41.2.brennan

New Literary History, 2010, 41: 277–299

Running and Dodging: The Rhetoric of Doubleness in Contemporary Theory

Timothy Brennan

Speak of the weatherBe thankful he’s dead

Who before he had spokenTook back what he said

—Bertolt Brecht1

The sociology of literature has often been involved in producing an inventory of social forms. In this role, it has often paid close attention to the formal properties of language, and so

clarified the social setting of literature by way of what was once called “stylistics.” The best literary sociologists—Henri Lefebvre, Raymond Wil-liams, and Pierre Bourdieu—frequently undertook such an enterprise and I will look at two of them later in this essay. In fact, the very con-cept of an inventory, which has been associated with Antonio Gramsci’s ideas about the constitution of the self, was derived from the founder of literary sociology, Giambattista Vico, whose early eighteenth-century proposals turned the science of rhetoric into a method of reading the poetic language of humans in prehistory. In Vico’s influential technique, the mind of civic and political humanity was approached through form. This is sometimes forgotten when thinking of sociology’s nineteenth-century focus on urban underclasses, the abnormal, and the anonymous logic of institutions—a sociology, in other words, that has generic rather than formal connotations as its basis.

An inward turn toward questions of style, then, can be a properly sociological concern, even in a theoretical environment such as ours that often sees the sociological as spoiling the game of form by over-contextualizing the work or reducing it to nonliterary determinations. This suspicion is every bit as strong today in overtly “political” criticism—like that of Jacques Rancière, for example—as it is in the belletristic dimensions of some versions of deconstruction, where the enigmatic character of form is typically foregrounded, or identified as what can never be reduced to the social as such.2 In these circles, “undecidability”

new literary history278

is once again mobilized as a redemptive feature of fiction, denying in advance and as a matter of political principle any hermeneutic endeavor that pretends to render the signified comprehensible, seeing meaning itself as a foreclosure of alternative possibilities.3

In a general sense, this is the “doubleness” referred to in my title, and that I plan to explore below. What seems overlooked in much of our criticism, at any rate, are the benefits of objectifying theoretical style, seeing its ideological gestures as formal components in and of themselves. The first thing to note is that this involves more than a purely formal analysis. It demands a description of the political logic of form as well as an account of how formal devices are often homolo-gies of social agendas. Fredric Jameson’s idea of “cognitive mapping” is an example of such a homology between socius and form, grafting the former onto the latter. But is there a way of getting to the reverse by returning, paradoxically, to the text in order to examine from the outside the rhetorical patterns that betray a political significance never made explicit . . . in fact, explicitly not made so? What would an analysis of the theory posture look like?

Although it certainly follows in their spirit, this sort of inquiry would have to take a different shape from that of Bourdieu or Williams. Both in different ways map a selective tradition of theory that was forged roughly between 1975 and 2000. The phrase “selective tradition” is taken from Williams, who in The Long Revolution uses it in a somewhat different man-ner to demonstrate how the English literary canon, carved out of tens of thousands of possible texts, was the outcome of an arduous modeling of value derived more or less unconsciously from the principles of English social hierarchy. He went on to use the phrase to describe the unwitting pressures on canon-formation within theory as well. Here, by contrast, I am introducing a different element, one of conscious selection and disavowal, and in that way describing “theory” as a polemical rewriting of a targeted political stance.4

Within this general frame, we have seen in the last decade several important new shifts of emphasis. On the one hand, there have been attempts to leave theory behind, but without resolving any of the philo-sophical or methodological problems it posed. Criticism of this type marks an emphatic departure from the politics of textuality and dis-course (which characterized the 1980s and 1990s) to a militant language of engagement and activism. As a result, many of the cultural-theory journals have now become platforms for work in what might be called the “combat mode.”5 Yesterday’s queries about the episteme here take shape as essays that directly invoke Abu Ghraib, flirt with problems of economics, and focus on the specific and local brutalities of empire, as though “mediation” were now a thoroughly irrelevant idea.

279running and dodging

On the other hand, in a different effort to move beyond the theoretical tendencies of recent decades (but representing almost the exact opposite of the first position), we have the reemergence of a new textuality: the “new formalism” movement in poetry studies, for example, or in the recent interest in “surface reading.” Within this quarter we are asked to see texts as themselves “bearing witness” to truth and to acknowledge “the complexity of literary surfaces.”6 An aspect of this thinking can also be found in Rancière’s work since, like him, this move rejects the search for hidden meanings, and no longer sees its purpose in ideological demystification (which are taken to be marks of intellectual arrogance or political leadership in the bad sense).7

This new textualism has, in one variant, found a voice also in “fict-ocriticism,” where creative writing is seen as itself a theory, and where theory, in order to perform its political tasks, fulfills itself in literature. In this incarnation, the theorist as artist sees him or herself as being more political because s/he is involved in practice. By summoning a term that appears to place fictocritics in a more committed, hands-on role, these critics deploy the word “practice” as a way of referring to the performance of identity—including the performance of being an intellectual who theorizes practice. In effect, by moving beyond abstract thinking, fictocriticism recuses itself from the labor of philosophical thought. Not only theory but (an older) politics belongs for them to the world of interpretation, which has been rendered largely irrelevant in a digital environment.8

Although no fictocritic, Rancière also reasserts literary autonomy under the sign of the “political” in an era when discourse in the humanities has become openly and aggressively political in a nominal sense. Despite his brilliant writing on democracy, on disagreement, and on labor, he abreacts to what he sees as encroachments on the realm of the aesthetic by literary sociology, insisting on the freedom of the poet to “withdraw from the duty of representation” and for a politics that dwells “in the non-signifying.” He is, as he puts it, drawn to the “body of incarnation” of the text that “escape[s] the fate of the letter released into the world.”9

One aspect of this awkward struggle to do away with the older theoretical dominant—although this is not true of either Rancière or fictocriticism—is a declaration of fatigue with the de rigueur gesture that one’s theory has a politics at all, putting an end to all this talk of politics and getting back to the business of aesthetic pleasure. And the other is, as I have said, its opposite—the conviction that the political issues before us (financial collapse, legalized torture, privatization, and permanent war) are too urgent and dangerous for us to be deterred by theory, which is suddenly seen as a luxury disconnected from the need to think through complex social processes.10


Although examples of each trend exist in their own element, it is a third variant that interests me most, since it is more pervasive and grows more directly out of the theoretical environment of the past it seeks to revive. For that reason it forms the basis of the inventory of theoretical gestures that I pursue below.11 I mean to refer to that powerful recent articulation of a theoretical style that declares itself as immediately political—whose theory is a politics performed, trying in its own way to flee one of the legacies of poststructuralism, which is per-ceived (because it prioritizes discourse) to have become paralytic; and, what is more, to do so in the name of theory. As distinct from “critique,” which involves a self-interrogation and a comparison of one’s positions to a ground, this tendency insinuates that theory is itself the practical world, the place where “possibility” presents itself in the form of previ-ously unthought thoughts, new constellations of meanings, percipient exercises of insight.

