Jodi Dean has a short post up on critics who interrogate how much Zizek writes:

This is an old topic, much trodden in these parts. But, I’m finally getting around to writing a review that was due 18 months ago (it has now become a review essay) and so I’m returning to old themes. Why, why, why do ‘critics’ attack Zizek for writing too much? An essay in one book I’m reviewing treats the amount of his writing as a symptom. What amount is symptomatic?

Even the title of this post is interesting, for it speaks to the difference between pleasure (which is homeostatic in nature) and jouissance, which always walks the line between pleasure and pain. In our discussions of style we’ve so far discussed the manner in which certain forms of style can produce attachments and identification, the institutional apparatus in academia and how style can function to reinforce certain class distributions, and a number of issues pertaining to the relationship between style and content. I wonder if Jodi doesn’t implicitly raise another issue here. What is interesting in these critiques of Zizek– regardless of what one thinks about Zizek theoretically or politically –is the way in which they seem to treat the symptom in perjorative terms. A symptom, these critiques imply, is something deviant, something that we’re supposed to escape, something we’re supposed to overcome. A symptom is conceived here, in short, as a sickness.

Nothing could be further from the Freudo-Lacanian position. Within the Freudian framework, a symptom is not a sickness, a cancerous tumor to be excised, but is rather a solution or a cure on the part of the subject. Lacan will go one step further and claim that there is no subject without a symptom. The aim of analysis is thus not to excise the symptom– which would lead to a collapse of the subject as the symptom is the subject’s ontological support in being –but to redirect this site of jouissance elsewhere so that the subject might find less painful forms of jouissance. For Lacan, then, the symptom is not something that disappears in analysis. The symptom, for Lacan, is thus the singularity of the subject.

Nonetheless, there is something to this critique of Zizek. Here I am not referring to it’s moralistic tone, but rather to the jouissance and relation to jouissance that underlies this response to Zizek. In Seminar 23, The Sinthome, Lacan, in his discussion of Joyce, states that we are never interested in another subject’s symptom. Indeed, when confronted with the symptom of another, there’s often a sense of horror. In part this has to do with neurotic structurations of desire (the tale would be very different for a perverse subject), which functions as a strategy for evading jouissance through maintaining desire (the hysteric subject striving to keep the desire of the Other unsatisfied so as to escape jouissance, the obsessional subject striving to negate all desire by satisfying every demand, thereby deflating or undermining all jouissance). Neurosis is a defense against jouissance. The neurotic lives in a terror of being the object of jouissance.

Does this not add another dimension to discussions of certain forms of style. Is not, in part, the visceral reaction to certain forms of style in figures like Hegel, Lacan, Levinas, late Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, etc., a horror at the jouissance of the writer, and a terror that one’s status as a subject will fade and disappear in this encounter with style? That is, these texts drip jouissance in the sense that they seem to enjoy the signifier themselves. In this way, desire seems to evaporate and there seems to be nothing save disappearance in this jouissance. This would account for the experience so many have that a game is being played with them by these authors. Of course, this would speak to the common fantasy of being a masochistic puppet of enjoyment in many neurotics. The question, of course, would not be one of condemning these styles, but one of how we might devise strategies to overcome these neurotic responses.

Pop-matters has weighed in on the issue of difficult texts on his blog. I’m still trying to articulate what, exactly, constitutes a difficult text. I think that there are different sorts of difficulties and that they shouldn’t all be lumped together. Recently, for example, I picked up Simon Duffy’s Logic of Expression. I had high hopes for this text as it deals heavily with Deleuze’s use of the calculus in Difference and Repetition. However, I confess that I’m very disappointed with this text, despite the high praise of Smith, Patton, and Balibar. Why? I simply can’t penetrate it. This isn’t entirely Duffy’s fault. The work presupposes a lot of background knowledge in mathematics which I simply don’t have. As a result, it is difficult for me to penetrate what he’s discussing, or even know why it’s relevant. This work, I would say, is clear, but only insofar as one has a particular background knowledge. It is thus not a difficult text, though I find it impenetrable. I do think, however, he could have done a better job shuttling back and forth between concrete examples and mathematical abstractions. I’m of the view, regardless of what purists like Alexei say about metaphors and examples, that we should always use examples to illustrate points as a crutch for intuition and imagination in reaching “the concept”. This is part of what makes Badiou such a brilliant writer, regardless of what one thinks of his thought. It is also part of what makes Zizek great.

