Political Philosophy and Public Purpose

Postmodern Theory
and Progressive
Politics
TOWA RD A N EW HUMA N IS M

T HO MAS D E ZEN GOT ITA

Political Philosophy and Public Purpose

Series Editor
Michael J. Thompson
William Paterson University
New York, NY, USA
This series offers books that seek to explore new perspectives in social and
political criticism. Seeing contemporary academic political theory and
­philosophy as largely dominated by hyper-academic and overly-technical
debates, the books in this series seek to connect the politically engaged
traditions of philosophical thought with contemporary social and political
life. The idea of philosophy emphasized here is not as an aloof enterprise,
but rather a publicly-oriented activity that emphasizes rational reflection as
well as informed praxis.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14542
 Thomas de Zengotita

Postmodern Theory
and Progressive
Politics
Toward a New Humanism
Thomas de Zengotita
New York University
New York, NY, USA

Political Philosophy and Public Purpose

ISBN 978-3-319-90688-1    ISBN 978-3-319-90689-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90689-8

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“Philosophy is an age grasped in thought.”
—Hegel
 Series Editor’s Foreword

Postmodernism—the term is still resonant with controversy so many years

after its faddish academicism has faded. But has it? One of the key aspects
of contemporary intellectual life, politics, and culture is a decisive break-
down of the structures of shared meaning that allowed for the coherence
of a democratic humanism. A new, even shallower politics of identity, a
skepticism toward rationalism, ideas about a “flexible self ” and social
constructivism, no less than a renewed expressivism in politics and a puer-
ile politicization of culture, are just a few of the enfeebled children
spawned by postmodernism’s assault on Western humanism and reason.
The basis of much of what constituted the progressive social movements
from the Enlightenment through the 1970s was rooted in values and
principles of equality, self-expression, and non-domination. These were
seen to be rational, human values: applicable to all and gradually to be
extended to all human beings as members deserving respect, dignity, and
self-development.
Postmodernism was a movement that saw the intellectual foundations
for this grand movement of Western modernity as flawed and self-­
contradictory. For the postmodern view was rooted in a critique of ratio-
nality, in an alternative aestheticization of politics as well as an
anti-universalism. It posited the inability of rational categories to serve as
emancipatory; instead, they served to oppress. It posited difference in
opposition to liberal or even social democratic forms of equality, since dif-
ferent cultures and identities were to be seen as having their own privi-
leged positions and values. What resulted was a kind of free-for-all, where

vii
viii   SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD

humanities departments saw themselves immersed in a politics generated

by hidden assumptions lurking in our philosophical and aesthetic concepts,
no less than our everyday language.
All through the 1980s and 1990s academic scene, ideas such as these—
as well as deconstruction, post-structuralism, and postcolonialism, to
name only a few—wormed their way through humanities and social sci-
ence departments. It was a climate ripe for hyper-intellectual, abstract,
and non-empirical ideas: social movements were waning, electoral politics
turning more conservative, and a new era of cheap consumption and
hyper-individualism was taking root. Postmodernism was the reflection of
this pseudo-political terrain in theory and it gestured toward radicalism
by seeking to undermine and overturn all that the traditions of Western
rationalism held as central. The result was a wholesale crumbling of liter-
ary traditions, humanistic philosophical ideas, and values grounded in
rationalism.
But, Thomas de Zengotita argues in this fascinating and daring book,
we should perhaps see in the intellectual debris of postmodernism’s after-
math the hope for a new humanism. For de Zengotita, the key issue is that
a new form of universalism and humanism will now be possible because of
the  shredding efficiency of postmodern ideas. For now, we can actually
hope to weave the different groups, identities, and voices together that
postmodernism centrifugally forced into their own corners of experience
and concern. Now, a humanistic synthesis can begin in earnest where there
was once a pulling apart of different groups and identities. This new
humanism would be cultivated by these differences, perhaps even be made
more human as a result. Even more, de Zengotita claims it is necessary.
For our world is continuingly fragmenting us, dividing us, mediating us.
We are losing that coherence and integrity that can hold out for us the
possibility for a universal humanism that—although he acknowledges its
ideological aspects in legitimating forms of domination historically—
remains our only hope for a rational, humane, and decent future.
This can also bring a sense of purpose and project back to the humani-
ties, which de Zengotita rightly diagnoses as being in a state of severe
crisis. The encroachment of politics into every crevice of the humanities
has rendered the search for the new and the phenomenological experience
of it inert. De Zengotita has produced an argument that will not fit nicely
into the ideological boxes that give perverse shape to our intellectual and
academic discourses. By acknowledging the necessity of postmodernism’s
acidic solvency on our power-encrusted ideas, we will now be able to build
   SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD 
   ix

a new and more textured humanism and study the human condition with
more nuance, more sensitivity. Perhaps then we will be able to start anew,
as he asks us to, and create a more humane, and more just cultural and
political sensibility. And that, given the nature of our times, will be wel-
come indeed.

New York, NY, USA Michael J. Thompson

Spring 2018
 Contents

1 Introduction: Phenomenology, Ideal Types, Narrative   1

1.1 Interlude   7
References   8

Part I Essential Background   9

2 The Situation of the Modern Subject  11

2.1 When the Shock of the New Was New: Rene Descartes
(1596–1650) and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)  12
2.2 The Lockean Dispensation and the Project of Progress  21
2.3 Varieties of Enlightenment  26
2.4 Nineteenth-Century “Evolutionism”: Hegel, Comte,
Spencer—Prophets of Consolation  36
References  51

Part II Modernism  55

3 New Authorities, Works, and Disciplines  57

3.1 Creators and Works  60
3.2 Founders and Disciplines: Durkheim, Ferdinand
Saussure, G.E. Moore, I.A. Richards  73
References  88

xi
xii   CONTENTS

4 Phenomenology  91
References 100

5 The Linguistic Turn 101

5.1 A Tale of Two Wittgensteins 101
5.2 The Rise of the Sign 104
References 112

Part III Masters of Suspicion 113

6 Marx, Freud, Nietzsche 115

6.1 Karl Marx (1818–1883) 115
6.2 Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) 117
6.3 Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) 120
References 126

7 Critical Theory 127
7.1 Theodore Adorno (1903–1969) 127
References 135

Part IV Postmodern Undoings 137

8 The Mood of the Moment 147

8.1 The Elders: Louis Althusser (1918–1990) and Jacques
Lacan (1901–1981) 147
8.2 Tel Quel (1960–1982) and the Spirit of 1968 155
8.3 Julia Kristeva (1941–) 165
References 177

9 Texts and Bodies 181
9.1 Roland Barthes (1915–1980) 183
9.2 Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) 204
9.3 Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) 237
9.4 Michel Foucault (1926–1984)282
References 306
  CONTENTS 
   xiii

10 The Anglophone Reception of French Theory: Literary

Criticism, Cultural Studies, American Pragmatism,
Identity Politics 313
10.1 Literary Criticism316
10.2 Cultural Studies320
10.3 American Pragmatism: Richard Rorty (1931–2007)323
10.4 Identity Politics330
References 341

11 Before the Annunciation Came the Virtual 345

References 350

12 Conclusion: Toward a New Humanism 353

References 358

References 359

Author Index 377

Subject Index 385
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Reading a poem: a neurological mapping 86