The deliberate rejection of all correspondence to experience, evidence, or proof is seen as the necessary precondition for the creation of openings to new modalities of perception, since any politics based on the merely existing would degrade the political as such. It is in the guarded terrain of a carefully prepared lexicon that a utopian space is carved out. And, indeed, the utopia cannot survive outside the medium of that lexicon, and so it flees from any debate that would require translating ideas into the idiom of skeptical interlocutors.12 For this kind of thought-in-extremis, then, the verbal space of theory allows the reader to transform him or herself into a global agent who does not act agentially (for instance, by persuading, unifying, or organizing); rather, their agency is to escape agency. In this mode, the reader exists immanently in an oppositional space, refusing to grant the merely real its reality.

I have written elsewhere about one strain of this articulation in “new Italian” thought (Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Giorgio Agamben) but it is much more widely found—for example, in a large wing of post-Althusserian thinking defined by the invention of “Spinoza” as a proto-Marxist philosopher. It appears as well in some aspects of Deleuzian theory, especially around the journal Semiotext(e) with its enthusiasm for Italian autonomism and French situationism and operating under the banner of a “hatred of capitalism.”13 And by far the most numerous and influential expression of this tendency, with all the pros and cons of having entered an academic common sense, is that of political Der-rideanism. Today this corner represents theorists who draw their energies from the philosopher’s late work on friendship and cosmopolitanism, and who see literary or cultural studies not as a science, a theory, or even a mode of inquiry but an instrument in the “development of a new


form of politics and a new political project” based on the performative act of doing theory.14 Under the very agonies of joblessness, increasing corporate control of government, and the general disparagement of all things intellectual, theory is compelled in this way to up the ante by establishing for itself a public role as the counterposition to politics as usual.

As theory has in this fashion moved from exposing problems of lin-guistic and cultural mediation to a declaration of its own political im-mediacy, it is forced to assume a dissembled form. It cannot otherwise be consistent with its earlier, more overtly discursive phase when the very ground of mediation or mystification provided the bulk of the analysis in essays obsessed with the form of their articulation. A counterposi-tion of this type, though, cannot achieve the supersession it seeks by offering a new position that betters what came before (for that would be to fall prey to a Hegelian “progressivism”). On the contrary, it must refuse to be positioned at all vis-à-vis what came before, “taking back what it said” even before the utterance has been voiced (to allude to the epigraph from Brecht above). And in its own mind this it does for solidly political reasons. I will have more to say about the effects of this running and dodging from the past, a gesture that depends on a struc-tured indeterminacy that can never be polluted by a definite defensible concept or arguable stand.

The prose of political immediacy constantly generates protective force fields of countervalue to prevent cooptation, a circling, retreating motion. Within this protected but surrounded space, the theorist sees him or herself departing sharply from the tenuously civic and amelio-rative emphases of the liberal humanist. Rejecting liberalism for being apologetic and tepid, it nevertheless shares a similar aesthetic value, expressed as an endless cycle of refutations and revisions. These, in turn, stand in as the very definition of the interpretive act, happily unresolved, and displaying a pluralist sublime that enshrines the open-ended as its end, and complexity as its primary aesthetic ideal. Notwithstanding the fundamental contradiction inherent in such a position, not having a telos is the telos of this strand of thought. Or, to put it another way, its telos is irresolution.

In one way or another, the methodological gestures of theory in its selective tradition are marked by this philosophical doubling, the desire to be both here and there at the same time, speaking and withdrawing at once.15 With an urge for political effectivity belied by an active flight from traditional forms of political organization and action, theory is in this way confounded. Associating itself for reasons of political authen-ticity with the dissident mode of an originally left-Hegelian critique, it


nevertheless rejects that tradition’s commitments to civic action, and flees from most of its political conclusions on principle, as it does from its attempts to systematize thinking. As a result, it is compelled only to signify on that tradition, to achieve in form what the other achieved by the flight from mere form. What was once so attractive about the thinking of Georg Lukács, Jürgen Habermas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Theodor Adorno, Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, or Lefebvre—namely, that what exists as their statement is always dialogic, always an engagement with the thoughts of others—is here displaced by the stand-alone utterance. Consequently, the selective tradition does not ignore the work of earlier thinkers—on the contrary, it is highly derivative of them. But, it does not lower itself to an exchange with those with whom it disagrees or whom it imitates; instead, following Nietzsche’s advice, it “turns its eyes away” from adversaries. In the philosophical traditions of critique, by contrast, the central moment of philosophy is a conversation with antagonists, and on the other’s terms. Theory, on the other hand, has been rendered epigrammatic. Although its arguments are fierce and unyielding, and although it views its opponents as implacable enemies, it never argues with them by identifying a counterauthority against which new evidence or reasoning has to be offered. Instead, it associates conceptual depth and gravity with the disembodied utterance: its truth lies in an intention-ally lofty, sibylline gesture whose proof is its allure.

There is no particular reason, of course, that all modes of argumenta-tion or theorizing should be plain, flat, or direct, or that disagreements should on principle always be brought to the surface by forgoing the tact of indirection. It is only that indirection and dissembling are not the same thing. And it is not that dissimulation should be ruled out in advance in any normative sense, only that it is an approach, once adopted, that precludes critique.16

The logic of theory in its selective tradition, then, grows out of this gesture of taking on a political legacy of conflict and demystification as one’s own while submitting it to the purifying register of aesthetic inde-terminacy. Ostensibly self-cancelling (since in this lineage, the subject is considered imaginary and without a center), it is actually self-affirming. In short, as Raymond Williams suggested in The Politics of Modernism, the tropes of theory in its selective tradition closely resemble the tropes of literary modernism.17 For both contemporary theory and modernism, literature is still, just as it had been for the New Critics of the 1940s and 1950s, what escapes the system. It is the unverifiable.


