Collaging epistolary passage and theoretical discussion, this article both embodies and investigates the intimate, cerebral and emotional voice as a post-critical device and a politics of the personal-made-public. Forms of critical memoir and autotheory are examined as rhetorical forms where criticality is charged by correlation to one’s own life. First-person critique, or the ‘radically intimate’, is recognized as a post-critical turn and as a revisionist return to poststructuralist critiques of subjectivity and citational practices of self-writing. A particular focus is this mode of enquiry applied to art writing and acting as a meta-critique of the conditions of creative practice. As a self-reflexive research methodology, it is argued that first-person observation, inflected by affect, intimacy and the quotidian, can be understood not only as a countercultural trend but as a radical intervention in the means, production and historiography of contemporary art, literature and its discourses.