Fig. 5.1 Communication through speech 105
Fig. 5.2 Biological universals of human kinship 108
Fig. 5.3 The atom of human kinship 109
Fig. 5.4 Transformational relation between Bororo and Ge origin myths 111

xv
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Phenomenology, Ideal

Types, Narrative

This book is for people who care about the humanities and progressive poli-
tics and want to understand the lasting influence upon them of postmod-
ernism as it was expressed in the academic culture wars of the late twentieth
century. What to make now of those furious debates over the canon versus
multiculturalism, relativism, deconstruction, on and on? These are espe-
cially urgent questions for students in humanistic disciplines today, thrown
as they have been into settings shaped by those battles and obliged to
make their way as best they can through the debris left in their wake.
The end of postmodernism has been announced many times—but one
could always wonder if the authors were stating a fact or trying to pull the
plug. In recent years there has been a shift in tone. Looking ahead to the 2012
MLA conference, Stanley Fish reported that “topics that in previous years
dominated the meeting and identified the avant-garde—postmodernism,
deconstruction, post-colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, racialism, femi-
nism, Queer Theory, theory in general”—were “absent or sparsely repre-
sented” in the schedule (Fish 2011). And Warren Breckman, in an essay about
French theory as an “historical object,” said that, while “there is a widespread
consensus that theory’s expiry date has already arrived,” it seems that “ends
are at least as complicated as beginnings” (Breckman 2010, 346). That com-
plexity reflects the range of influence of “theory.” In some academic settings
its discourses still flourish; in others, they have been displaced, squelched,
mocked. But recent innovations in self-­reference through personal gender
pronouns (PGPs), millions of contributions to #MeToo, and continuing

© The Author(s) 2019 1

T. de Zengotita, Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics,
Political Philosophy and Public Purpose,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90689-8_1
2   T. DE ZENGOTITA

efforts to remove or rename historically charged symbols from the public

square combine to remind us: the expressive dimension of our politics is still
dominant and that is the enduring legacy of postmodernism in general. That
emphasis is so thoroughly baked into our habits of thought and action that it
doesn’t really matter if the people involved can cite Althusser’s concept of
interpellation or have read Derrida or Judith Butler. They operate in a context
shaped by the reign of the signifier and the claims of desire nonetheless. And
so do Donald Trump and his cohort of followers—they too are products of
the conditions that gave rise to academic postmodernism, they too feel
aggrieved and are demanding their due. In them, postmodern identity politics
as it arose on the “left” in the 1960s and 1970s finds a grotesque  mirror
image of itself. In them, we see what can happen when “truth” and “fact”
actually become nothing more than social constructions.
Many defenders of the traditional humanities, passionately attached to
the classic works that gave meaning to their lives, dream of a return to the
day before yesterday when men like Lionel Trilling presided over the
canon, secure in the knowledge that it contained what Matthew Arnold
called “the best which has been thought and said in the world.”1 Others,
more concerned with an activist political tradition aimed above all at eco-
nomic justice, try to accommodate identity politics by acknowledging the
importance of intersectionality in various ways or, failing that, persist in
polemical attacks that remain essentially the same today as they were 30
years ago. But the postmodern moment cannot be wished away or
repressed. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” as Faulkner put it,
and if the humanities are to flourish once again, if economic realities are to
reclaim the center of the political stage, that moment must be incorpo-
rated, comprehended and overcome (as in, sublated).
That task does not fall to veterans of the culture wars, still clinging to
their grudges. It belongs to the coming generation. But what they most
need to begin with is a way to assess their inheritance as a whole and for
themselves. Without that basic historical orientation, they can only drift—
borne along by currents flowing from accidental encounters with particular

1
 I owe much of my understanding of modern intellectual history to Trilling and others in
that cohort. Without them, this book could not have been written. But it is worth noting at
the outset how critics of postmodernism have simply assumed that they represent the tradi-
tion of Western thought, of Western philosophy in particular. If the focus is on method, on
the value of rationality—logic, clarity—that makes sense. But if the focus is on substance,
their claim looks weaker. What did Socrates ultimately care about? His famous method, his
logic—or the meaning of life in the face of death?
   INTRODUCTION: PHENOMENOLOGY, IDEAL TYPES, NARRATIVE    3

teachers and topics that happened to catch their interest. Meanwhile the
technology juggernaut assimilates everything and rolls on, offering academ-
ics  spectacular solutions to “how” problems and pushing the humanities
ever further to the margins of the curriculum, unable to contend with a
question only the humanities can ask seriously: what next? What next for the
meaning of being human in a world growing more incomprehensible and
vulnerable every day? There presently exists no account of our intellectual
history designed to provide that orientation. This book will supply that lack.
In After Babel (1975), George Steiner chose 1870 to mark the onset of
the radical disruption of artistic intelligibility we know as “modernism.”
That disruption resonated with a crisis in comprehensibility across the cul-
tural spectrum, from the Freudian unconscious to the uncertainty principle
in physics. No surprise, then, to find the term “postmodern” first used in
1870 to describe painting styles more avant-garde than impressionism. In
the twentieth century, historians like Arnold Toynbee used it to mark “the
next age” on their big picture timelines before it was picked up and dissemi-
nated by critics like Susan Sontag, again referencing disorienting innova-
tions in the arts and architecture. But this book focuses on a set of intellectual
strategies and a certain style that shaped academic postmodernism in anglo-
phone universities since the 1960s, also with disruptive consequences.
Postmodernism in this sense is derived largely from a particular group
of  French thinkers and the radical artists and German philosophers who
inspired them—though, of course, as Fredric Jameson (1991) and David
Harvey (1990) have demonstrated, shifts in modes of production from
bricks and mortar assembly-line Fordism to instantaneous digital transac-
tions in cyberspace ultimately conditioned the emergence of the postmod-
ern in general, in the academy and in society at large. But this book is not
principally concerned with technological causes. Its focus is on their effects,
on culture, on consciousness—and especially on ethics and conceptions of
politics. It tries to provide a straightforward and balanced account of certain
movements of thought and value, from their origins to the present moment.
In that way, it hopes to exemplify the core values of the humanism it is
calling for. It shows that, while absolute objectivity may be beyond our
finite powers, a good faith effort to be fair is not. We expect no more of
ourselves in our lives and should ask no less of ourselves in our work.
This book tells a familiar (too familiar?) story of modernity. But it does
so in a particular way, to a particular purpose—highlighting those aspects
of thought and culture that conditioned the emergence of “modernism”
and “postmodernism.” The first chapter, for example, aims to show how
and why early modern thinkers were so captivated by the physical sciences.
4   T. DE ZENGOTITA