The Critic of Doubleness: Pierre Bourdieu

The work of Bourdieu has, to many of us, seemed to offer a diagnosis of this kind of move—to show, among other things, how the model that aesthetic thinking is its own exalted end emerges as the disposition of the intellectual worker. He explores this subject at length in The Rules of Art, his study of Flaubert’s novel L’education sentimentale—arguably the most original and significant work of literary criticism in the last two decades. 18 In this work Bourdieu explains the internal logic of the claim that politics resides within aesthetics, and describes in some detail the pressures that brought it about. He vividly depicts the history of the first tentative moves to assert an insurrectionary core to the practices of autonomous art.19 Resurrecting the personalities, friendships, private encounters, media, and macropolitics of the mid-nineteenth century, which are all extensively narrated, the book can also be seen in some ways as a roman à clef. For, as Bourdieu sees it, Baudelaire’s and Flau-bert’s invention of aesthetic autonomy is a precise counterpart to the predicates of contemporary theorists he skeptically (if indirectly) ad-dressed in other work.20 These inventions still, and in similar ways, carry on the essential “double-movement” of the original, at whose heart lies a self-styled literary revolt against the bourgeois privilege to which the artist nevertheless aspires.

Exactly because Flaubert designed his novel Sentimental Education to be a sociology of the field he occupied (to escape turning out like his main character, Frédéric Moreau, whom he otherwise resembles), Bourdieu arrives at a striking definition of the duplicitous character of literature itself: “This discourse which speaks of the social or psycho-logical world as if it did not speak of it; which cannot speak of this world except on condition that it only speak of it as if it did not speak of it” (RA 3). Every stratum of Parisian society, meticulously slotted by Flaubert into an interlocking network of types, vies for power and money in an asymmetrical struggle in which bohemia leverages its cultural capital and upstart aura to acquire allies in high places. These allies then act as its benefactors at a time when aristocratic patronage can no longer be found and when the bohemian takes on an aristocratic disdain for acquired wealth, a sublimation of the great works of the past, and a withering hatred of social reform.

The cornered artist in the mercenary surroundings of the Second Empire, languishing without patronage and with contempt for the buying public, learns to devise, as Bourdieu terms it, “the cult of disinterestedness”—a “prodigious reversal, which turns poverty into rejected riches, hence spiritual riches” (RA 28). The indistinct, insecure


status of the heroic artist-supplicant employs “the ambiguous use of a citation which may have the value of either ratification or derision, and expresses both hostility . . . and identification” (RA 31). The famous torments of Flaubertian style, the painstaking labor to make language impassive, emotionless and self-mocking, at the same time makes it (and him), and for just these reasons, superior. What we are enjoined to rec-ognize, then, is that if Anglo-American theory of the past few decades had declared that language speaks man, that the system of discourse supersedes the subject, this discovery did not emerge from a specialized turn-of-the-century linguistic revolution (as the narrative goes). Instead, as Bourdieu demonstrates, it must be seen as a mid-nineteenth-century aesthetic strategy, following on Baudelaire’s and Flaubert’s invention of the literary field as a “world apart, subject to its own laws” (RA 48).

The Flaubertian formula, “I detest X (a writer, manner, movement, theory, etc.) . . . but I detest just as much the opposite of X” (what Roland Barthes derided as “neither-norism” in Mythologies) is the “transformed form of the contradictory properties of the [social] position” (RA 79).21 As Bourdieu avers, it is the vulnerability of artists, caught between the market and the censor, that drives them to an apparent volatility and intransigence, although one that symbolizes the very indeterminacy of their position: an “autonomy” welcomed by those in power who would accept them as dependents.22 The very outward-turning gesture of meet-ing the reality of the social world in the Flaubertian sense of seeing Sentimental Education as an ironic sociology demands an inward-turning emphasis on the plasticity and materiality of words, the now objectified language upon which the new status of the artist depends: “The intensi-fied experience of the real that they have helped to produce in the very mind of the writer, is to oblige the reader to linger over the perceptible form of the text, with its visible and sonorous material” (RA 109).

Bourdieu’s study of the historical categories of artistic perception is conspicuously absent from the bibliographies of much recent work in literary aesthetics, despite the fact that, more than any other study, it describes the mechanism by which today’s critics translate conventional notions into novel concepts by way of verbal attitudes. Nonetheless, his work is an injunction for us to make an altogether different return to the text in order to examine, from the outside, the rhetorical patterns that betray a political significance that, as I said at the outset, hides from itself.

It is difficult to articulate—and rare to see anyone even try—what theory looks like at the level of style to those who draw their influences from traditions other than the selective one I alluded to in the previous section. At least from where I stand, the exasperation one feels faced by


work whose content of form seems so transparently assured of its own subtlety is undeniable. So my overall intention in this essay is to see if there is anything to be learned by categorizing and anatomizing this con-tent of form from the standpoint of critique (a tradition I earlier linked with argument, opposition, and debate). Let me turn to one rather long example before proceeding to a discussion of other cases, which I hope will further clarify the embedded rhetorical gestures of theory.

Running and Dodging

When teaching courses in literary theory, I have often noticed that to my students Derrida is from the outset more instantly appealing, he rings more mental bells and is more accessible than the more versatile and resilient thinking of, for example, Karl Polanyi, Mary Douglas, or Raymond Williams. I hope it is obvious in setting up this contrast that I might have chosen others, for it is the general point that I am after. That Derrida would be considered more accessible is unexpected, since the initial impression of most scholars would surely be that Derrida is both more dense and more philosophically intricate than any of the three thinkers just mentioned. Williams, for instance, would be taken to be a demotic writer, a populist, with an admirable if somewhat expository intelligence.

The poetic evocations of Derrida are of course compelling, but let us look first at a fragment from Raymond Williams’s short chapter on “Language” in the 1977 book Marxism and Literature:

The whole question of the distinction between ‘language’ and ‘reality’ was eventually forced into consciousness, initially in a surprising way. Descartes, in reinforcing the distinction and making it more precise, and in demanding that the criterion of connection should be not metaphysical or conventional but grounded in scientific knowledge, provoked new questions by the very force of his skepticism about the old answers. It was in response to Descartes that Vico proposed his criterion that we can have full knowledge only of what we can ourselves make or do. In one decisive respect this response was reactionary. Since men have not in any obvious sense made the physical world, a powerful new conception of scientific knowledge was ruled out a priori and was, as before, reserved to God. Yet on the other hand, by insisting that we can understand society because we have made it, indeed that we understand it not abstractly but in the very process of making it, and that the activity of language is central to this process, Vico opened up a whole new dimension.23


One may notice that in condensing a world of ideas ranging from the historical personages of Descartes and Vico to the epistemological muddling of language and reality, Williams provides a synthetic view of a history of ideas that cannot be anthologized easily, nor cited in the form of an epigrammatic outburst or coinage. For that reason, it lends itself poorly to an apparent sumptuousness of thought. In a chapter of twenty pages, he traverses theories of language in pre-Socratic philosophy through Plato’s Cratylus and the medieval trivium to Russian formalism by way of nineteenth-century comparative grammar.

