Dead Theory

Dead Theory collects a series of essays permutating “death,” “theory,” and “Derrida” in various rhythms and to various ends. For some contributors, the volume provides the occasion to respond to the alleged death of “theory” as a period or field: with proclamations of theory's rebirth in the numerous “studies” now populating the academic landscape (Jeffrey Di Leo, “Notes from the Underground”); with calls for the institutionalization of theory (W. Lawrence Hogue, “The Heirs to Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction”); with reflections on the cybernetic afterlife of theorists (Henry Sussman, “The Afterlife of Critics”). For others, the volume provides the occasion to theorize death anew and in sometimes unexpected shades: death in Freud and futurity in Kant (Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Thanatographies of the Future”); haunting, friendship, and the democratic temporality to which they are bound (Paul Allen Miller, “Ghosts in the Politics of Friendship”); zombies, phenomenality, and alterity (Christian Moraru, “Undying Theory”). For others still, Dead Theory is an opportunity to relate “death” to “theory” in literary analyses: the fate of the poem in translation (Brian O'Keeffe, “Death, Survival, and Translation”); Jack Kerouac's schizoanalytic resistance to fascism and death (Hassan Melehy, “Deleuze, Kerouac, Fascism, and Death”); theories of the ruin in Caribbean studies (Nicole Simek, “Theory's Ruins”).In this opening and very cursory survey, I have not listed all the articles included in the volume, and there are certainly other themes and approaches according to which they could be regrouped, which is a sign of the volume's versatility. All divisions and all continuities, however, depend upon a more general binding within the phenomenon that has been called “theory” for nearly half a century, first in the United States and elsewhere soon after. But what, exactly, is “theory”? Debates over the term, its relevance, and its referent have existed almost as long as the phenomenon it is meant to name. There would seem no better occasion, indeed, no more pressing occasion for reflections upon “theory” than a volume dedicated to its possible decline and resurgence, its death and afterlives, its abandonments, reactivations, and transformations. As long as “theory” in its specificity remains undefined, as long as it is not positively differentiated from the fields and disciplines in which it intervenes or from which in certain cases it derives, there can be little hope of celebrating its rebirth or even, if it cannot be revived, mourning its death. At the risk of both normalization and aporia, one must understand theory “as such” to understand its relation to death.In his editorial introduction, Di Leo presents the constellation of death, theorist, and theory as the volume's unique problem: “how the deaths of the high priests of theory have affected the life of theory and our relation to it” (3). Although six of the eleven articles address him only in passing or not at all (which should be noted by anyone expecting a collection dedicated exclusively to him), the volume focuses upon Derrida in particular. Taken as a paradigm of sorts, Derrida silently doubles as a guarantee. Theorist par excellence, he provides implicit assurance that, in speaking of his work, one speaks of theory in the strictest sense and that, in assessing the legacy of his work, one can also discern the fate of theory itself. Pointing to Derrida's often quoted “double feeling” in Learning to Live Finally (trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2007, 33–34)—Derrida's feeling that we have not yet begun to read his work and that nothing will remain shortly after his death—Di Leo writes: “If Derrida ... has this ‘double feeling,’ then the legacy of the rest of the theory world is in even worse shape” (11).Yet, pointing to theory's corpora—whether the writings of Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, or any other—cannot determine why a given corpus qualifies as “theory” and not simply, for instance, the philosophy it engages or reclaims. At a roundtable on the question of “theory after life” at Loughborough University in 2001, Derrida himself dissolves “theory” into a number of disciplines.Now, I never use the word ‘theory’in the way that you do here; I don't use the word ‘theory’ after you, after the Americans and the English speakers. So, I would translate this into French as ‘life after philosophy’, after deconstruction, after literature and so on and so forth. (Life.After.Theory, New York: Continuum 2003, 8) I could cite passages from other “theorists” to the same effect: “theory” often claims an origin in thinkers that do not explicitly support it. Which is not necessarily an argument against “theory.” On the contrary, “theory” might vindicate a logic of inheritance where “loyalty” and “betrayal” are no longer opposed, a logic that Derrida himself formalizes in the same discussion in which he distances himself from the word “theory.” Such a vindication, however, would only magnify the need for elaborating theory's specificity. This specificity and its necessity would constitute the surest and only positive means for countering François Cusset's sweeping claim, for instance, that “French theory” stems from a structural and therefore insurmountable misunderstanding on the part of the American intellectual field as a whole (French Theory, trans. Jeff