By contrast, it seems to me that there’s a different sort of difficulty that isn’t about background knowledge or familiarity, but about style. When confronting Hegel’s Science of Logic or certain texts by Derrida, the issue does not seem to be one of background knowledge, but appears to occur at the level of sentence structure itself. Marx might be added here as well, in some respects. Hegelians sometimes speak of the “dialectical sentence”. The dialectical sentence is inherently difficult stylistically, regardless of one’s background knowledge, perhaps because of how it seeks to evade the simplifications of the understanding (abstraction, thingly thought), making it very difficult to determine what, exactly the sentence is saying at all. In Marx there are similar difficulties. Marx wants to unfold the logic of what he’s dealing with, to make you experience it. Often you don’t know where you’re going or why it’s important. For example, in the first chapter of Capital, we begin with the commodity, but we have no idea how the commodity will be unfolded or analyzed or where this analysis is leading. Instead it’s as if Marx wants you to encounter the experience of the commodity itself.

Popmatters makes some good points about commodification of thought. S/he claims that any form of writing that slows down easy transmission is already a blow against the dominance of the commodity. There’s something to this very Adornoesque thought. I respect this thesis. I understand it. By the same token, as we’re struggling against a particular form that capitalism has taken today, I wonder if this is truly the most pragmatic strategy. We need weapons. We need careful analyses of our situation. There is a certain sort of style that turns you into a scholar by necessity, because you have to work through the intricacies of these mysteries. Are these stylistic approaches that we find in later Levinas, Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, Adorno, etc., the most effective tools in such struggles, or do they end up inventing/making scholars that turn away from these struggles? I think, for example, that we could do better with Marx and that a certain sort of academic work should be strongly discouraged. The verdict is out for me.

A few months ago I began to feel exhausted and generally wretched all the time. Early in the afternoon I’ll feel a deep weariness sink into me. My legs will ache and I’ll feel as if I’m sinking into my chair. My thought will become fuzzy. I find it difficult to concentrate. What is this? Is it normal? Is this what it means to age? I’m only 34. I shouldn’t feel this way. Do I not exercise enough? Am I not eating the right things? Do I drink too much? Am I depressed? Is it stress?… Or is it something more frightening like cancer? For all the talk of embodiment these days, I can see why philosophers in previous centuries were so resistant to the body. It weighs one down. It is finite. It suffers. It gets sick. It gets fatigued. It distracts thought with appetites and passions. Next week I begin to swim.

I’ve already pimped his thesis in the past, but now that I’ve had the time to sit down and read it I would highly recommend Nick’s thesis on Deleuze for anyone interested in Deleuze’s ontology and complexity theory. Nick articulates Deleuze’s ontology with exceptional clarity, reading it in terms dear to my own heart– with respect to the problem of individuation –and articulates its relevance to social and political theory. One question that emerges for me is that of what theory must look like once we take seriously Deleuze’s thesis that only individuals exist (where the concept of an individual is to be conceived at different levels of scale, such that, for example, cities, nations, and various social systems are also individuals). That is, once we adopt this premise we can no longer advocate universal laws and generalities. N.Pepperell once told me that she does not believe assemblage theory is a theory. I got irritated at the time as is my custom when I’m enthusiastic about something, but in this I think she’s right insofar as the concept of assemblage is not yet a theory or an explanation of a particular field of individuation, of a particular individuation or phenomenon, but rather an ontological concept that precedes a theory. For example, Marx’s historical materialism stipulates that there are no essences of the human or society. This is a general ontological claim, not yet a theory. We have not yet proposed a theory until we engage in the arduous work of accounting for the specific regularities governing a particular socio-historical moment. Marx becomes a theory when he explains why the historical moment takes the particular form it does (i.e., when he articulates all the processes and contingencies by which particular subjects were formed, particular social relations came into being, and particular tensions or antagonisms developed) and when he envisions the immanent processes by which these historical moments are undergoing transformation. In short, what is required is not logos but immanent logoi, immanent patterns of (re)production internal to a phenomena, absolute specific to situations and their organization.

