The craftwork of the suspicion: the essay as a critical tradition

Abstract

This essay aims to be a defense of the academic importance of the essay. In the current academic life, the pragmatism of the functional productivity and efficiency expressed through a business English, especially by the paper, is mainly held. This emptying of the words invites us to emphasize the importance of the essay. From Montaigne to Steiner, passing by Adorno, especially at a time of crisis of the great narratives, the essay, the genre of modernity, becomes the way of capturing the eternal in what we live and perceive as destined to perish. The essay constitutes the writing of the modern subject, the manifestation of his/her extraordinary restlessness and solitude. The essay as the craftwork of the suspicion, rather than being seen as the victory of amateurism in the academic life, is the path that will reveal the limits of all pretense universalist and academic productivism prevalent today.