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I don't attach quite the same significance to demystification as an animating principle of criticism as the left does or did. That is, I no longer see opening up the mystifications in which ordinary life is wrapped as a necessary aim, or indeed an obligation, of criticism.… A healthy level of suspiciousness is not a bad thing. But some of my criticism…is soured, I think, by a certain relentless suspiciousness of appearances. Why am I now suspicious of such suspiciousness? For two reasons. First, in the act of triumphantly tearing the clothes off its subject and displaying the nakedness beneath—“Behold the truth!”—it exposes a naïveté of its own. For is the naked body really the truth? And second, because a critical practice whose climactic gesture is always a triumphant tearing-off, as it grows lazy (and every orthodoxy grows lazy) begins to confine its attentions to clothed subjects, and even to subjects whose clothes are easily torn off. In other words…a demystifying criticism privileges mystifications. It becomes like Quixote scouring the plains for giants to tilt at, and ignoring everything but windmills.
—J. M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point 106