Post-Postmodernism by Nealon Jeffrey

Post-Postmodernism by Nealon Jeffrey

Author:Nealon, Jeffrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER 5

Deconstruction

POSTDECONSTRUCTIVE? NEGRI, DERRIDA, AND THE PRESENT STATE OF THEORY

Nobody needs French theory. —JEAN BAUDRILLARD, 2005

It seems that we live in discouragingly posttheoretical, or even antitheoretical, academic times. Venerable interdisciplinary journal Critical Inquiry, whose advertising materials used to hail it as “Theory-Driven,” held a kind of high-profile wake for theory after 9/11, with many of theory’s luminaries (now somewhat flickering, as they approach retirement age) pronouncing the entire operation dead in the water. Even Terry Eagleton (who, to hear the New York Times tell it, in fact invented theory sometime in the late 1970s) pronounced the enterprise over and done with in his 2004 book, After Theory. The Times story on Eagleton’s book ran under the headline “Cultural Theorists, Start Your Epitaphs.” Indeed, an epicedial discourse surrounds theory in the North American press: from Christopher Hitchens in the New York Times Book Review, to articles in Slate, Salon.com, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.1 Even the Christian Science Monitor ran a feature-story obit for theory. And, according to its Web site, “Christian Science . . . speaks to the dumb the words of Truth, and they answer with rejoicing”; so when Christian Scientists speak these words of Truth, you might begin to think there’s something to them.

However, having already lived through several deaths of theory, I’ll have to say that I’m not very impressed with the pitch and tonality of this latest rendition of “Danny Boy,” though I think it is undeniably true that a certain kind of theory (let’s call it English department or comp lit theory circa 1980-something) is in fact over and done with, and effectively has been for at least a decade. From the vantage point of the present, it’s very hard to understand why, if I recall the statistic correctly, a late-’80s MLA survey found that more than 10% of English professors surveyed thought their primary job was to show students how binary oppositions in a text cancel themselves out. If that version of “theory” is over, good riddance, one might say.

You’d never know theory was dead, though, if you ran a citation index on the big names associated with it. In 2010, the Arts and Humanities Citation index turns up 1,498 hits for Michel Foucault, 1,310 for Jacques Derrida, 699 for Gilles Deleuze, and 455 for Jacques Lacan. And these citation numbers have in fact grown steadily in recent years, up more than 60% across the board since 2003. And, contra the “theory is over” hypothesis, these numbers are substantially higher than those from the supposed heydays of theory: Foucault, always leader of the citation pack, scores only 699 hits for 1986, and 700 for 1993.

Of course, Derrida’s death in 2004, still so personally difficult for the many people whose lives he touched, has only intensified this anxiety in the theory world, broadly conceived. As the New York Times put it shortly after Derrida’s passing: “With the death . . . of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the era of big theory came quietly to a close” (Eakin 2004).



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