Our Carl gives a nice analysis of the mechanisms of textual identification with respect to the issues I raised on style over at Dead Voles. There Carl writes:

At one level there’s absolutely nothing remarkable about this dynamic of text identification except the fact that all these smart people seem to think it’s remarkable. Every text from Dr. Seuss on up, difficult or not, has the charismatic potential to generate reverent reading communities that might be described as ‘priesthoods’. My own experience is with Antonio Gramsci, an Italian theorist who wrote about complex things quite clearly, all in all. There are a lot of pages of Gramsci, most of them in prison notebooks that he never had a chance to edit into a linear text, many of them on topics that very few people could care less about. This of course creates the opportunity for a mystery cult for those few who have virtuously read through all of it, sort of like the Kabbalah or the Hadith. Here are instances where the reading community in effect ADDS difficulty to the sacred text by digging out and canonizing every little detail, aside, and tangent. The characteristic assertion is that the plainish meanings of the core writings must be supplemented or even amended in light of these exclusive arcana. (Translation fetishists from the Qur’an to Weber and Foucault work the same way. Translations are not just workably second-best but unacceptable in comparison to the sacred revelation of the original.)

People choose these texts and these reading strategies for all the usual reasons they choose religions (and reject other religions). They may be born into them, or disposed toward them by cultural marking of the text. They may be seeking identity and collective effervescence in a community. The text may be culturally marked as normative or transgressive, enabling the effervescence of dominant or rebellious subculture identification. There may accordingly be a component of acceptance and/or rejection of authority, be it the father’s or the group’s. These are choices within structured fields of options and decision strategies. All of this falls under the sociology of what Weber called elective affinity and Bourdieu elaborated as the schemes of the habitus.

For some reason this makes me think of Virno’s discussion of fear in A Grammar of the Multitude. In the third chapter of A Grammar of the Multitude Virno argues that anguish/anxiety is one of the predominant affects of our time. I hope to write more on this later when I am not inundated with grading at the end of the semester and thoroughly exhausted. At any rate, as Marx and Deleuze and Guattari argued, one of the marks of capitalism is the manner in which it decodes all social relations and codes through processes of deterritorialization. By “decoding” Deleuze and Guattari do not mean the activity of finding the meaning behind some coded fragment of speech as intelligence officers and cryptographers do. Rather decoding is the process by which social codes are undone and destroyed.

Money, of course, is one of the primary forms of deterritorialization under capitalism. Where barter is based on qualitative use-values and the contingent encounter between two people who have goods that both serve the use-value of the other, money allows for an abstract equivalence of all goods, allowing the dimension of use-values to fall into the background. As a consequence, the use of money as a means of exchange accelerates exchange processes, leading to an intensification of certain forms of exchange that would not be possible under a barter system. Under capitalism there are also the mass deterritorializations characterized by migrations that take place as people move from their traditional homes into the factory. In contemporary capitalism, images, snippets of speech, texts, etc., are perpetually deterritorialized through new media. The very fact that Carl and I are talking is an instance of this sort of deterritorialization. Similarly, writing on a blog is a deterritorialization insofar as one cannot presume or choose their audience, but is instead thrown into aleatory encounters with others that lead to transformations of ones thought. That is, I cannot presume that the person I’m engaging with shares the same theoretical background that I have and therefore my theoretical background undergoes drift as they interpret my claims in unexpected ways and I strive to communicate with the other person without being able to appeal to shared resources.

In one way or another, all of these deterritorializations have the effect of breaking down established codes within a community, mixing codes together that previously had no contact or relation, undoing other codes. As Bourdieu notes, habitus functions as a system of anticipations allowing us to navigate our world and social interactions. If I am anxious when I meet someone new, then this is because I do not yet know what to expect from this person. In Lacanian terms, I have no idea what this other is demanding of me. In late capitalism this phenomenon is generalized as I can no longer rely on established codes to define my place in the world, gender relations, what I can expect from others and what I am for them, and so on. Instead, these relations are perpetually experienced as precarious. As Marx said, “all that is solid melts into air”. This is part of what Lacanians mean when they talk about the “collapse of symbolic efficacy”.