Their concept of knowledge, of rationality itself, was shaped by that exam-

ple—by what they called “the new reason” and “natural philosophy.”
From the beginning of the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century,
the conviction that knowing about human nature would be analogous to
knowing about the rest of nature dominated modern inquiry into the
human form of life.
But this book was written under the influence of the phenomenological-­
hermeneutical tradition, which is characterized, first of all, by its refusal of
this analogy.2 That tradition does not (or should not) deny that one can
study human nature in a scientific way. It does not (or should not) deny
that extraordinary results follow from studying human nature in that
way—as in modern medicine, most obviously, but also in psychology,
genetics, and neurology. Insofar as human nature is physically determined,
the scientific study of it has been successful. But insofar as human “nature”
is not physical, insofar as it is ethical, say, or mental or historical or aes-
thetic or even spiritual—then studying it as if it were physical was bound
to miss the mark.
In a nutshell, the claim is this: you cannot understand (verstehen) what it
means to be human, what it is to be human, by way of science. Brain scien-
tists of the future may someday map the brain’s activity so precisely that they
may be able to tell from that map what a person is consciously experiencing.
But such a map will never be that conscious experience. Such a map might
help to explain a conscious experience; only a person can understand it.
Take jokes, for example. An explanation of a joke is notoriously unfunny.
It may be true in every detail, but it inevitably falls short in that crucial
respect. A joke is only funny when you get it—that is, understand it to
begin with. The spirit of the phenomenological-hermeneutical tradition
can be evoked by this requirement: any theory of humor it might produce
should aspire to be funny.
All of which means that a commitment to understanding entails a will-
ingness to sacrifice a measure of rigor for the sake of significance. Of course
one strives for as much precision as the subject matter will allow, but if
some things that matter to us resist perfect definition and we want to
address them anyway, so be it. Once the distinction between explanation
and understanding is grasped, congenial consequences emerge. There is no
inherent contradiction between the analytic and continental traditions in
philosophy—nor between phenomenology-hermeneutics and objectifying
2
 For readers unfamiliar with the phenomenological-hermeneutical tradition, a lucid cri-
tique of this same analogy can be found in Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949).
   INTRODUCTION: PHENOMENOLOGY, IDEAL TYPES, NARRATIVE    5

science-inspired studies more generally—anymore than there is between

abstract expressionism and impressionism (see Derrida/Searle controversy
in Chap. 9). Conflict arises when these styles of inquiry get implicated in
larger, essentially political, disputes. Broadly speaking, phenomenology-­
hermeneutics has been suspected of inspiring fashionable nonsense in the
radical and relativist discourses of its postmodern heirs, while objectifying
analytic systems are thought to collaborate with political-­economic and
technological domination.
Be all that as it may for now—the politics is one thing, to be considered
in the book itself. Conceptually, methodologically, these are simply differ-
ent enterprises.
The refusal of “scientific” explanation does not eliminate the possibility
of constraint on method.3 Meaningful situations entail their own kind of
limits. In church, at a dinner party, people are constrained in certain ways.
Methodological constraints of the same kind arise in situations of interpre-
tation. Like the fieldworker, the historical interpreter is the  (uninvited)
guest. The other is the host who shows the guest about the place, the
place the guest wants to know her (own) way around. A certain respect for
the customs of the house is in order. Method in the humanities depends
ultimately upon ethics. That is why, at the end of the day, authorial inten-
tions matter—however compelling it has seemed at certain junctures to
deny them, again for reasons to be explored in these pages.
This book is an essentialist synthesis, not an exhaustive study. An ideal
type of modern subjectivity-in-context derived from Heidegger’s “Being-­
in-­the-World” and Wittgenstein’s “form of life” will be shown developing
over time, exemplifying modernity’s characteristics through representative
creators and works.4 Postmodernism, post-structuralism, “theory” is best
understood in relation to that type, classically represented in Cartesian/
Kantian philosophy as a mind apart, observing and shaping the physical
world. Otherwise diverse expressions of postmodernism were united in
this: they made of that subject their principal enemy. In one major guise,
it appeared as bourgeois consciousness, masking its self-aggrandizement
3
 The idea that explanatory categories like those of the natural sciences constitute the only
possible kind of generalization has severely distorted postmodern critique—especially in the
USA.
4
 A translator of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind defined its method this way: generality
and particularity “are satisfied at once if the experience considered … is treated as the experi-
ence of a generalized individual … without it we should merely have history alone, which is
inexhaustible and so cannot be a whole; or a mere connexion of abstract ideas which cannot,
as such, be experience” (Baille in Hegel [1807] 1967, 56).
6   T. DE ZENGOTITA

in a supposedly universal humanism. In another it appeared as a specifically

economic expression of bourgeois consciousness with its objectifying
schemes and technologies of exploitation. In a third it appears as norma-
tive, white, European, masculinist, heterosexual.
This book’s story, in the telling, justifies two claims: first, the
phenomenological-­hermeneutical tradition is the most suitable source for
any theory (in the traditional sense) that would provide anthropological
and historical ground for a humanism that aspires to be universal and,
second, the ethical aspect of the human condition is authentically accessi-
ble only through narrative. So I am reaching here for an understanding of
postmodern theorists by way of genres they disdained—yet I hope, for
that reason, to do them justice. And they deserve justice because, at the
end of the day and in spite of all the excesses, the historical significance of
academic postmodernism has been this: in exposing the hypocrisy of tra-
ditional humanism’s claim to universality, it opened up—in practice and
not merely in principle—the possibility of realizing that ideal, thanks to
the diversity of voices that can now be part of the conversation.
A unique feature of this book: some conceptual explication is featured,
but the emphasis is on rhetoric, motive, mood—and biographical anecdote. I am
staging a diagnostic drama on the Nietzschean model, with a more sympa-
thetic bedside manner. This strategy allows me to make notoriously difficult
works of postmodern theory accessible without betraying their purpose.
If the humanities are to thrive once again, they must recover an essentially
intellectual mission. These disciplines are today in crisis (enrollment numbers
don’t lie) for a number of reasons—but one is especially difficult to face.
People on all sides of the culture wars, swept up in decades of contention,
allowed politics to override commitment to understanding for its own sake.5
While those battles raged, commitments sustained by political outrage were
maintained for as long as the outrage lasted. But when the high tide of indig-
nation ebbed, there turned out to be little left to talk about that really mat-
tered for its own sake and many culture warriors have continued to rely on
political outrage to motivate their work and, hopefully, their students. But
most of those students sampling those disciplines today can sense a certain
lassitude in relation to the subject matter itself, especially compared to the
5
 I can remember as a graduate student at Columbia in the early 1970s agreeing with
demands for political “relevance” in the curriculum—but nursing doubts as well. For exam-
ple, I can remember encountering this oft-cited injunction: “The philosophers have only
interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it” (Marx in The German
Ideology: Including Theses on Feuerbach and Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy
[1845] 1998, 11). I thought, “Sure … but wait, don’t we need to interpret it correctly first?”
   INTRODUCTION: PHENOMENOLOGY, IDEAL TYPES, NARRATIVE    7

palpable excitement generated by technological enterprises in those glamor-

ous new buildings across the quad. Employment prospects have been a major
factor, to be sure, but stressing that aspect of the situation lets too many
people off the hook too easily. Just compare the atmosphere at a typical semi-
nar or colloquium for leading scholars in the humanistic disciplines today
with the mood of the great modernists in the arts and the academy described
in Chap. 3 of this book. Or sample a few pages from the works of Trilling
or Howe or Barzun. That’s the mood of minds engaged in projects that
really matter for their own sake, as intellectual enterprises that bring inherent
value with them because they serve values built into the human condition
and offer accounts of that condition that disclose the grounds and possi-
bilities of value itself. That is what has been lost and must be found.
But mood cannot be directly sought. It arises as an effect of the quest,
as an aura that attends the object of desire. I think it clear what the quest
should be at this historical moment. We must find common ground. We
must ask again what it means to be human, what it is to be human and,
when the moment for politics arrives we should orient ourselves through
answers to those questions, however fallible, however provisional.
When work in the humanities is empirical and specific, as most of it will be,
it should be framed as contributing to our developing understanding of
the human condition, still unfolding as it always has and always will in
accordance with its historical nature. Likewise, for sweeping narratives,
enjoying a revival on the margins of the academy that attests to a longing
in people for an understanding of their place in the great scheme of things,
an understanding only grand narrative can provide. Finally, as I hope to
show in this book, and in work to follow, the potential for theorizing
about the human condition built into phenomenology—and the philo-
sophical anthropology it once envisioned—has yet to be realized.