Williams demonstrates how in Western philosophy language came gradually to be seen as a set of rules and laws, a daunting and alien entity above and outside the person, rather than as an activity. As Vološinov had argued in 1929 (and Williams follows Vološinov very closely here) the fixity of linguistic norms that were seen to trump the creative activity of speakers in a collective setting, precluding their creative manipula-tion of diction and syntax—the reduction, if you will, of all language to langue—was the inheritance of nineteenth-century philology. This might come as a surprising source for the Saussurean school, given Saussure’s supposed departure from the exclusive diachrony of philology. And yet both derive their linguistic principles from the study of dead, finished, and defunct literary languages, giving the alien word (in Williams’s words) “a grandiose organizing role” as well as an imperialist dimension. For the alien perfection of classical languages was seen as the product of a “conqueror nation of an old and once mighty culture” that could in this way be enlisted on behalf of a “newcomer nation”—the imperial spirit of the nineteenth century finding its source, as it were, in classi-cal empires past. This process is approximated, with some differences, in the Heideggerian, but especially the Nietzschean, appeals to Greek antiquity, which have been so overwhelmingly influential in establishing the argot of contemporary theory.24

By contrast, Williams reminds us of the full implications of the idea that language is constitutive. If reality cannot be grasped except through the bond and bridge of linguistic interaction, it matters less that the sign intrudes in the process of meaning, forming a screen or barrier that ensures semantic indeterminacy, than that the speaker and author exist for an audience. The scene of language is always local and specific, one in which linguistic norms are called upon and usually manipulated on behalf of an audience for a variety of conflicting intentions. Structural-ism and poststructuralism seem almost naïve in this setting. They exalt a partial, bookish, hierarchically imposed model of language drawn from the cult of the library, and if poststructuralism differs from the mentor it supposedly unseats, it is only in reasserting for this clerical hypostasis


a rhetoric of polyphonic openings and play. Both schools arrest the contexts of meaning, and abstractly efface the physical labor involved in the utterance, which is always to some degree a collective encounter in a medium whose norms are themselves transitory and subject to the force of human creativity.

Williams’s writing, we should note, is deceptively straightforward at the level of the sentence. But apart from the volumes of prior reading required to appreciate his range of reference, his writing also demands a constant maneuvering and renegotiation, since the kinds of point being made are consistently different, the product of syntheses of earlier aspects of an argument building to a crescendo and filled with not-so-minor dis-sonances. Williams’s thinking is in this way symphonic and although, like any symphony, it conveys a single mood, it is extraordinarily difficult to analyze the intricate architecture of its individual components.

Now let us turn to Derrida in a passage from Donner le temps: I. La fausse monnaie (1991) (translated into English as Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money), his most direct treatment of economics:

To join together, in a title, time and the gift may seem to be a laborious arti-fice. What can time have to do with the gift? We mean: what would there be to see in that? What would they have to do with each other, or more literally, to see together, qu’est-ce qu’ils auraient à voir ensemble, one would say in French. Of course, they have nothing to see together and first of all because both of them have a singular relation to the visible. Time, in any case, gives nothing to see. . . . One can only be blind to time, to the essential disappearance of time . . . Nothing sees the light of day, no phenomenon, that is not on the measure of day, in other words, of the revolution that is the rhythm of a sun’s course. . . . We will let ourselves be carried away by this word revolution. At stake is a certain circle whose figure precipitates both time and the gift toward the possibility of their impossibility. . . . Of this privilege of circular movement in the representation of time, let us take only one index for the moment. It is a note by Heidegger . . . Some time ago I attempted a reading of it in “Ousia and Grammè” [and then Derrida goes on to rehearse that earlier reading].25

There are several aspects of this passage, despite its daunting self-reflexivity, that make it attractive to those at an early stage wrestling with the lures of theory. First, it is a thinking that watches itself think, dramatizing (and flattering) the act of author and reader alike, and at the same time. Next, although billed as a philosophical reflection on economics, its métier is compulsively literary, and as such, a relief to many readers testing the philosophical waters. It draws on a familiar (and comforting) hermeneutic repertoire that plays with syntax and double entendre, indeed comments on the syntax of the very sentence


that comments on syntax, moving our eyes and ears to the palpability of a language in its very opacity that, again, admires itself as it revels in the quirks of translation in general, and that offers itself up freely in translation from French to English.

Notice too, though, the coy intentions of Derrida’s punning, where much of his argument is slipped in, as it were, along the way of mean-ing rather than face-to-face with its interlocutor. The state of owning or possessing (to have: avoir) is here rendered as the state of understand-ing (to see: à voir). The professional thinker here plays the role, in this ordered scriptural terrain, of grand owner. Let us note as well the sepa-rability of agent and medium—precisely Williams’s earlier point about the evacuation of context and activity. Only language lives, acts, puns. With the pretense of working with a mind of its own, Derrida’s language allows the phrase “time . . . giving nothing to see” (Le temps . . . donne rien à voir) to slip over into the rather different phrase “disappearance of time” (la disparition essentielle du temps). The haphazard colloquialism, “nothing sees the light of day” (rien ne vient au jour) leads, again playfully, to the overliteral reading of “day” as the “rhythm of the sun’s course” (rythme la course d’un soleil). Suddenly, then, a problem of epistemology (individual, active, personal sight) is transformed into the peremptory given of natural science (cosmic, indifferent, evolutionary vision), and “seeing” becomes a matter of the circular motions of the planets—a movement that leads to the grossest pun of all: revolution. Revolution, by playing on the meaning of “circle,” is meant to be understood both as the very real and indeed boring and eternal course of the heavenly bodies, and on the other half of the image, as the “impossibility” of any social transformation.

Under the current regime of theory, the student’s recognition of these kinds of points is prepared in advance of his or her actual read-ing of Derrida. Derrida is more understandable, more an intellectual home, from the start since, apart from the entertainment value of such writing found in its self-irony, he projects the security of conventional ideas. The knowledge he demands of us is knowledge ready to hand: the formal knowledge of metaphorical logic. The hero of his tale is the reader playing the role of writer into whom we as readers can again project ourselves. Insofar as he calls upon us to venture into intellec-tual history, he turns to the single figure of Heidegger, the philosopher whom Derrida has repeatedly turned to, and largely rephrased, for over thirty years. Indeed, everything about this passage is a rehearsal, of the forms and contents of a significant part of Derrida’s work for that same thirty years. He is attractive in part because what he has to say is usually the same—a matter illustrated in this passage by the familiar Derridean


practice of self-quotation. His philosophical depth is to that degree easily won, and he triumphs by giving us literally less to think about.