Nor are these decodings restricted to the deterritorialization of images, speech, and various migrations. They are now internal to the workplace in many instances as well. That is, codes underlying labor are breaking down in ways that make it difficult to know exactly what is expected of us. We are told that we must constantly innovate and invent. For example, In this years self-evaluation form for the renewal of my contract, I am asked, among other things, “what innovative teaching techniques do you use and how do you make use of cutting edge teaching techniques?” Here, it would appear, that solid learning outcomes are not enough. No, I must innovate in my classroom and apparently keep up with the latest trends in educational research in order to properly do my job. Why? I’m not quite sure. Rather, it seems as if innovation is itself valorized as an absolute good or positive thing. It is no longer enough to have found effective techniques in teaching this or that subject. Rather, we are not rising to the occasion as educators if we aren’t constantly finding new techniques. The point is that where perpetual innovation is called for, it is no longer possible to observe just what one’s job is. Where perhaps, in a different social configuration, I would be qualified as an educator after going through a certain amount of requisite education, now, as Deleuze observed in his “Postscript to the Societies of Control“, my education never ends and it is never clear that we are qualified as we are expected to be perpetually innovating. Here fear and anguish set in. “Will my response satisfy administration?” “Am I really innovating in the classroom?” “Am I suitably up to date on teaching techniques?” And, of course, the insidious result of this sort of pervasive self-doubt and anxiety is that we cling all the more tenaciously to our labor conditions, willingly accepting anything administration and our bosses might say because we live in a perpetual state of guilt wondering if we are doing our jobs correctly. For example, we allow representative organizations to be dismantled and for benefits to be cut back. All of this follows from a collapse of codes defining various labor positions. “Professional Development” has now become an integral component of contractual renewal in most professions, leading to a state where “expert” status is never reached or even available as one is never “done” with anything. It thus comes as no surprise that many commentators bemoan how the age of adulthood seems to be pushed back perpetually, such that we find 40 year olds living at home with their parents like children. Such would be a more general symptom or reflection of the decoding of labor roles in our society.

In describing these relations in terms of anguish/anxiety rather than fear, Virno is drawing on Heidegger. Where fear has a specific object (”I’m afraid of that tiger over there that looks hungry”) anxiety seems to be without a determinate object. I am pervaded by a sense of dis-ease, yet unable to locate the source or object of this dis-ease. Rather everything seems overwhelming. There is a tendency among Deleuzians to celebrate deterritorializations for their own sake, yet this is the converse, dark side of deterritorialization. Anxiety leads to reterritorializations of various sorts. On the one hand, we strive to transform anxiety into fear, localizing it in a determinate object that we could then manage. For instance, new spectres emerge in late capitalism, objects of fear that seem to inhabit all the shadows, such as the terrorist, the pedophile, the war on drugs, the looming environmental crisis, etc. All of these things can be more or less real, more or less threatening, but they also serve a sort of structural function by giving anxiety a determinate object or by naming that which cannot be named. As I argued long ago in my post on apocalyptic fantasies, these reterritorializations of anxiety onto determinate objects of fear are pervasive throughout our cinema and culture.

On the other hand, Carl seems to be suggesting another sort of reterritorialization, where we reterritorialitize on various figures and texts as a way of establishing and founding new codes. When I reterritorialitize on Heidegger, Derrida, Marx, Deleuze, Lacan, etc., I am not simply identifying with a set of claims and positions, but am also carving out a territorial code with a number of people, thereby forming a community where some measure of order exists. Everyone speaks “Lacanese” at an Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workshops conference. Everyone speaks Heideggerese at the annual Heidegger symposium. Similar attempts at recoding and territory formation can be discerned in activist political movements, emerging religious movements, organic food movements, etc. These communities are oases of stability where a community of people might collectively set about the production of shared codes. As Carl points out, the vector of these reterritorializations will be a function of identifications that precede these coded territories. For example, I was already predisposed to identify with Lacan or Zizek rather than Rawls or Habermas prior to knowing anything about them because of counter-cultural and political identifications I have going back to my teen years.

Nonetheless, while I think there is much worth taking up in Carl’s analysis, I wonder if he isn’t going too far in the direction of placing everything on the side of the reader, minimizing the rhetorical dimension of these texts. In Hegelian terms, we must avoid the trap of formulating these issues in terms of “abstract understanding” or one-sided opposition. We must be cognizant of how certain rhetorical styles function as apparati of capture for desire, while also discerning how readers bring with them a set of identifications and commitments that, as it were, actualize texts.

No doubt I am behind the curve on this one, but if you want to read a book that will make your hair literally stand on end, take a look at David Harvey’s Brief History of Neoliberalism. Harvey deftly traces the history of neoliberalism, showing how contemporary capital systematically deregulated business and dismantled collective labor movements, and how people were convinced that this was in their interests, giving us the marvelous world we have today (I say that sarcastically). Of course, as a function of this, we also witness the rise of identity politics (on both the left and right– nationalist and fundamentalist religious movements on the right, gender and ethnic politics on the left) and postmodern politics. In the meantime, questions of class antagonism become almost completely hidden or clothed (as evidenced by the recent flair up over Obama’s “Bitter” comment, where he hit the true third rail in American politics: class). Books like this make me wonder if theory is asking the right sorts of questions or questions that are even relevant to our contemporary moment. At any rate, I think I need to go drink now.

