I have had trouble writing a statement primarily because I have always thought ofmyself first as an analyst of politics and second as a literary critic. Criticism, for me, has generally been an instrument for coming to understand political orders and phenomena and then for intervening in them.As I read it, the call for statements is addressed rather to those who are critics first. So what can somebody who approaches the question of the future of criticism from my more resolutely political perspective add to the conversation? Perhaps I can offer the small confession that, for my work, I have always found Foucault more interesting than Derrida and that the Foucauldian project still points, I believe, to a vast number of unexplored avenues of inquiry. Foucault’s genius lay in coupling a sociological imagination—concernedwith howwhole societieswork and the structuringprinciplesof their operations—with a remarkably astute sensitivity to the texture and effects of sign systems. Derrida is no less astute on the latter point but lacks (inmy view) the sociological imagination, which is fundamentally necessary for any effort to give criticism serious political relevance. If one wishes to know how language is working and shaping our world, one needs to know not just how it plays, obscures, reveals, and subverts, but also where human social orders are explicitly (and not just implicitly) held together by words: the realms of law and punishment, of value and the division of labor (gender and sexuality come inhere), of religion, oforganized strife (from athletic events to war), of membership in imagined communities like “the people,” and of generational transition. Words not only tell but also do, but some words are asked to do more work than others, and Foucault was more sensitive to this, in my view, than Derrida has been.