The strategy works because its intent is less to free prose from its evidentiary referent than to taunt that referent with the mimicry of cor-respondence (the pretense to meaning) that can then, when the prose reasserts itself as object, be revealed a ruse. In this way, the sheer empty versatility of the prose, the creaking machinery of erudition, arises as its own ground. This mode of theorizing continually runs and dodges around any alterity that can be held as productive of the singularity that alterity, in opposition, creates. Moreover, it is the basic philosophical claim of the Derridean text, which operates according to the rigid model of appositional statement and restatement. In this sense, Derridean writing is a repetitive attempt to approach (asymptotically) the always fleeting third element, the spectral presence of the nonpresent, or at least to force the reader to submit to that which cannot be seen but which, by being surrounded and pitilessly pursued by phrases, slowly emerges as thing. The great triumph of Derrida’s ontological lessons from Heide-gger is that both have succeeded, while questioning being, in inducing readers to write long books about nothing. It is, however, a very precise nothing described at some length by Heidegger in “What is Metaphys-ics?” as the essential absence overlooked by the methods of the natural sciences. But that is the subject of a different essay.

The production relationship is by analogy repeated here and re-inforced, although this is not part of Derrida’s conscious project on economics in Donner le temps. In reading the Derridean essay, the frame demands that we assume he is working for us. In fact, the relationship is inverted. We are the ones who supply what has been carefully eliminated from the original, projecting on to a deliberate antimeaning, a meaning that, as formula, is more easily transmissible. The inevitable sense of feebleness in our rendering-as-encapsulation of his “depth”—that which alone makes the content transferable—is evident when placed beside the more potent yet effete artifice of the Derridean text. In instance after instance, Derrida exhibits the conundrum faced by his master Heidegger who, like Derrida, is Hegel’s reflected light. For Derrida in effect petrifies Hegel’s notions of the contradictory, doubling character of thought, reducing them to the inflexible features of a reading practice. The “logic of the supplement” is little more than a pale dialectics in which A is not opposed to B so much as A is both added to and replaces B, making A and B neither equivalent nor opposed but differant (which is to say, self-alienated, indecisive, unresolved, seeking, in fact, the state of deferment as a salvational irresolution).26


What has indeed changed in the movement from the one thinker to the other is a turn from politics to ethics—both on the microlevel of the affective and intellectual logic of the move itself (abstaining, evasive, polite) and on the macrolevel of intellectual history, where abolishing Hegel allegorically signifies getting beyond Marx, in turn signifying the overcoming of an agential, organizational politics. If in Hegel we come to understand that the empirical is a lie in the sense that what we perceive is already decaying, already developing into its opposite under the changes that we effect by the act of conceptualization, in Derrida the statement is itself a performative contradiction—or lie—that asserts precisely the opposite of the truth in order to demonstrate its doubleness.

If presence is the unworthy desire of speech, Derrida would have it that we cannot indulge in the reversal by claiming that writing, rather than speech, possesses presence. But he is left with no other argument than precisely that, which is what compels the strategy we repeatedly see in what I have called “running and dodging.” Derrida, in short, op-poses opposition. We might say that his entire philosophical movement is devoted to an opposition towards opposition. Derrida, then, must posit a relationship rather than a thing (precisely as Hegel did in the name of opposition), only now this relationship is a ghost or specter, and functions very much like a thing. Consequently, his analysis rests not on presence but on the lack of presence, where lack and desire are coterminous (we can only desire what we do not have). Derrida makes of this lack a subject, just as Heidegger in “What is Metaphysics?” had made nothing a productive component of the study of objects.27 For in this mimicry of Hegel—copying the one he would displace—Derrida takes us to a mental space where one can always display proof of what is not because what is not, as lack, is. And here we have the Derridean formula that has proved so influential in its infinite iterations in liter-ary and cultural theory: any text is an authority for one’s positions, for it either will support them by embracing them or support them by not embracing them. This is the primitive accumulation of truth in the service of an ethic of dissimulation.

In Derrida’s career, this foundational “violence of the letter” began with his now-legendary reading of Rousseau, but one (though this is not contained in the legend) that was astonishingly literalist.28 Far from demonstrating that the presence of Rousseau’s lover, the soft breath of her being in a closed room, was for Rousseau a “dangerous ideal” (as Derrida had argued in Of Grammatology), Rousseau had observed some-thing quite different and dangerous to the Derridean ideal. Resigning himself reluctantly to the perversity that is the love of writing, Rousseau was protesting against the simulacrum to which he was drawn in the


presence of the authentic—that he had then to disparage as a ruse, by arguing that there is no authenticity in order to prioritize paper and pen over flesh. Rousseau was not proposing (contra Derrida’s read-ing) that the supplement is dangerous but that it is the intellectual’s paradoxical fulfillment—a form of undeserved mastery over events he considers inferior when actually lived. This is precisely the mastery that Derrida exults and seeks, of course, and is what he meant by an ethics of reading. None of this, needless to say, will prevent Derrida’s followers who, when presented with such objections, defend him on the ground (of all things) that one must pay attention to the intricacies of his texts and his intentions as they are actually written by referring to those late-career works on friendship, cosmopolitanism, South Africa, Russia, and his French-speaking childhood in Algeria, that seem so directly to engage the world of current events in political language. Apparently for him and him alone, the text is to be held out as incontrovertible and transparent proof of intent.

To turn the text against itself has always been an aspect of the exegeti-cal repertoire in the tradition of the disembodied statement so charac-teristic of today’s claims on behalf of political immediacy. In The Bible, A Biography, for example, Karen Armstrong discusses the conventional interpretive move based on “doubling” and “reading into the text that which is not there” for polemical purposes in an intentionally cryptic language that sets up the hermeneut as the technician of the sacred.29 At least some expressions of this rhetorical posture were, she points out, established in the transitional years between BCE and CE when the politics of textual authority took a particularly acute turn:

The second-century author [of Daniel] was clearly not interested in the original meaning of the text: Jeremiah had obviously prophesied, in a round figure, the length of the Babylonian exile. He wanted to find an entirely new significance in the ancient oracle. . . . Instead of looking back to uncover its historical meaning, the interpreter would make the text speak to the present and the future.30

Armstrong identifies this well-established maneuver as having been perfected already in the first century BCE by the famous Alexandrian exegete Philo.31 And so we return again to the paradoxical pastness of the “rupture” that supposedly attends the revolutionary gestures of theory in its selective tradition today—its affinity to religious modes of thinking, the nagging textualism of its gesture towards a practical or engaged politics, and its modernist reaction against the modern.


