March 9, 2006
I concur with this quote by Sylvere Lotringer in Sylvere Lotringer and Sande Cohen, eds., French Theory in America, (New York/London: Routledge, 2001, p 125).
I knew about French theory before arriving in America in the late 1960s. It wasn't called that, in fact didn't yet exist as a distinct phenomenon, but it really is through America that I discovered theory, or rather realized its full potential...French theory is an American creation anyway. The French themselves never conceived it as such, although French philosophers obviously had something to do with it. In France, French theory was considered philosophy, or psychoanalysis or semiotics, or anthropology, in short any manner of thinking (pensee) but never referred to as theory.
I never really understood the American Theory thing. I always understood it as a construction from within literary departments in the US fashioned to enable a critique of their society; a critique that had little connection to the Frankfurt school 's critique. It really was French theory that galvanized the European side of American philosophy in an influential way--it had far more market penetration in academia than the Frankfurt School ever had. It became a sexy French commodity in the marketplace of ideas.
Why so? Was it all the stuff about the sexual desire and power? Or the need to find ways to navigate through the traps of identity and subjectivity in a world of confusion?
A point that is made is that whilst some academics were doing theory others were trying to figure out the theory from the outside, from their own lives and habits. I was in the latter camp. So I looked for tools to enable me to navigate my way.
What suprises me is that 40 years on we still hear the old criticisms about postructuralism: it continues to be routinely accused of destroying the humanities;t aking the "human" out of the humanities: by reducing everything in the world to texts and signifiers; erasing the subjectivity of the individual; reducing the world to language, to the relativity of linguistic signs--and making the world "meaningless," and so promoting nihilism.These are used as hammers and body blows. This conception of French Theory that laid waste to the humanities is called postmodernism (po mo) in Australia. It represents the 1990s backlash against 'French Theory'.
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Or at least to pretend to enable an critique of their society.