late Capitalism (Verso, 2024). Of course, these books are also very different from each other: While Levine’s includes a sensible “workbook” at the end to prepare oneself for climate activism, Kornbluh’s is a broad attack on the neoliberal romance of “flow” that targets everything from on-demand streaming video to self-centered autotheory. But they share a generally collectivist politics and a suspicion of excessive theoretical romanticism.

On some level, all three ask whether theory can be not just true, but also responsible to something beyond itself. They query whether theory can envision progress without getting paralyzed by the possibility of leaving something out, or by imagining every open present moment as leading to the worst-case scenario. They ask the reader not to linger in the moment of the most radiant irresolution, but, rather, to push beyond to a messier, less charismatic, and less perfect kind of action.

This line of questioning also happens to address a central problem for the left in the 2020s: how to acknowledge the many good reasons for despair without getting stuck. These books are not anti-theoretical but envision how local movements—planting a garden, passing a law, or forming a union—might fit into global theoretical modes of understanding. And all three of these books end up employing specific works of art—especially clunky but humanist forms of realism—to reconcile imagination with practice. Levine suggests paying attention to the middle parts of novels, where actual work gets done before the big twist. Kornbluh advocates returning to mediated models of third-person fictionality that use the distance between subject and object to point to a bigger picture. And Anker’s return to the aesthetic—specifically Woolf and Rankine—is described as a pedagogical intervention to help her students move past their Trump-era despair.

Anker’s is a big, ambitious project, and she sets out some extremely broad goals that are both dazzling and a little confusing. First of all, what is paradox? I’d say the simplest definition would be the holding of two impossible ideas in tension without rejecting either of them. Such a definition might include Keats’s “Negative Capability,” which is the intellectual capacity to reside “in uncertainties … without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” or it might reference one of Jesus’s gnomic proverbs (“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it”).

Anker’s definition of paradox is wider and deliberately vague. Her goal is to unravel how “the logic of paradox has been indispensable to critique” not simply as a useful figure, but as a “lyrical, metamorphic, tropological, charismatic [dimension] of reasoning” that might expand in practice to include such varied approaches as “contradiction, antagonism, aporia, ambivalence, irony, ambiguity, indeterminacy, Otherness, opacity, complexity, dialecticism, and so on.” Well, this is just about all of our lovely tools! So what’s really at stake?

The paradox at the heart of Anker’s argument is that ironically paradoxical argument styles—which seem to offer nuanced and penetrating insight—have had a paralyzing effect on political action and particularly on human rights theory. There’s a certain hypnotic circularity to this use of a trope to criticize that trope, but Anker does not wish to ban the use of paradox entirely. She just thinks theorists have become overly reliant on paradoxical assertions of impossibility that don’t help the victims of injustice.

In the spirit of “touching grass,” Anker rejects the depiction of law as the paradoxical site of injustice, arguing that in fact, changing a law can improve the lives of citizens in unromantic but concrete ways.

Anker’s analysis starts with the story of an epiphany: her distressing recognition that paradox has become a predictable intellectual reflex rather than a clarifying insight. That deconversion moment takes her from being someone who gave her job talk on “The Human Rights Paradox” to finding that “every book in my theory library performed the exact same moves on what felt like autopilot … Texts that had previously invigorated me started to feel dead, robotic, and unoriginal.” Their habitual recourse to paradox had become a cliché, in which every argument ended in a moment of pessimistic oscillation between irreconcilable opposites with no useful path forward.

Even worse, these foundational texts sometimes let the ecstatic radicalism of paradox blind them to practical steps that would help suffering people. The critiques in her chapters aim at practically every theorist’s leitmotifs, from Foucault’s “buried frictions and discontinuities” to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “emancipatory” celebration of “infinite incommensurabilities,” Hannah Arendt’s “mystical … tautologies” in which human rights dissolve the moment they are legalized, and Carl Schmitt’s irrational definition of legal authority as paradoxically based on the extra-legal. Special ire is reserved for recent thinkers who enshrine political marginality as ontological, like Lisa Marie Cacho’s totalizing assertion that “there is no way out” from a law that renders people of color “permanently rightless.” While the breadth of this critique is invigorating, the reader will doubtless yelp at the attack on her favorites (I admit I shed a tear when she went for Arendt).