An Inventory of Doubling Gestures

These gestures are not limited to this or that theorist in the immediate politics of the selective tradition. On the contrary, they are adopted across the entire field in what has become an act of compulsory apprenticeship to an ethical understanding of the politics of form. The opposition to opposition, for instance, is almost environmental—in Rancière’s recent writing on the aesthetic dimension of politics, for example, where he employs the word dissensus, and then rushes to point out that this term does not mean conflict: “It is [rather] a perturbation of the normal relation between sense and sense.”32 The desire to move past conflict is of course not a stylistic matter alone but a metaphoric rendering of the “middle way” of mainstream liberalism, and a contradictory accompani-ment to the more immediately political turn in theory we have been discussing.

It should be added that not every gesture in theory is a rhetorical figure; it can be an epistemological formula, or a strategy of reading, as well. But in each case it leaves traces of its political outlook in a recog-nizable style. The repertoire of theory in particular combinations has become in this way limited, manageable, and insistent. It is learned by its apprentices as a mode of articulation whose ideological positions are expressed as style and, in fact, it frequently draws from the same group of ideas relentlessly characterized as new, doing its work of persuasion phatically.33

Broadly speaking, then, how might some of these rhetorical gestures be characterized? They can certainly be said to include the following: 1) “circularity,” an antithetical structure that sets out to demonstrate the complicity of critique with the target of criticism; that is, to render cri-tique impossible by seeing it as inherently guilty of reproducing whatever it criticizes.34 Another entry would be: 2) “hypertrophe,” a figure that, lacking a ground, appeals to the deliberate outrage of overstatement. In this vein, we find Giorgio Agamben declaring that no one has ever really studied Auschwitz or Antonio Negri asserting that the factory is nothing more than a prison; or, differently yet, André Gorz intoning that “we” live in a postindustrial society; or, finally, Foucault’s familiar proclamation that in authorship, it does not matter who is speaking, as though we do not hear or remember these words for the very reason that it was Foucault who uttered them. 3) “Assemblage,” the citing of a group of thinkers as one’s authorities whose positions are in fact incom-patible with one another or even directly at war, without distinguishing among the positions or marking the incoherence of the amalgam. This move is meant to establish one’s nonsectarian outlook and generosity of


mind, when it is often about traducing and even reducing arguments. 4) “Groundlessness,” the idea that freeing one’s statements from any correspondence to the sensual or objective world, or even to any clear proposition rooted in an objectively other philosophy, allows for a com-plete break from earlier modes of thought—that it is indeed the only guarantee of surpassing routine thinking in general.

All of these conform to a mode of writing and produce a similar style, but the political autonomy of theory relies also on normalizing a mode of reading. We might be reminded that such techniques of reading are just as prescriptive as New Criticism had been when it scoffed at the intentional fallacy, for example, in order to train readers in the proper aesthetic valuation of the modernist text. Today, such normalized pro-tocols of reading include two predominant tropes: 1) “reading against the grain” and 2) the assertion of a “productive reading.” Although the first is sometimes talked about as though it enriches interpretation by acknowledging the hermeneutic difficulties of contending with ambiguity, of penetrating a text to elicit from it meanings contrary to conventional interpretation, Joris-Karl Huysmans’ A rebours (the original referent for reading against the grain) has, by now, been left far behind. In the con-temporary use of the phrase, as Althusser reformulated it, the concern is not with the grain at all but with bracketing all interest in a philologi-cal content and, if necessary, filling the text with content indifferent to referents in the name of innovation, openness to difference, and making the original one’s own.35 Thus, it is not the problematizing of meaning but the invention of a past—on presumptively political grounds. The second of these protocols, the productive reading, is only a variant of a wider maneuver by means of which meaning is assigned to a text on the basis of what is productive of the political effects one seeks.36 The criterion for a good reading, then, shifts from asking “is it what the au-thor wrote?” to “does it create an effect?”37 In this context, it is easy to see how Adorno can now be read as an anti-Hegelian thinker, Benjamin a surrealist, or Johann Gottfried von Herder a nationalist.

So many of the gestures of contemporary theory, though, have no particular generic identity or coherence, having come to solidify around a collection of everyday words and ideas that one learns to recognize as marking a fealty. It does not even have to be argued any longer, for example, that a telos must be avoided at all costs, along with metaphysical thinking, that all boundaries should be negotiated, that one should never try to represent (speak for) others, that the place to occupy is always in the interstices, that the good scholar does not “disagree with” (which would be too definitive) but puts pressure on views of which they are skeptical. These ways of speaking and their variants duplicate themselves


endlessly—the gestural lexicon of a doubleness that occupies a space somewhere between ambivalence and duplicity. In this amalgam, the same note is struck—that of the desirable middle, a withdrawal which, for that very reason, is felt to be ethical bravery, and where indecision, as indecision, is for that reason taken to be insight.

And yet, there is one term that runs counter to the drift: the idea that rupture rather than continuity is the sign of historical change.38 Through the claim to “rupture,” the fleeing from a position (or rather, the ar-gumentative cloaking of the position one holds by way of insinuation) presents itself as a radical break from an unsavory past purportedly real-ized by the new ethical dispensation of an embodied rhetorical posture. This radical incantation of rupture—borrowed from the literary avant-gardes and a particular kind of modernism (Pound and Woolf rather than Eliot and Yeats)—is, in fact, conservative. For, if nothing else, the apparent calm of insisting on the flow and repeatability of tradition, as opposed to the Copernican shifts of the supposed year zero of the new, provides a mental landscape in which social transformation can actually be imagined. It lends itself more readily to a break from the past on the grounds that it provides clarity about what one can break from and what, by contrast, is an unavoidable aspect of the real—its tenaciously residual elements, as Williams conceived it. Rupture, by contrast, cuts the theorist off from any responsibility to the past, removing any require-ment to converse with one’s predecessors, and drains real novelty of its appeal, downgrading the name of the new in a sense by coupling it with the recycling reminiscent of the commercial world.

