Toward a Theory of Stupidity

The first part of the article discusses stupidity as a state of things and processes associated with an institutional framework that fails to or prefers not to provide an adequate theoretical response to what we could loosely call “naturalized epistemology”, in the sense of “natural to late capitalism”, which is dealt with in the second section. In the third part, we reflect on the way this systematically produced stupidity is, at the same time, intrinsically related to the very conception of the objects of study and of literary criticism