1.1   Interlude
One of my earliest memories: the front lawn of my Grandfather’s house in
a small Massachusetts town. It is the 4th of July and the parade is under-
way, people gathered along the street to watch—all ages, some on lawn
chairs, some standing, a few little flags waving, a smattering of applause
now and then. It is 1949, maybe 1950. The veterans appear, rounding the
corner, and the applause thickens and lifts as they draw near. The ranks are
ordered in accordance with how recently the veterans served—the still
youthful and most numerous World War II servicemen bringing up the
rear. I was struck at once by a lone figure, an ancient specter, all bone and
8   T. DE ZENGOTITA

parchment skin and blue veins, being pushed along in a wheelchair, alone
at the head of the column. My mother was standing behind me and I
remember her leaning over me, her face next to mine, her hair brushing
my cheek, pointing out in front of us discreetly, as was only proper, whis-
pering: “See him? He was a drummer boy in the Civil War.”
So here I am, in 2017, recalling an encounter with a man who could
have stood at a 4th of July parade in 1856 and seen an aged veteran of the
American Revolution go by, a man who, in his turn, might have met
Thomas Jefferson or known someone—an officer of rank, perhaps—who
sat down with Edmund Burke in London to discuss the latest news from
Paris in 1789. Or 1793. Only two more such passages and we are in the
company of Descartes and Galileo, present at the creation of modern
thought, or so the story goes. And it is the story that most concerns us
here—the myth, if you like, of modernity’s making. And in that mythol-
ogy, the genesis moment was not that long ago.
It seems more distant because so much has happened. More changes
have been wrought on the face of the planet in the last 400 years than in
the 50,000 years preceding. The changes have been so massive and intri-
cate that our sense of the time it took expands in proportion—as if to
make room, as if to fit it all in. But it was not that long ago. We moderns—
just a few generations, really—have been caught up in an explosion of
events and developments we couldn’t possibly comprehend with any
­certainty. Today, looking back, one is perhaps most struck by how willing
so many of our intellectual ancestors were to assume that they could.

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Durham: Duke University Press.
Marx, Karl. (1845) 1998. The German Ideology: Including Theses on Feuerbach and
Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy. Amherst: Prometheus Books.
Ryle, Gilbert. (1949) 1984. The Concept of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Steiner, George. 1975. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation.
New York: Oxford University Press.
 PART I

Essential Background
 CHAPTER 2

The Situation of the Modern Subject

The master trope:

NATURE (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the
art of man … imitated [so] it can make an artificial animal. (Thomas Hobbes
1651)

Implications of this analogy shaped the modern project of progress. The

“artificial animal” Hobbes had specifically in mind was the early modern
state, but he was as fascinated as were all his contemporaries with the daz-
zling array of other contrivances the “art of man” was inventing and pro-
ducing in his day. In conceiving of their innovations as imitations of God’s
work, early moderns gave themselves a deity who was inviting his own dis-
placement, implicitly inviting human beings to become their own Makers.
Chapter 2 offers a synthesis of John Locke’s most influential ideas to justify
this sweeping claim. When he argued that human labor gave worthless raw
materials their value, making property a natural right—and that the mind,
as it left the hand of nature, was a blank slate, Locke (all unknowing) opened
up the most fabulous investment and development opportunity in history.
The implicit question became: whose “workmanship” would humanity be?
Progress supplied the answer. Over the next astounding centuries the human

© The Author(s) 2019 11

T. de Zengotita, Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics,
Political Philosophy and Public Purpose,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90689-8_2
12   T. DE ZENGOTITA

life-world would be remade and title transferred accordingly.1 The “human-

ism” we associate with the Renaissance, swept up now in the project of
progress, was profoundly affected; it took on a form that deserves its own
rubric—call it “proprietorial humanism.” When virtual realities, cloning,
and genetic engineering are placed at the climax of this narrative arc, the
moral of the story emerges and postmodernism can be rightly understood.

2.1   When the Shock of the New Was New: Rene

Descartes (1596–1650) and Galileo Galilei
(1564–1642)
Descartes and Galileo were already dealing with the “shock of the new”
early in the seventeenth century. Traditional conceptions—even
perceptions—of the world had dissolved under the influence of Copernicus,
the Protestant Reformation, the revelations of microscopes (you thought
your blood was liquid?) and telescopes (you thought the moon was per-
fectly round?), and the discovery of a literal “New World” across an ocean.
And evidence of this dissolution was widely circulated, thanks to print and
the Protestant insistence on literacy. As those traumatic and exhilarating
developments unfolded, people were thrown back on their own devices,
obliged to consult with themselves as never before on essential matters of
belief. The Cartesian division between mind and world in early modern
philosophy articulated that gigantic social fact—and Protestantism
expressed it in popular terms.
What the mind confronted when it looked out at a world stripped of
traditional meaning was Nature. And, as Newton would make evident, that
nature had a uniform design. It was regular in describable and manipulat-
able ways. Until the French and the Industrial revolutions, nature’s laws,
like Newton’s laws, were typically conceived as synchronic. Responding to
the trauma of those revolutions, the nineteenth century would preserve the
idea of the natural order by historicizing it—by discovering in nature’s plan
an unfolding, a development over time. But the most important thing to
grasp about early modern nature if “modernism” and “postmodernism” are
to be rightly understood is this: it had authority. Its laws were laws, for
1
 C.B.  MacPherson’s influential account of “possessive individualism” (1962) interprets
Locke in a similar way, but, in my view, he allows contemporary ideological concerns to
distort his account. Manifestations of self-proprietorship—like manners (or dieting or an
exercise regimen)—may today seem trivial compared to issues that shaped subsequent politi-
cal developments. But at the time, as will be shown, they were of the first importance.
   THE SITUATION OF THE MODERN SUBJECT    13

things and for people. Falling apples were, in some way, obedient and tyran-
nical monarchs unruly. From a place apart, the early modern mind assigned
itself the task of learning those laws and applying them, technologically,
economically, politically, and personally. Two texts will recall to us the basic
architecture: Descartes’ Discourse on Method ([1637] 1968) and Galileo’s
“Two Kinds of Properties” ([1623b] 1970).

