The critic Ruth Graham recently published an essay called “Against YA,” on Slate, that caused a brouhaha; the piece received more than three thousand comments and inspired dozens of counter-essays. The magnitude of this response underlines the ubiquity—and the effectiveness—of its title formulation, “Against [X].” In recent years, there has been an “Against [X]” epidemic: against young-adult literature, against interpretation, against method, against theory, against epistemology, against happiness, against transparency, against ambience, against heterosexuality, against love, against exercise, etc. The form announces a polemic—probably a cranky one, and very likely an unfair one. But an essay with such a title has inoculated itself against the criticism of being too polemical or tendentious—after all, did you read the title? Caveat lector!

“How could anyone be against transparency?” Lawrence Lessig asks, ingenuously, in his 2009 essay “Against Transparency,” in The New Republic. “Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious.” Lessig neatly articulates the customary logic of “Against [X]”: How could anyone be against X? It seems so good, so redoubtable, yet I really am against X! The polemic generally goes on, responsibly and often a bit boringly, to enumerate any number of qualifications. In this case: “There is no questioning the good that transparency creates in a wide range of contexts.” Not quite as lively as the title “Against Transparency” promises, is it? “Against [X]” is a symptom of a liberal culture’s longing to escape its own strictures; it’s the desire of thoughtful and nuanced people to shed their inhibitions and issue fearsome dicta. We feel that we must be fair and evenhanded in our prose, but in our titles we can fly a pirate’s flag.

The most famous modern example of this formula, Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” from 1964, exemplifies the appeal of “Against [X]”—witty bravado, willful abandonment of fairness, balance, and measured restraint. “Against [X]” works best when X is a sacred cow. How can a critic be against interpretation? The swagger of Sontag’s title imbues each word of the essay with the threat of brute rhetorical force, promising that, for all the probing nuance of its claims, the argument will wind up in a crushingly _un_nuanced blow—a gesture of total dismissal. The essay, which makes a case that criticism should attend to qualities of form rather than hunt for hidden meanings, ends beautifully, with the declaration, “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” This stylish sentence is the entire final section of the essay. But what makes “Against Interpretation” arguably the most famous piece of aesthetic criticism of the postwar era is its title, which reductively distills Sontag’s careful, searching prose into a startling sound bite. “Against Interpretation” is the mother of all contemporary click-bait intellectual polemics.

Sontag’s essay did not invent the formula, of course. Perhaps she was thinking of Iris Murdoch’s essay “Against Dryness,” from 1961, in which Murdoch criticizes a secularized “smallness, clearness, self-containedness” that cannot imagine or depict either “the transcendence of reality” or human evil. But both Murdoch and Sontag were alluding to, and working within, a well-known polemical formula from antiquity. Going back to Lysias, in fifth-century Athens, speeches for the prosecution (“Against Theomnestus”) typically took the “Against [X]” form. Cicero made his name, for example, as a young Roman lawyer with his series of speeches, in 70 B.C., that attacked the shocking corruption of the former governor of Sicily, Gaius Verres. The speeches of prosecution, “In Verrem” (or “Against Verres,”) laid out a series of charges—extortion, embezzlement, bribery, and mistreatment of prisoners—with devastating aplomb. Cicero concluded of Verres, “I think he is the only criminal in the memory of man who is so atrocious that it would even be for his own good to be condemned.” A humiliated Verres fled Rome before the trial had concluded, seeking exile in present-day Marseilles. The trial, and especially the speeches (which were subsequently published), made Cicero well known as an orator and a politician, marking the beginning of his eventual ascent to the plum position of consulship. “Against [X]” is often not just an effective rhetorical form but also a canny career move: against X as an implicit argument for the polemicist.

As Cicero’s “Against Verres” triumph suggests, the “Against [X]” formula implies or mimics a scene of mano-a-mano combat with a fake-modest implicit personal subject: the brave author who is pitched against X, telling it like it is, let the chips fall where they may. (In Nietzsche’s 1888 essay “Nietzsche contra Wagner” the pronoun is characteristically not implicit.) When Augustine of Hippo composed his “Contra Faustum,” in 400 A.D., the Manichean Faustus had already been exiled for his criticisms of the Church. Nonetheless, Augustine wrote, “I judge it convenient to put his words under his name and to place my response under mine.” Although his target was already vanquished (and was, in fact, no longer alive), it made for a more satisfying victory to imagine him standing there in person, to be humiliated by superior rhetoric. Saint Athanasius, the chief defender of Christian orthodoxy in the fourth-century battle against Arianism, won such fame for his blistering polemics (e.g. “Against the Heathen_”_) that he became immortalized by the phrase “Athanasius contra Mundum.” The “Against [X]” formula tends to aspire to global contrariness; after one has vanquished the unlucky target of one’s invective, the rest of the world had better watch out. “Against [X]” can be a formula of grandiose and ambitious oppositionality, with exile and civic death for all foes its implied goal.

Today, titles of the ad-hominem “Against Verres,” “Against Faustus,” or “Nietzsche Contra Wagner” variety are rare; more often, an author squares off belligerently against some broad abstraction that seems rather unlikely to fight back or to otherwise to pose much of a threat. (J. K. Huysmans’s 1884 perverse-aesthetic novel Against Nature is a precursor of this mode.) The crankily oppositional intellectual journal N+1 has made a regular diet of “Against [X]” in the past decade: “Against Exercise,” “Against the Rage Machine,” “Against Reviews.” The formula’s quality of brashly counterintuitive overstatement is well suited to twenty-first-century online publishing. When someone throws down the gauntlet against something as seemingly benign, necessary, or positively good as interpretation, happiness, exercise, or young-adult literature, who can resist taking a peek? Here lies a problem with “Against [X].” Its contrariness can seem contrived or ginned up for effect, aiming, with an excess of self-congratulation, for a outraged or scandalized response: Yes, folks, I’m dismissing happiness itself in a two-word title. Can you handle it?

But the contemporary manifestations of the form can appear weakly liberal when considered within the longer history of this genre. For the early “Against [X]” polemics by the likes of Augustine, Athanasius, or Tertullian (“Adversus Marcionem”), nothing less than the fate of the Church was at stake; their scorching blasts were designed to shore up correct orthodoxy against a heretical enemy whom they aimed to drive into exile. The contemporary, post-Sontagian polemics adopt a posture of provocation in faintly echoing such forebears, but they are, in their hearts, pluralistic, and in fact suggest only a slight revision in perspective. Lawrence Lessig isn’t really against transparency, of course: rather, his claim is that “we are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion,” and so on. Ruth Graham and Eric Wilson do not actually want to ban or to do away entirely with Y.A. literature or with happiness, they simply want to ask us to consider these subjects in a new light.

We probably cannot do without “Against [X],” however. Self-promoting and self-congratulatory as the form can be, it does offer a bracing dose of rhetorical vigor. In a contemporary intellectual culture that is often pusillanimous in its evenhandedness, a dash of unreasonable invective is sometimes just what the doctor ordered. “Against [X]” is most satisfying when it is most true to its origins in the denunciations of antiquity: when it issues its condemnatory ban on an offending concept with no namby-pamby qualifications. The 2012 Jacobin essay “Against Chairs” may mark the point at which the formula began to enter its self-parodying later phase, but, even so, one must admire the stringency of its author’s condemnation: “Chairs suck. All of them. No designer has ever made a good chair, because it is impossible. Some are better than others, but all are bad.”

Sometimes, after all, the corrupt, venal heathens simply need to be banished_._