UPDATED: With his characteristic acerbic wit, Adam Kotsko coins the term “Academic Stockholm Syndrome” to describe what I was trying to get at. After 50 comments in response to this post– many of them lecturing me about the relationship between expression and content that anyone who studies Derrida, Lacan, Heidegger, Hegel, or Deleuze is familiar with… And many of these responses missing the irony that they’re able to explain clearly what they’re claiming can only be articulated through a particular style –this might be the one remark that actually paid attention to what I argued in the post.

Perverse Egalitarianism has an interesting post up on “difficult books”. A taste:

I have been thinking along the similar lines recently as I was revisiting the old issue of trying to use “difficult texts” in my Intro class: the rationale for me has always been that I will expose my students to a type of writing that in itself will allow me to teach them a skill. For example, even though Plato’s dialogues are quite “easy” to read, or at least I can say that most college students find the form of a conversation between several people to be quite easy to grasp, we spend a lot of time trying to explain why it is important to ask about the essences of things like “justice” or “piety” - the style of a dialogue itself is never really an issue, because the subject matter is what is most important. Is it possible, for example, to use a text by Deleuze or Derrida or Blanchot as a way of exposing a group of students to the style of philosophizing that, because it is impossible to clearly see the actual subject matter, would draw attention to itself?

Assuming that the students actually read, or try to read the difficult text, is it possible to coherently argue in favor of such an experience of confusion? Does it make sense to say:”Yes, I know some of you told me in private that you tried to read the text but you couldn’t understand anything, but that is precisely what I expected would happen. Now that we are in class we can read the same text together and see if we can figure it out, because that is the skill we are trying to acquire in addition to being introduced to a contemporary thinker.” In a sense, if students could read and understand an essay by Derrida, they wouldn’t need to be in an Intro class.

Hopefully I have enough “cred” to inveigh against “difficult books” (I am, after all, mired in the work of figures such as Deleuze, Lacan, Hegel, etc., who are the worst of the worst), but I have increasingly found myself suspicious of the “difficult work”. On the one hand, I read texts in the sciences that express extremely complex ideas in very basic prose. Somehow I’m just unwilling to concede that what Hegel is trying to talk about is any more difficult or complex than what the biologist, complexity theory, economic social theorist, ecologist, or quantum physicist is attempting to articulate. This leads to my concern. I wonder if terribly dense styles such as we find in figures like Deleuze, Lacan, Hegel, Derrida, etc., etc., etc., aren’t a form of intellectual terrorism. Please do not misunderstand me. I am not referring to the quality of their concepts or arguments. What I am referring to is a general writing strategy that demands so much work on the part of the reader in the art of interpretation, that by the time you’ve managed to make heads or tails of what Lacan is arguing or Hegel is seeking to articulate or Deleuze is seeking to theorize, you have so much invested that you simply cannot think critically about that figure.

Among the post-structuralists, at least, style was a way of subverting the metaphysics of presence and identity by drawing attention to the differential, the play of the signifier, our inability to pin down meaning due to the inherent polysemy of language. There’s an implicit politics here as well. The metaphysics of presence and identity is seen as being attached to centralized and totalizing social systems similar to the “Great Chain of Being”, where you have the sovereign giving decrees on high. However, isn’t there still an insidious power structure at work in these textual strategies as well?

On the one hand, post-structuralist texts (and other similarly obscure texts) take on the logic of the veil. When confronted by the veil our desire is evoked. We are led to wonder what is behind the veil. The veil suggests something hidden, something tantalizing, something just out of reach. “What is it that Derrida is saying?” “What is the secret of Hegel’s Logic?” “Is Guattari saying anything at all?” The veil in writing either produces a violent reaction of rejection or a sort of hypnotic attachment in the reader like a moth drawn to a flame. On the other hand, if the effect of hypnotic attachment is successfully produced, if we become convinced that the text hides a secret, we become locked in a power relationship with text and authorship where the author is now a master containing the truth of a secret, and the reader is perpetually inadequate, always close to the elusive truth of the secret of late Heidegger, late Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, etc., while also always falling short. Far from freeing the reader, far from liberating them, the reader instead is locked in identity as a disciple and apostle of the text, devoting, perhaps in the extreme case of the scholar, their entire life to the hermeneutics of the text that has now become sacred. In short, this textual practice stands in stark opposition to its often stated aim.