2.1.1  The Book of the World

The Discourse on the Method for Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking
Truth in the Sciences was written in French, not Latin. Couple that fact with
the claim in the first paragraph that “the ability to judge well and distinguish
what is true from what is false … is naturally equal in all men” (Descartes
[1637] 1968, 3) and you have what amounts to a provocation before the
argument even begins. Apparently Descartes did not have politics in mind,
but no contemporary reader can miss the echo of his words in The
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Declaration of Independence.
Descartes was appealing to nature to authorize the free exercise of reason in
science just as Locke would 50 years later when he called for the free exercise
of reason in matters of government and economics. Modernity is inconceiv-
able without the authority of nature trumping the authority of tradition in
both arenas. It was that authority that provided the leverage needed to
overcome the massive weight of history, the towering presence of throne
and altar. It inspired people to look at a peasant child in its wooden crib and
compare it with an image of the dauphin, stripped of his silken swaddling,
naked as that peasant child—two eyes, two ears, ten fingers, the same heart
and liver and brain. It allowed them to conceive of that comparison in terms
of “natural right”—and, eventually, it incited them to action.
Something like “postmodernism” would become inevitable when
nature’s authority was lost—so we need to have some sense of how that
authority worked.
The Discourse on Method was written as an introduction to a book that
was to contain everything Descartes thought the sciences had achieved,
including much of his own scientific work. The book was to be called The
World—a title that says a lot about the spirit of that inaugural age. But
Descartes suppressed the book after the Church condemned Galileo—and
made public the introduction only. A philosophical formulation that
intended to ground the natural sciences became a touchstone for the
whole of modern metaphysics and epistemology.
14   T. DE ZENGOTITA

So it is worth our while to notice how Descartes chose to introduce

himself—and the first of the six parts of the Discourse is indeed a very per-
sonal introduction. The tone (first person, confiding) entices. The story line
(how he came to doubt everything he had been taught) dramatizes the
modern turn away from tradition in terms that verge on intimacy. It is as if
Descartes is expressing stylistically the situation of the modern subject his
philosophy will describe—a private mind, alone in its body, signaling hope-
fully across the chasm of physical extension, to another private mind, analo-
gously isolated. Descartes promises to “delineate my life as in a picture, in
order that each one may be able to judge for himself” as to the validity of his
method and the reliability of its author. He hopes that his example “will
prove useful to some without being hurtful to any, and that my openness
will find favor with all.” And then he takes us through his life, touching
upon every aspect of his education—describing his disdain for “magnificent
palaces” of traditional knowledge built on the “sand and mud” of the “dis-
quisitions of the ancient moralists.” He contrasts that with his awe at the
“certitude and evidence of the reasonings” in mathematics and his hopes for
their application to the “advancement of the mechanical arts.” He assures us
of his reverence for the truths of theology, of course—but (making a show
of refusing to “subject them to the impotency of my reason”) he moves
quickly on. Of philosophy (as taught in “the schools”), he merely remarks
(in terms that anticipate with eerie precision the judgment of analytical phi-
losophers at the beginning of the twentieth century; see Chap. 5) that “it
has been cultivated for many ages by the most distinguished men, and yet
there is not a single matter within its sphere which is not still in dispute.”
Brushing it all aside with what will become a classic gesture, to be repeated
many times in the centuries to come, a gesture that wipes the slate clean to
make way for a new beginning, Descartes arrives at the climax of his story:

as soon as my age permitted me to pass from under the control of my

instructors, I entirely abandoned the study of letters and resolved no longer
to seek any other science than the knowledge of myself or the great book of
the world.2 I spent the remainder of my youth in traveling, in visiting courts
and armies, in holding intercourse with men of different dispositions, in col-
lecting varied experiences, in proving myself in different situations into
which fortune threw me. (1968, para 14)

2
 For Descartes’ contemporaries, the implicit contrast was with books of traditional phi-
losophy and theology. Derrida will make much of this image in “The End of the Book and
the Beginning of Writing” (see Chap. 9). A world authored as a whole and readable as a
whole is assumed by this metaphor of containment—and poststructuralist “writing” tried to
disrupt both its terms.
   THE SITUATION OF THE MODERN SUBJECT    15

In other words, Rene Descartes—disillusioned with traditional ways—

dropped out and went on the road, looking for adventure, looking for
truth, looking for himself. It doesn’t get more modern than that.

2.1.2  “I Think Therefore I Am”

After his journeys were done, Descartes found himself in isolation, free at
last of passion and distraction. He settles on a plan for inquiry into his own
being, a direct encounter, eschewing presuppositions of any kind. He
thinks immediately of analogies with architecture and city planning. A
good citizen of France’s Classical age, he takes it for granted that “there is
seldom so much perfection in works composed of many separate parts,
upon which different hands had been employed, as in those completed by
a single master.” He is not arguing, just rehearsing the whys and where-
fores of an aesthetic no one would question, noting the “indiscriminate
juxtaposition” of buildings in unplanned neighborhoods, “there a large
one, and here a small, and the consequent crookedness and irregularity of
the streets” that leave one “disposed to allege that chance rather than any
human will guided by reason must have led to such an arrangement.”
A glimpse from a distance of the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment
reason. A hundred years and more before Adorno or Foucault, the Romantics
would discern the virtues of irregularity, of chance, of events that disrupt
settled arrangements—of ruins, especially—the beauty in all things gothic
would become apparent to the first modern opponents of abstract mind.
Descartes was justifying his project with this imagery. You can’t tear
down a city, he admits (a bit wistfully?), to realize a master plan—but you
can do what you like with your own house, surely? And that is his tone for
most of the second and the third parts of the Discourse—he is determined,
but also defensive, even anxious. Of course he knows as he writes what is
coming in the fourth part, and he has to know how certain steps in that
argument will be received. So he goes to great lengths to show that he
isn’t recommending this rigorous path for larger social reasons—let alone
religious ones. But even though it concerns just himself, he still takes
every precaution. He solemnly formulates four moral maxims in
­preparation for this inward journey in which “like one walking alone and
in the dark, I resolved to proceed so slowly and with such circumspection,
that if I did not advance far I would at least guard against falling,” which
is why he was taking “sufficient time to satisfy myself of the general nature
of the task I was setting myself,” and so on. The overall mood has been
compared more than once to that which attends the preparations of
16   T. DE ZENGOTITA

explorers about to enter a wilderness. And trepidation was surely justified.

Freud will one day follow him on this journey into the inward empire of
modern subjectivity—and discover monsters.
Still, it is impossible in this instance to distinguish neatly between self-­
description and self-dramatization. At a minimum, it seems safe to say that
Descartes knew he was proposing a radical break with philosophical tradi-
tion—not only in substance, but in procedure—and that he was impressed
with his own daring. Not since Augustine had a philosopher placed him-
self so much at the center of his thought. But no one could question
Augustine’s utter subordination to God no matter how self-descriptive his
discourse. In Descartes’ case they could and they would. He was about to
make himself responsible, personally responsible, for indubitable truth—
including the truth of God’s existence.
The opening sentences of the fourth part of the Discourse should, I
think, be read as drama, consciously crafted to seduce:

I am in doubt as to the propriety of making my first meditations in the place

above mentioned a matter of discourse; for these are so metaphysical, and so
uncommon, as not, perhaps, to be acceptable to everyone. (29)

