Recent discussions in literary studies about critique’s legacies have tended to characterize the available options for criticism in oppositional terms: critique is detached and aggressive, while post-critical criticism is attached and receptive. However, equating attachment with positive affects is at odds with what we know about how attachment actually works, which suggests that aggressively pushing back against objects is a crucial aspect of attachment. This talk finds that in eighteenth-century moral philosophy and fiction encounters with obstacles do not impede but rather express and enliven attachment. I find in these accounts a model for a kind of aesthetic engagement I characterize as “restive”—one that thrives on a species of aggression that is not reducible to the dialectical thinking that underlies critique, nor to the destruction that Eve Sedgwick, following Melanie Klein, associates with “paranoid reading.” Rather, to engage with works of art restively is to tangle them with in a way that aligns with Donald W. Winnicott’s more capacious understanding of aggression as a vital expression of exhilaration in meeting a world that pushes back.