Helpful though it is, Bourdieu’s social mapping of aesthetic autonomy could not of course speak directly to the pressures on style and attitude felt by intellectuals circa 2010 (he died in 2002). But these determina-tions are no longer about the absence of patronage, as he argued, even if they are in their own ways just as closely related to the precariousness of intellectuals earning their daily bread. So how might the social posi-tion of the theorists of political immediacy be described? Approaching this question demands the kind of inquiry one finds in Williams’s The Long Revolution, for example, in Régis Debray’s Teachers, Writers, Celebri-ties, in Zygmunt Bauman’s Legislators and Interpreters, and is also what I attempted in Wars of Position.

Briefly put, these days the pressures derive from the odd placement of the university humanist in the division of intellectual labor. 39 The humanities have a greater social value precisely because the humanist is underpaid and nominally (but only nominally) marginal. The humani-ties, in other words, are a use-value that does not signify publicly as a use-value, which makes it more useful since an agenda of value can be


systematized by those who speak of it “as though they did not speak of it.” The conveying of a political philosophy of ethical indecision and irresolution by means of stylistic gestures is perfectly fashioned to shore up this social role of dissimulation: of being both there and not there at once. It also satisfies the pedagogical task of dissemination, allowing the ideology of the mainstream, remade as oppositional and marginal, to be taken up with less effort, and to achieve a mass density more easily.

Running and dodging is the rhetorical image of an ethos of self-uncertainty in which a finely wrought complexity is the name given to what has been painstakingly worked into the prose of theory as part of its dual task, and expressing in this way involuntarily (and without work, and even helplessly) what is really an impossible social bind. Within the now-marginalized traditions of critique, there is no such impossibility. There the critics’ eyes have still to be trained on our own roles as intel-lectuals in an economic and political setting; then too, the interested character of all knowledge must be placed in the context of a dialectical understanding of contradiction and opposition which alone allows it to take a (provisional) stand, and only, therefore, from that standpoint, to see where and what we are.

All of us are driven towards a dissident sensibility in a professional environment of censorship, where the university is explicitly targeted by market-oriented think tanks and politicians. And, if only by dint of a reflex gesture, we are inexorably drawn to be more and more explicitly “political”—not only to respond with some relevance to the market outrages of financial disasters, attacks on habeas corpus, and war, but because the marginalization of the humanities in a postliterate mass cul-ture moves the intellectual on professional grounds (with some hope of advancement) to establish a criterion for relevance and importance that exceeds the mere reading of literature. To claim political relevance, even agency, justifies our existence and makes a case for our continued pay. In the selective tradition, this criterion has long been found, as I have argued here, in the privileged knowledge the theorist has of language, our professional object. Theory thrived because it found a way to make people see language as more than a vehicle of information or arena of semantic play, but as the medium of all social interaction, all civil society and politics, thereby making the critic, and not others, seem central to the operations of power.

But there are also the pressures of censorship, as much within as without the academy, and we deeply underestimate them in coming to terms with the reigning terms of theory. After the Fall (1989−91), when it was illegitimate to say anything positive about continuing third-world independence movements, or to dissent without reaffirming one’s re-


jection of “violence,” denying any worth at all to the old failed states of the Eastern bloc, or the “naïve” epistemologies of any pre-New Left Marxism, and so on, a frame was imposed on the discussion of politics and letters that has added its own frustrations and blunted instincts. The “combat mode” I spoke of above does not contradict the reality of these impertinent requirements but brings them to completion. “Capitalism,” “exploitation,” and “Marxism” are all freely and even militantly discussed, but never without carefully disavowing actual revolutionary movements, allegorically summoning a lexicon that suggests the untranscendable good of liberal democracy, and rejecting any actual organizational ex-pression of resistance. To that degree, the selective tradition of theory is not just coincidentally reminiscent of, or ironically echoing, the brand of “freedom” in mainstream discourse but of a piece with it in a dissembled, self-alienated, form. Placed in an impossible position of being beyond opposition—whose very function, in fact, is to be impossible—critics can only critique if it is critique itself that is ultimately being interrogated; as a result, they can only speak what they disavow, and can only say what they do not say.

University of Minnesota

NOTES

1 Bertolt Brecht, Poems: 1913–56 (New York: Methuen, 1976), 418; “Sprecht jetzt vom Wetter und/ Grabt ihn mir tief, der/ Vor er gesprochen/Schon widerrief”: Gedichte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 967.2 Jacques Rancière, The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2004). For his antagonism to Bourdieu, see The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 49; and The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Essays in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1991). Jacotot, Rancière’s “ignorant schoolmaster,” is fashioned, in fact, as a counter-Bourdieu. 3 This is the position taken, for example, by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2003). 4 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2001 [1961]), 66–69. The political stance I am referring to here can be called “left-Hegelian,” and the story of its targeting—which involved a good deal of subversive borrowing as well—is one I explore in Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2006). 5 Some examples of the combat turn in cultural theory include recent issues of bound-ary 2: “Snapshots of Intellectual Life in Contemporary Post-Revolutionary China” 35, no. 2 (2008); “The Sixties and the World Event” 36, no. 1 (2009); and “The Pathology of Empire” 35, no. 1 (2008) on the status of the spectacular aspects of empire in the post-9/11 era of Abu Ghraib; for its part, Social Text 26, no. 2 (2008) includes “Urban Margins: Envisioning the Contemporary Global South” with essays on “Emergency Democracy,” “Urban Modernity on the Periphery: A New Middle Class reinvents the Palestinian City”;