That is a tease. It is also a personal challenge of a kind many a modern

innovator will issue to his (and later, her) audience. One wished to cull the
worthy from the herd before the going gets tough, as it surely will, with
the stakes so high, with truth hanging in the balance (compare Emile
Durkheim and Max Weber in Chap. 3). And Descartes immediately spells
out how far he is willing to go to win the day if it can be won at all. He
concedes that in everyday life we must constantly act upon opinions that
cannot be certain. But in philosophy—in this philosophy, at any rate—
another standard would be met. The highest standard possible. Descartes
is going to take an inventory of what he thinks he knows and subject it to
this withering test: if there is “the least ground for doubt” it will be
rejected as “absolutely false” until he comes across something—if he
does—that is “wholly indubitable.”
This is known as the “method of doubt”—better to call it a scorched
earth epistemology. The words are so familiar, read and referenced so
often, that the ferocious determination implicit in the procedure gets
washed out over time. To reject as absolutely false what you can find any
reason for doubting—no matter how far-fetched—testifies to a desire for
certainty, a need for certainty, so deep-seated that one risks the possibility
of utter failure in its name. Maybe there won’t be any knowledge that
   THE SITUATION OF THE MODERN SUBJECT    17

could pass such a test? Descartes will have to find out and his rhetorical
stance summons us to follow him, to take that risk for ourselves—each
reader with the right stuff must take the plunge alone. That is the tease
and the challenge of the fourth part of the Discourse.
As it turned out, one entity survived the massacre: Descartes himself or,
more precisely, his mind. And so it would be for everyone following the
path laid out by this self-help book that secured the essence of
modernity.
For the process of epistemological self-examination soon boils down to
this: how do I know that I am holding this book in my hand right now?
How do I know I’m not dreaming or hallucinating? I’ve had dreams where
I dreamt I woke up and thought I was awake—until later, when I really
woke up. At least, I think I did.3 And we have all seen psychotics on the
street talking to their imaginary friends, hearing voices—it’s at least con-
ceivable that I am one of them right now, hallucinating the book in my
hand (Derrida and Foucault will fall out over Descartes’ view of insanity,
see Chap. 9). So that gives me some reason to doubt the truth of this expe-
rience. And that’s all the method requires.
Now I have to assume that there is no book in my hand and then look
around and see if there’s anything left that I just cannot doubt.
Right away I realize that what applies to the book applies to everything
I experience through my senses. On these grounds, I can doubt every-
thing I see, touch, smell—including my own body, for the same reason I
can doubt the book. Maybe I don’t even have a hand. I might be a brain
in a vat wired up to some supercomputer that puts me in The Matrix.
People with an amputated limb can feel it itching, after all.
But then I suddenly realize that, while I can doubt the physical reality
of all these things I am experiencing, I cannot doubt the experiences per
se. I can doubt that I have a real book in a real hand, but I can’t doubt that
I am having book-in-my-hand sensations of various kinds—tactile, visual.
If I try to doubt that I just add effort-to-doubt sensations to the book-in-­
my-hand sensations—and so on, for the entirety of my subjective experi-
ence at any given instant. All my thoughts and feelings, sensations, ideas,
memories, whatever—I can doubt that they correspond to anything real,
but I can’t doubt that I’m having them, the pure experiences themselves,
3
 The autumn of 1619 found Descartes, filled with “enthusiasm,” engaged in fervent med-
itations as he conceived his life’s work. On 19 November, he had a dream so vivid and so
weighted with significance that he took it for a supernaturally inspired vision—of which he
had had premonitions before going to sleep. Auguste Comte once lamented that modern
philosophy originated in this “cerebral episode” (Maritain 1944).
18   T. DE ZENGOTITA

at any given instant.4 I can’t doubt that—it is “wholly indubitable.” That

is what cogito ergo sum means.
From there Descartes goes on to derive his dualist metaphysics, an
absolute ontological division between all things mental and all things
physical. Those arguments were suspect even to some of his contempo-
raries—and to many later readers they seem downright bogus (Levinas was
a notable exception), an almost fraudulent way to get out of the irredeem-
able solipsism of the cogito at its moment of self-discovery. First, Descartes
says that his knowledge of his own purely subjective existence sets a stan-
dard for “clarity.” That becomes, he claims, his criterion for identifying
true knowledge. Then, while exploring his now secure—but entirely sub-
jective—storehouse of ideas and sensations, he comes across one idea he
can’t account for: the idea of a perfect spiritual being, of God. He has this
idea and it is “clear.” But he, Descartes—the doubter—is not a perfect
being and therefore could not be the source of that idea. It has to come
from somewhere else. It has to come from the perfect being itself.
So Descartes is alone no more. There is his mind—the totality of his
conscious experience at each moment—and there is the perfect being who
has inserted this idea of itself into Descartes’ consciousness like a lifeline.
Then Descartes realizes that among the qualities of this idea of perfect
being are omnipotence and perfect goodness. And, obviously, no perfectly
good spiritual being is going to suddenly decide—for its own amusement,
as it were—to create Descartes’ mind and stock it with all the ideas and
impressions he has of a world and other people, history, nature. That
would not be good. That would be mean and deceitful.
All’s well that ends well. As the fourth part of the Discourse comes to its
conclusion, Descartes is assured of the existence of an external and physi-
cal world, a counterpart to his subjective experience of it, lying on the
other side of what would come to be called the “veil of ideas” (meaning
perceptions). So the situation—and this is Descartes’ segue to the book—
at the end of the day is this: imperfect beings that we are, our ideas and
impressions of the external world may not truly represent what things are
actually like out there beyond our minds, but we can be assured that there
is some real physical stuff out there causing our perceptions. Enter science.
It will enable us figure out what that physical stuff is really like—and its

4
 The Meditations ([1641] 1968) develops the argument in detail—in Latin, for a scholarly
audience. There Descartes argues that not only empirical knowledge but logical/mathemati-
cal knowledge is subject to doubt, thanks to conceivable interventions by an evil demon.
   THE SITUATION OF THE MODERN SUBJECT    19

promise knows no bounds. In the sixth part, Descartes famously called for
“a practical philosophy” which would allow us to know the workings of
nature’s bodies “as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artisans”
and so “apply them in the same way to all the uses to which they are
adapted and thus render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature.” In
the very last paragraph, he commits the remainder of his life to the study
of medicine and hints at a cure for death.
Shades of Larry Page and Ray Kurzweil.

2.1.3  The Veil of Ideas

Early modern scientists committed to “corpuscularism” had worked their
way into an essentially Cartesian position before Descartes put pen to paper.
Galileo’s “Two Kinds of Properties” (from The Assayer) was published in
1623, more than 15 years before the Discourse on Method. In it Galileo argues
that there is actually no such thing as heat; not as the “commonly held con-
ception” understands it, anyway—namely, as a property of hot things.
The way Galileo organizes his presentation calls to mind a magician
preparing an audience for some stunning effect, but of course, in this case,
the procedure is inverted. The “trick” is the illusion that common sense
plays on us and the magic of science is to reveal the truth behind appear-
ances we take for granted. This gesture too will be endlessly repeated in
centuries to come—and not only in the hard sciences. Later moderns—
“masters of suspicion” like Freud and Nietzsche and Marx—will one day
reflect upon the whole sweep of history, upon human societies and psyches,
and see through what convention and consciousness accept as given, reveal-
ing the hidden forces that actually determine human lives5 (see Chap. 6).
But will to truth, in Galileo, did not reach so far. He concentrated on
the basic furniture. He was a great experimentalist, of course, but he gave
first place in physics to mathematics and began with a concept, with a
deductive argument:

whenever I conceive of any material or corporeal substance, I am necessarily

constrained to conceive of that substance as bounded and as possessing this
or that shape, as large or small in relationship to some other body, as in this
or that place during this or that time. … But I do not feel myself compelled
to conceive of bodies as necessarily conjoined with further conditions as
being red or white, bitter or sweet. (in Danto and Morganbesser 1970, 27)