Does this mean I cease to read such figures or reject them out of hand? No. I do believe they hide secrets. However, if Badiou has contributed one thing to Continental thought, if one thing lasts in the case of Badiou, I hope it is the rejection of stylistic virtuousity. This is not an endorsement of Badiou’s ontology but of his ethics of writing. I confess that I harbor some resentment of the hours of my life penetrating a text, navigating the stylistic gymnastics of some thinker, to grasp a concept that is really rather simple and which could have been articulated far more directly. If someone can articulate string theory in a straightforward way I don’t see why they cannot do so with ereignis. I’ve spent my fair amount of time defensively defending the writing style of figures such as Lacan, Derrida, Heidegger, Deleuze, etc., etc., etc. What I realize is that what I was defending was not their style but the value of their concepts and arguments despite their style. As per Lyotard’s remarks at the beginning of Differend, I would like to gain some time. We live, we work, we must integrate superhuman bodies of information. Perhaps a little consideration is in order.

I am always startled when semiotic codes surrounding style stand in stark contrast to the ideology a person espouses. For example, recently we have seen how certain movements in the Christian right have embraced counter-cultural forms of style found among skaters, punks, goth, and hard rock for very conservative ends. Where many of these movements are implicitly forms of critique of cultural hypocrisy and capitalist consummerism, these semiotic codes instead get redirected to the most normalizing, conformist, reactionary ends. Along these lines I was today depressed to read one of my goth students argue that Michael Savage and Glenn Beck are Socratic figures, speaking truth to power, and undermining the injustices of the powerful elite. How can it not be immediately evident that such figures are apologists for social and economic injustices, distorting the true nature of things through their rhetoric and constant appeal to arguments from outrage? I suppose this is one meaning of Lacan’s aphorism that the big Other does not exist. We would like there to be stable codes, for the signifier to be intrinsically attached to a particular signified, but the signifier can come to be attached to any signifier (functioning as a signified), such that we can never infer from the manifestation of a signifier what signified it is attached to. Nonetheless, I find the way in which codes are reterritorialized, the way in which deterritorializations are snatched up by various forms of capture that redirect them towards exploitation and normalization, to be deeply depressing. Or perhaps, in a more optimistic vein, it could be said that insofar as the signifier enjoys a life of its own– isn’t this the meaning of the agency of the letter? –that perhaps these mismatched codes are traces of an unconscious desire to draw a line of flight and escape such sad passions. In that case I wish such a desire could coincide with a conscious will, rather than being contrasted with the dark forces of ressentiment.

This book looks interesting.

The must-read exposé of America’s love/hate affair with French theory.

During the last three decades of the twentieth century, a disparate group of radical French thinkers achieved an improbable level of influence and fame in the United States. Compared by at least one journalist to the British rock ‘n’ roll invasion, the arrival of works by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari on American shores in the late 1970s and 1980s caused a sensation.

Outside the academy, “French theory” had a profound impact on the era’s emerging identity politics while also becoming, in the 1980s, the target of right-wing propagandists. At the same time in academic departments across the country, their poststructuralist form of radical suspicion transformed disciplines from literature to anthropology to architecture. By the 1990s, French theory was woven deeply into America’s cultural and intellectual fabric.

French Theory is the first comprehensive account of the American fortunes of these unlikely philosophical celebrities. François Cusset looks at why America proved to be such fertile ground for French theory, how such demanding writings could become so widely influential, and the peculiarly American readings of these works. Reveling in the gossipy history, Cusset also provides a lively exploration of the many provocative critical practices inspired by French theory. Ultimately, he dares to shine a bright light on the exultation of these thinkers to assess the relevance of critical theory to social and political activism today—showing, finally, how French theory has become inextricably bound with American life.

“In such a difficult genre, full of traps and obstacles, French Theory is a success and a remarkable book in every respect: it is fair, balanced, and informed. I am sure this book will become the reference on both sides of the Atlantic.” —Jacques Derrida

“The Atlantic Ocean has two sides, and so does French Theory. Reinvented in America and betrayed in its own country, it has become the most radical intellectual movement in the West with global reach, rewriting Marx in light of late capitalism. Breathtakingly moving back and forth between the two cultures, François Cusset takes us through a dazzling intellectual adventure that illuminates the past thirty years, and many more decades to come.”—Sylvere Lotringer

Stanley Fish discusses it here.

A recent series of public awareness commercials depicts a young boy screaming family secrets at the top of his lungs to people in a public park to illustrate the manner in which all things said on the internet are completely public. Well, it would appear that I’m now that boy. At 1:48pm this afternoon Andrew Sullivan linked to my blog post on “academic Taylorism“. Within twenty minutes I received over two thousand hits.