The book’s critical style is thus fascinatingly divided: On the one side, there is the self-conscious paranoia at discovering the false seductions of paradox everywhere in modern thought; and on the other, there is a pragmatic attempt to think around and beyond paradox using the intellectual tools at hand. Its critique alternates between radicalism—the desire to penetrate to the root of a theoretical error—and liberalism—the practical goal of minimizing injustice.

The radical, diagnostic part of the critique results in descriptions of paradox that proliferate richly and suggestively: Paradox is described as “a framework for replenishing the darkened vistas of a radical tradition shipwrecked on modernity’s debris”; an “alchemy” that transforms “sites of strife and error into something meriting worship and adulation”; and a figure that can transform something “toxic when submerged into something grace-like in its untapped potentiality.” Its definition expands to include the melancholic fixation of trauma, the accelerating abstractions of Marxist dialectic, and the ontological aspects of disability studies.

This definitely leads to hyperbole in places: Is the “world indeed ravaged by paradox”? But the book’s sweeping critical range also raises its stakes beyond a simple critique of the deconstructive theory that—let’s be honest—no longer rules our hyperpoliticized age.

If paradox can be toxic, what’s the antidote? Here’s where one might expect the book to reject theory as a whole, perhaps in favor of a sober archival historicism, or committed political action in the model of Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic. But that’s not what happens.

In the spirit of “touching grass,” Anker rejects the depiction of law as the paradoxical site of injustice, arguing that in fact, changing a law can improve the lives of citizens in unromantic but concrete ways. She points to the successful power of political action—like the organizing that resulted in the Americans with Disabilities Act—to achieve real results for the suffering. These successes can break the enchanting spell of perpetual failure that she locates in ontological defenses of the constitutive marginality of the oppressed. Anker defends theory’s ability to connect ideas across disciplines, but warns that paradox can be too slippery a sluiceway between intellectual methodologies. Paradoxes that seem intellectually coherent in one situation (say, the simultaneous one-equals-three of the Christian trinity) might lead to an occult paralysis in other situations. The exciting resonance between aesthetic form and content and the dark sublimity of metaphysical negativity seem to be the Scylla and Charybdis of political theory here.

Thus the book doesn’t suggest doing entirely without theory. Instead, Anker defends it as the force that combines ideas to create new synthetic insights. Without theory, new concepts and discoveries are trapped in their separate disciplines and stagnate in isolation.

It’s not exactly clear in this book how you tell good theory from bad, except by weighing specific theoretical stances against their actual human impact. This might require a step away from radical visions that exalt sweeping dramas of human suffering, and attending to humbler and more specific moments of workable social justice. One could see this as an extrapolation of Derrida’s analysis of Plato’s pharmakon: While Derrida focuses on the paradoxical identity of poison and antidote, Anker suggests that even if the same drug can be either poison or antidote, you shouldn’t actually mistake the result of a poison for that of an antidote.

So she suggests that one test of an apparently irrefutable paradox is simply to measure its totalizing conclusions against real political goals—and then test again when circumstances change. One should make sure the real people suffering from injustice are allowed to look for a way out of their impasse as well as mourn the nature of their entrapment. Anker’s second remedy is the analysis of complex aesthetic works—which are, paradoxically, also the source of the charismatic aesthetic theory that Anker claims has expanded too far into other theoretical domains. She draws inspiration from a line in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own that describes how certain works occasionally “do hold together occasionally very remarkably” because of the novelist’s “integrity” or “conviction that he gives one that this is the truth.” She also finds a salutary dyad of despair and hope in Claudia Rankine’s 2014 Citizen: An American Lyric, which she praises for “vignettes [that] … converge not on immovable roadblocks or tragic lessons in erasure but on openings susceptible to intervention and empowerment.”

The unfinished project of Anker’s book is its desire for a humanist political theory of justice, one that achieves a planetary range but avoids charismatic metaphysics and reflexive pessimism. Obviously this is a massive goal, and one for which On Paradox feels like a partial clearing of the ground. Not even materialist Marxism escapes the trap of charisma in her view: It’s too dependent on the mechanism of dialectical reversal. Paradox is the signifier here of a path that seemed to offer redemption, but then ended in a slough of despond.

In my response to this book, I’ve found myself relying instead on more humble figures of speech: partial and contingent analogies like “hall of mirrors” and “psychoanalytic self-analysis,” along with some sneaky metaphors like “sluiceway.” In its struggle with its Hydra-like opponent, this book serves as a warning to those who think it would be easy for a liberatory or decolonial political theory to simply reject aesthetics without understanding the tricky filiation between paradoxical works of art and theory itself.