5
 “Consciousness” would be a reference to what Freud exposed as a mere surface and
“convention” to what both Marx and Nietzsche exposed as mere surface.
20   T. DE ZENGOTITA

In other words, the properties of things that necessarily—logically, a

priori—belong to them are also the properties that happen to be measur-
able. Those “primary properties”—the real ones, the objective ones—can
be safely assumed to belong to the corpuscular elements, the invisible
atoms, and molecules that constitute the physical world. The crucial point
is this: primary properties that are inherent in matter and measurable are
therefore mathematically representable (mass, velocity, etc.). So even
though we cannot experience atoms and molecules directly, we can theorize
about them mathematically. And, since these atoms and molecules consti-
tute the physical world and determine all events in it—some of which we
can experience directly—we can make predictions about observable events
based on mathematical theories about unobservable causes. And we can
test and refine those theories over time. Modern science in a nutshell.
So there is no heat or color or sound (let alone beauty) in the external
world. These are “secondary” properties or qualities that owe their phan-
tom existence to the human senses.6 Those senses, and our reflections on
them, place us on one side of the “veil of ideas” beyond which lies truth,
things in themselves. Rightly interpreted, that metaphor captures how sci-
ence as a practice has depended upon the situation of the modern subject
all along. As we shall see in the following chapters, the major critiques of
science and technology—from Goethe and Hegel to Husserl and
Heidegger to Horkheimer, Adorno, Foucault, and Latour—assume an
understanding of this situation and the aspiration to a mathesis universalis
it entails.7 Without that understanding, those critiques cannot be read
intelligently—another reason why this is “essential background” for the
story of modernity’s efforts to extend and/or overcome itself.
The rigorous Cartesian distinction between mental and physical sub-
stance corresponds to a more loosely rendered division in “sense of self”
experienced by ordinary people going about their business in the modern

6
 “Suppose I pass my hand, first over a marble statue, then over a living man … the primary
qualities of motion and contact will similarly affect the two objects, and we would use identi-
cal language to describe this in each case. But the living body … will feel itself affected … [for
example] ‘tickling.’ This latter affection is altogether our own, and is not at all a property of
the hand.” (Galileo [1623b] 1970, 8).
7
 Said Galileo: “Philosophy [physics] is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—
which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns
to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written
in the language of mathematics.” ([1623a] 1957, 237–238). Compare Descartes’ “book of
the world.”
   THE SITUATION OF THE MODERN SUBJECT    21

world. Protestantism, founded on an individual’s inner relationship with

God (no mediating Catholic paraphernalia required), was the most com-
prehensive manifestation of this form of life. It provided the broader ideo-
logical framework that reflected the social and economic context in which
Cartesian philosophy took shape and made sense. Max Weber famously
described the pious burghers who forged the modern world in The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) as being in the habit
of reflecting upon their private minds of an evening, the better to keep
track of their moral credits and debits, just as they attended to their com-
mercial ledgers and enterprises by day. Though they were not typically
troubled by the thought that the external world might be a hallucination,
they lived the distinction between res cogitans and res extensa nonetheless.
Cartesian dualism was a philosophical distillation of a sense of inner dis-
tance from the world and from the self that characterized their mode of
existence—as surely as it did Diderot’s and Adam Smith’s.

2.2   The Lockean Dispensation and the Project

of Progress

The “moral sciences” of the Enlightenment found their Newton in John

Locke (1632–1704). His philosophy offered a systematic account of
human nature that was intuitively appealing and immediately useful. In
effect, he drew out the consequences of the Cartesian bifurcation in rela-
tion to politics and economics in ways that inspired activists in England’s
Glorious Revolution in 1689 and in the American and the French
Revolutions a century later. No modern thinker, besides Marx, had so
direct an impact on events—and as we shall see, Marx owed his most fun-
damental formulation to Lockean precedent or, more precisely, to the
form of life Locke articulated.
With the situation of the modern subject stipulated, move on to this
question: what did the natural world in general look like to educated men
and women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? They were
through with mythological explanations; even the Book of Genesis was just
another fable by comparison with the works of Aristotle—and all the more
so in comparison with the works of Galileo and Harvey, Huygens and
Newton. Their perceptions of the natural world were shaped by a sud-
denly fashionable “new reason” or “natural philosophy.” To understand
what they saw we must suspend our knowledge of geology and biology.
22   T. DE ZENGOTITA

They had no sense of the eons of time it took for the universe to take shape
since the big bang, no idea that billions of years had passed since the for-
mation of our solar system. No fossil record to consult. No dinosaurs to
imagine. No knowledge of genes. No speciation, no natural selection—
above all, no evolution. The great panorama of life, the stunning diversity
of its forms and adaptations, the intricacies of anatomy and physiology—
all this was immediately apparent and deeply appreciated, but the unexam-
ined assumption was that all of it had always been there more or less as it
now appeared, ever since it appeared in the first place.
The (almost) inevitable conclusion was that an intelligent Maker was
responsible for the order of the universe—especially the intricate biologi-
cal machinery. To look at nature, at all the inorganic bodies dancing to
Newtonian measures and all the organic bodies sensing, respirating, loco-
moting, ingesting, digesting, reproducing—to look at all that and not
apprehend design would be like coming across an array of pebbles on a
beach precisely spelling out some message and perceiving it as a random
effect of surf and tide. “Let there be light” was beautiful poetry, but
F = MA was the word of the modern God.
But with organisms a curious difference prevailed: a healthy body was
obviously in conformity with a designer’s intentions. But one also encoun-
tered mortality and disease. Here, for some reason, was a sort of disobedi-
ence, a malfunctioning. Why that should be so was the subject of much
debate, but almost no one doubted the framework of interpretation. Modern
medicine was founded on the metaphor of repairing such malfunctions.
And so, when early moderns looked upon human history—the carnage,
absurd superstitions, institutionalized barbarities—the conclusion was
inevitable. Here was a disease of another order, a malfunctioning of
another kind. Again, there was much debate over why this should be so,
but the framework of interpretation remained. And the question became:
what were the Maker’s designs for His human creatures at the social level,
what were those natural laws, and how could His creatures cure the dis-
eases of history in accordance with them?