Fort, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2008, 5).Although the extent to which one can speak of an edited collection as a whole has essential limits, Dead Theory seems to operate from beginning to end within a certain precomprehension of “theory.” In his editorial introduction, Di Leo holds that “theory” is close enough to philosophy and literary criticism to be mistaken for them but distinct enough from them to merit another name (7). But Di Leo offers little more, finally, than this merely nominal specificity, presuming that we know not only what he is talking about when he talks about “theory” but also why he must talk about it as theory. Throughout the volume, the elusiveness of “theory” intensifies. While there seems to be no question in Dead Theory that the word “theory” applies to a certain style that flourished for a few decades especially (but not only) in the United States, one would read at pains to find a basic consensus among the contributors on the term's specificity. “Theory” is taken variously for an object of study, a field of study, a method spanning fields of study, and an institution; at times it is rooted in conceptual thinking and, at others, in affect; at times it is associated with critical thinking in general and, at others, with the visibility and phenomenality audible in its etymology (theōrein); at times it is related to systematic thought, at times to hairline fractures within a system, and at others to the outright nonsystematic. To glean some of its more precise contours in the volume, I isolate three of the most promising and therefore most telling instances where “theory” surfaces as a problem in its own right.(a) Before thematizing some of theory's death throes in the late 1990s and situating them within the larger context of a neoliberal wave, Herman Rapaport recognizes the need to specify his understanding of “theory” from the very beginning of “The Humanists Strike Back.” He does so only in a note, however, and from a perspective that remains factually descriptive, disciplinarily derivative, and conceptually negative or reactive. I emphasize a few terms in his formulation: Theory, as I am addressing it, speaks historically to the influx of revolutionary innovations in European thought transmitted to Anglo-American universities during the 1970s and after that derived from philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and socioeconomic analysis. Such thinking invalidated Cartesianism, positivism, humanism, and ethnocentricism. (69, note 1)(b) Zahi Zalloua is the only contributor to address the specificity of theory at length and even holds that theory, to be theory, “must continually revisit its distinction from philosophy” (165). In “Theory's Autoimmunity,” Zalloua attempts not only to revisit this distinction but also, more fundamentally, to contribute to its establishment by constellating Montaigne's skepticism with a few “theoretical” notions such as autoimmunity in Derrida, aphanisis in Lacan, and askesis in Foucault. But “theory” becomes all the more enigmatic when Zalloua claims that it seeks “to revitalize” a certain definition of philosophy (159). Not only does the promised specificity of “theory” recede into philosophy; one of the thinkers most readily recognized as a theorist provides Zalloua with the definition of philosophy into which theory seems to dissolve. “The ‘essay’ ... is the living substance of philosophy, at least if we assume that philosophy is still what it was in times past, i.e., an ‘ascesis,’ askēsis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought” (Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage Books, 1985, 9).(c) At the beginning of “Eclipse of the Gaze,” Kir Kuiken sets aside questions of theory as an institutional legacy with the prior and more profound claim that, if theory is to have a future as a field or otherwise, “it will only be thanks to the means by which it continually pushes up against its own internal limits” (173). An “internal limit” promises to clarify not only the very possibility of theory's “death” in principle and thus regardless of this or that date on which it might be pronounced dead—“theory,” Kuiken stresses, “has always been dying” (173)—but also some sort of “interiority” for theory without which one could never speak of “internal limits.” Kuiken quickly turns to one limit in particular through the problem of death and community in Jean-Luc Nancy, and his discussion remains valid and insightful in its own right, but it goes no further toward a strictly theoretical “interiority.” The specific work of “theory” recedes once again when, for instance, he symptomatically and repeatedly refers to “theory” and “philosophy” as if they were synonyms (173, 176, and 181).To be sure, no single article in Dead Theory is responsible for defining what's often somnambulistically called “theory.” If, however, one insists that the premise that binds the volume—“theory,” its “death,” its “afterlife”—also imposes the question of what theory is such that it can die, live on, be reborn, mourned, or even recognized, then the total effect tends to be disconcerting. Perhaps the greatest merit of the volume as a whole—in abstraction, then, from the independent merits of each article within the particular horizon of its discussion—lies in somewhat inadvertently renewing the challenges of undertaking theory “as such.”

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