Abstract
This chapter focuses on four specific areas of study in the Anglophone academy that are most often associated with postmodern theory: “high theory” as practiced in the more rarefied precincts of literary criticism; “cultural studies” as they proliferated, more popularly and politically, into university settings all over the world; the postphilosophical project of Richard Rorty, the pragmatist philosopher who sympathized most insightfully with continental influences in the Anglophone academy; and the rise of “identity politics” and intersectionality, informed as it was at every turn by French theory and embodied most effectively in the thought and personal example of Judith Butler. While this chapter alludes to the broader influence of theory across the humanities as a whole, it concentrates on those areas in order to highlight specific processes of appropriation that were typical of the Anglophone reception.
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Notes
- 1.
See also Barsky on how “French theory may be primarily an American dream” in SubStance #97: 8.
- 2.
Nothing like this could happen in France, where centralized control of resources and curriculum was absolute—and where the powers that be turned decisively away from the ultra-structuralist program as soon as the winds of fashion shifted in favor of the new philosophers and their new humanism.
- 3.
Does this explain why anglophone practitioners of deconstruction in literary disciplines so often seemed to overlook the significance of Derrida’s “general text” of “all possible referents?”. That would make them partly accountable for egregious misrepresentations of Derrida more generally. Was their narrow interpretation a lingering effect of the New Criticism? Did Derrida, who spent many months at Yale, allow this misunderstanding to persist for the sake of keeping his followers productive and content? That would not be inconsistent with his history, as we have seen.
- 4.
Which is not to say that these suggestions are entirely mistaken. Trump supporters routinely cite excessive political correctness and the disdain of “elites” for “people like me” as motivating factors in their politics.
- 5.
Incidentally, my very politically engaged 30-something daughter, a public defender, remembers Cindy Lauper as an early influence on her lifelong concern with social justice. I don’t quite get it, but there it is.
- 6.
See, for example, his video dialogue with Donald Davidson on YouTube.
- 7.
It was the Derrida of Glas and The PostCard, the literary experimentalist, whom Rorty claimed to admire—for “doing something different.” He found Derrida’s earlier work—the work discussed in this book—too transcendental.
- 8.
As the newly elected president of the American Philosophical Association in 1979, Rorty ruled in favor of the renegade “pluralists” and against the analytic establishment, a betrayal that many never forgave. An epic uproar ensued over which Rorty presided with characteristic imperturbability. The message of his manner was the message of his philosophy: our doings just aren’t that important. With Rorty especially, staging and rhetoric spoke volumes.
- 9.
For a fuller account, see my “The Functional Reduction of Kinship in the Social Thought of John Locke” in Functionalism Historicized (1984).
- 10.
The tutor to the Dauphin and a theologian of some note is reported to have perused The Meditations for a few moments before slamming it down on the table, exclaiming, “Bah! Protestantism in metaphysics!”
- 11.
In his interview with Claire Parnet (Deleuze from A to Z: H is for the History of Philosophy 2012), Deleuze was only echoing pragmatist principles when he prioritized “the problem” philosophers of the past were facing in their context: “if one cannot identify the problem, one cannot understand the concept and philosophy will remain abstract … to engage in the history of philosophy is to restore these problems.”
- 12.
When I first encountered this claim, I resisted—but memories of adolescence kept intruding. Adopting a certain stance and a walk, certain gestures, how to handle a cigarette—a Dean/Brando model in mind. Had I been in drag all my life?
- 13.
Alan Schrift rightly calls Gender Trouble “a profoundly Foucauldian enterprise” (2006, 54) and it is reasonable to credit it for a lot of Foucault’s staying power in the anglophone academy, where “identity studies” of various kinds became a lasting legacy of French theory.
- 14.
The ban on subject talk, it should be recalled, applies to a style of writing that treats subjects as effects of language rather than as agents of actions, including thinking and speaking. To those implementing the ban, treating subjects as agents seemed to imply that subjects exist outside of the language they use as a tool for representing their experience; in other words, “pre-discursive” subjects—Cartesian or even Aristotelian substances.
- 15.
Based on Bakhtin’s account of “carnival,” where the “threshold site” is a “boundary site bringing together food and defecation, gluttonous Gargantuan ingestion and obscene expulsion, birth, sex and death, pain and laughter.”
- 16.
For example, “the body is … directly involved in a political field; power-relations have an immediate hold on it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs” ([1975] 1995, 25). For the image of the body “emitting signs,” Foucault is surely indebted to his friend Deleuze.
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de Zengotita, T. (2019). The Anglophone Reception of French Theory: Literary Criticism, Cultural Studies, American Pragmatism, Identity Politics. In: Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90689-8_10
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