in Transition 99 (2008) we find “Avenging History in the Former French Colonies”; and in Public Culture 21, no. 1 (2009), “Untimely Vision: Aimé Césaire, Decolonization, and Utopia” and “The Terrorist Imaginary.” 6 Dana Gioia, “Notes on the New Formalism,” The Hudson Review 40, no. 3 (1987): 395–408; Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Repre-sentations 108, no. 1 (2009): 1–21. 7 Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster. 8 In a conference on “fictocriticism” held recently at my university (2009), the move I am describing was made very clear. Critique is pushed into an aesthetic register that, in that mode, is said to have a politics more tactile than mere “theory.” The conference announcement asked: “What is, or should be the relationship between academic research and creative practice? . . . The last decade has witnessed a striking growth of interest in what has sometimes been termed ‘practice-based’ research, including the establish-ment, particularly in Europe, of a number of graduate programs aiming to combine intellectual inquiry with creative practice. Such initiatives have . . . suggested exciting pos-sibilities . . . for new modes of social engagement. . . . ‘Fictocriticism’ . . . seeks to question or to blur conventional boundaries between academic and literary modes of writing.” It is not clear that this was not already the case much earlier—in deconstruction particularly (the Critical Inquiry special issue following Derrida’s death was titled “homage de l’auteur”; 33, no. 2 [2007]). Overlooked here is the consonance of this approach with the plans of university administrators (Bard College is a well-known example) who wish to redefine the humanities by defunding inconvenient or “useless” work of critical social theory in favor of the creative arts—a pattern equally evident in major fellowships in the humanities as well where the vast majority of grants go to artists (the Guggenheim, for instance). 9 Rancière, The Flesh of Words, 4, 13.10 See, for example, an essay like that of Sandya Hewamanne, “‘City of Whores’: Na-tionalism, Development and Global Garment Workers in Sri Lanka,” Social Text 26 (2008): 35–59. 11 Inasmuch as “theory” itself is Nietzchean, it matters that for Nietzsche the rhetorical is the theoretical: “Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms and anthropomor-phisms” (from “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Viking/Penguin, 1954], 42–6).12 There is, in short, a hostility to debate in this mode, which conceals a great deal and silences so much on the mind of readers who cannot object—particularly because in the genre of writerly reading the lure of the author’s invented world, the mesmerizing effect (which is cumulative) of a certain terminological and syntactical aura can have its effects go unquestioned. The quick follow-up, direct challenges, and uncomfortable back-and-forth of debate tend to shatter aura and bring to clarity certain fundamentals of belief.13 Pierre Macherey, In a Materialist Way (London: Verso, 1998); Warren Montag, Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and his Contemporaries (London: Verso, 1999); Eugene W. Holland, Daniel W. Smith and Charles J. Stivale, eds, Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text (London: Con-tinuum, 2009); Sylvère Lotringer and Chris Kraus, Hatred of Capitalism: A Reader (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001). 14 Gary Hall and Clare Birchall, eds., New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2006). It is in the contributed essay of one of the editor’s (Hall) that the deconstructive basis of the enterprise is spelled out. 15 Derrida himself announced at the dawn of his career that theory (in its selective tradition) was inaugurated by an “event” whose “exterior form” is that of a “rupture or redoubling.” See “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Writing and Difference (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978 [1967]), 278.


16 The freedom to choose any approach one wishes is not being challenged, only the right to do so without acknowledging what is being giving up: the form of discourse in-separable from popular movements for egalitarianism—the historical achievement of a discourse of debate, exchange, negotiation, and assessment. 17 Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 1989), 31–80. 18 Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995) (hereafter cited as RA).19 In this sense, The Rules of Art brings to the literary field what his Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1991) brought to the philosophical: an elaboration of the social situation of the “thinker,” which decodes the philosophical underpinnings of ideas by exposing the competing interests of various parties in the envi-ronment of their setting. The textually enigmatic in this light (and in Bourdieu’s hands) can be seen to be actually the quotidian and the banal. 20 For example, Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990) and Homo Academicus (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1988). The implicit hostility shown by Jacques Rancière towards Bourdieu is evidenced in The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing. 21 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 153. 22 My argument elsewhere has been that this is the general condition of Anglo-American theory: a select group of thinkers who in media renderings are portrayed as proxies for the left traditions they were trying to displace. See my Wars of Position, pp. x–xi. 23 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 23.24 V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973), 75. 25 Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992), 6; Donner le temps: I. La fausse monnaie (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1991), 17. 26 A similar point is made by Slavoj Žižek in The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 154–55. 27 Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphyisics?” Basic Writings (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993), 93–110. 28 Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974), 144–64. 29 Karen Armstrong, The Bible: A Biography (New York: Grove, 2007).30 Armstrong, The Bible, 4131 Armstrong, The Bible, 49, 57, 107, 117.32 Rancière, “The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 1 (2009): 3; and Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2010), 29: “What is specific to politics is the existence of a subject defined by its participation in contraries.” 33 For example, at a recent academic gathering, a professor frequently repeated the phrase “let me think with x,” and the phrase was soon picked up by a number of the graduate students. This was not a stylistic matter alone, but was intended to convey that the speaker was too nuanced or modest to disagree with her interlocutors. The gesture was meant to suggest that the other’s ideas would simply accompany, or interact with, or couple with one’s own, as though disagreement were to be avoided as a matter of integrity or good taste, even as the other’s ideas were cordoned off and replaced by this very act of “thinking with.” 34 So, for example, resistance to colonialism in many postcolonial essays is presented as inescapably colonizing. As Fredric Jameson has recently put it: “The structuralist perspective


always grasps contradiction in the form of the antinomy: that is to say, a logical impasse in which thought is paralyzed and can move neither forward nor back” (Valences of the Dialectic [London: Verso, 2010], 43.) On the other hand, Jameson himself, in the tenor of a more general concession to “theory,” develops a version of the dialectic that resembles deconstruction itself: “The opposition between truth and falsity . . . was the vocation of the dialectic (and its unity of opposites) to overcome and to transcend” (64). 35 Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1976), 140. 36 The source is Nietzsche: “I hate everything that merely instructs me without augment-ing or directly invigorating my activity,” a quotation originally from Goethe that Nietzsche develops in the direction of having us see the “productive” as both life affirming and invented—both at once. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 59. 37 Macherey, In a Materialist Way, 25, 199–221: “What at first glance appeared to be on the order of planned or involuntary falsification turns into forms of expression which, by virtue of being deviant, are no less authentic in their own way, and in any case are neces-sary: these are, if I may put it this way, ‘true errors,’ which reveal meanings that no one can claim to be radically foreign to the work itself.” In Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Continuum, 1995), 203, Adorno and Horkheimer indict those who consider “fruitfulness” the major criterion for theory (it was, one notices, a common gesture even in the 1940s, to speak once again of the “new”).38 Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 180. It is in the traditions of critical theory and social critique where one finds the trope of “continuity” rather than rupture identified as, paradoxically, the more oppositional option. Bourdieu again offers an example of the reversal at the core of these two images of change. Regarding his use of the term “habitus,” he writes: “The intention in taking up a word from tradition and reactivating it—diametrically op-posed to the strategy of trying to associate one’s name with a neologism or, on the model of the natural sciences, with an ‘effect,’ even a minor one—is inspired by the conviction that work on concepts may also be cumulative.” The view is very similar to Williams’s well-known concept of the “residual” elements of culture—those supposedly superseded aspects of the past that live on alongside newly emergent ones, which greatly influenced Said in his notion of “traveling theory.” 39 See Keya Ganguly, “Introduction: After Resignation and Against Conformity,” special issue on “Intellectual Labor,” Timothy Brennan and Keya Ganguly, eds., South Atlantic Quarterly 108, no. 2 (2009): 239–47.