2.2.1  Dr. Locke and the Body Politick

Born into a Puritan professional family, Locke became an academic and a
physician. At Oxford with Robert Boyle, he was—like all his fellows—
deeply influenced by Descartes’ new philosophy. Again, like so many
ambitious young men of his day, he took up medicine out of impatience
with “useless scholasticism.” He was struck from the outset by the image
   THE SITUATION OF THE MODERN SUBJECT    23

of living creatures as devices of God’s making. Inspired by possibilities for

imitation inherent in that image, Locke and his peers assumed the point of
view it immediately suggested.
Medicine was no abstract success story for John Locke. He experienced
its power as a clinician, a thinker, and a man on the rise in a changing
world. There is a pretty symbolism in the manner of his introduction to his
patron, Lord Shaftesbury, a leader of the Whigs in the revolution to come.
He performed an innovative operation on the Earl’s diseased liver that was
widely regarded as a medical breakthrough. He was taken on, to begin
with, as Shaftesbury’s personal physician, but the Earl later turned to
Locke for supervision of his family’s education and for guidance on mat-
ters of political theory and policy. He became, in effect, Shaftesbury’s
expert on human nature at all levels of its organization on the basis of his
understanding of the divine Maker’s designs—whether of hearts and liv-
ers, or persons and families. Locke undoubtedly gave advice on strategy
and tactics as well. Certainly, he managed his own career well; he was
always a good investment.
Above all, Locke was a dutiful Protestant, a believer in scripture as well
as in nature, and his efforts to reconcile those convictions would animate
his life’s work. It was God’s will—in both venues—that concerned Locke
most and discovering and promulgating that will was his calling. He fol-
lowed it faithfully, wherever it led. In the Essay on Toleration (1667), which
he wrote as a member of Shaftesbury’s entourage at a time when men
were haunted by memories of wars of religion, Locke set out the great
principle of Classical liberalism: “Any exercise of political power over indi-
vidual behavior which did not threaten peace or security… was an illegiti-
mate exercise of power” (Dunn 1969, 30–32). So the idea of limiting the
role of government for the sake of the body politic was first presented by
Locke in religious terms. At first only the “subjective condition” of reli-
gious belief and its expression was off-limits to political authority and that
was because such convictions were not “manipulable” by government
action. For “it is not just the outrageousness of political interference in
purely religious matters but almost equally its categorical irrelevance that
drives the point home” (Dunn 1969, 33–35; italics mine).
But what at first seemed categorically irrelevant to government would
become the basis of government—the private mind, the seat of opinion,
the abstracted locus of the self-governing modern person, the practico-­
ethical equivalent of the cogito (see MacIntyre on “emotivism” 1984).
Locke had no room in his philosophy for Descartes’ innate ideas, but the
24   T. DE ZENGOTITA

mind as he described it was every bit as private—a purely subjective space

within which human belief was elaborated and human conduct
determined.

2.2.2  An Invitation from the Maker

For Men being all the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise
Maker; All the Servants of one Sovereign Master, sent into the World by his
order and about his business, they are his Property, whose Workmanship
they are. (Second Treatise of Government, II, 6)

This image, a more pious expression of the master trope cited above,

the analogy with which Hobbes had introduced Leviathan, informed all
Locke’s philosophical questions and inspired his politics as well. This
Maker supplied the foundation for modernity, a foundation so familiar
that its importance is often overlooked. Abridged editions of Locke’s
works leave out the many passages devoted to the Maker in favor of parts
that are “still relevant”—for in those excised passages all the divine honor-
ifics, adorned with capital letters, become a meaningless blur, outdated
stylistics. But if we want to understand how we came to be what we are,
the Divine Artificer must be rescued from cliché and from exclusion
and returned to His rightful place in the history of ideas.
The seminal arguments of the Second Treatise that directly influenced
the Bill of Rights and The Declaration of the Rights of Man all depend on
this image of the divine Maker/Owner. The right of self-preservation is
actually a duty to that Maker/Owner; suicide is wrong because it is rob-
bery of God; for the same reason, a man could not sell himself into slavery.
Even the central claim of “the equality of Men by Nature” held true
because God made men “furnished with like Faculties, sharing all in one
Community of Nature” and therefore “equal in His eyes.” If nature was
the authority that gave moderns the strength to overthrow tradition, it
was because nature had designs for human beings that functioned as orders,
as commandments of new kind.
Finally—perhaps most crucially, with the political future in view—there
was Locke’s account of property as a natural right. That claim was imme-
diately intended to buttress the case for the rising productive classes
against traditional entitlements of idle lords and kings, entitlements that
bourgeois French revolutionaries would call parasitical. That claim found
its principle of ownership in the same image. God’s labor made man His
property, so it followed that:
   THE SITUATION OF THE MODERN SUBJECT    25

He that is nourished by the Acorns he pickt up under an Oak, or the Apples

he gathered from the Trees in the Wood, has certainly appropriated them to
himself … and ‘tis plain, if the first gathering made them not his, nothing else
could. That labour put a distinction between them and common. (II, 28)

Locke went on to claim that human labor gave value to the “almost
worthless” raw materials of nature by transforming them into “useful goods.”
Title belonged, under natural law, to those whose labor gave the value.
At the same time, in the context of the Essay Concerning Human
Understanding ([1689] 1996), with practical politics far from his thoughts,
Locke articulated the first principle of modern empiricism when he com-
pared the human mind to a tabula rasa—a blank slate when it left the
“hand of nature” (I, ii, 15; II, i,2).
Consider those claims together. Locke, in his piety, never saw the impli-
cations, but he was announcing to generations of striving moderns the
discovery of an uncultivated and unimproved piece of raw material of a
new order. And those rational and industrious human analogues of the
Divine Maker were quick to seize the opportunity. The abstracted modern
subject—locus now of all meaning and value—took control of raw mate-
rial, of objects as “they left the hand of nature,” and imposed upon them
the designs of human makers. This massive, intricate process constituted
the modern form of life. Implicit in the whole situation was this question:
whose “workmanship” would humanity be? The project of progress, in its
myriad actuality, would supply the answer.8
The basic plot of modernity’s story has now been outlined. The under-
lying themes—the transformation of nature and society by modern sci-
ence, technology and politics, the displacement of God—figure largely in
many accounts of modernity, of course. But this particular telling brings
out the fact that the Hegelian/Marxist version was continuous with its
predecessor; it took Locke’s labor theory of value and reassigned it from
an individual subject to a social one. The complexities of dialectical mate-
rialism and the passions of politics have obscured that essential commonal-
ity—which marks both Locke and Marx as fundamentally modern and
sheds much light on that “mirroring” of structures of capitalist domina-
tion by Communist institutions that so troubled left intellectuals during
the 1950s and 1960s, especially in France (see Chaps. 8, 9).
8
 Jacques Barzun once remarked the fact that “the appliance works” was “the great argu-
ment that has redirected the western mind” (1964, 19). Barzun had technological appliances
in mind, but his point is only deepened when extended to include modern self-made persons
and their social arrangements. And it never applied more aptly than it does today.
26   T. DE ZENGOTITA

2.3   Varieties of Enlightenment

2.3.1  Polishing the Rude Device: Refinement and Self-Possession

Nothing in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discussions of prog-
ress is as foreign to us as the emphasis on the improvement of manners.
But this emphasis was central to the original idea of modernity and, in
degenerated forms, it persisted into the twentieth century. Nowhere were
the advantages, and the sheer sensations, of self-ownership more evident.
That emphasis underlies the dominant figure of the civilizing mission, one
in which the child, the savage, and the vulgar are equated. What reason-
able, what educated and objective observer could miss the difference? On
the one hand, the unclothed and ungroomed, the babbling, the illiterate,
the uncoordinated and graceless, the loud, the cruel, the hysterical, the
gullible and superstitious, undisciplined and uneducated. On the other
hand, gentlemen of blood and merit, disposed and displayed to mutual
advantage in their persons and deportment, in their conversation, in their
raiment and in their equipage—cultivated all and all in possession of them-
selves. Could anyone doubt where the value lay? And knowing that gen-
tlemen were once children and societies of gentlemen were once savage,
who would deny the laborer his due?
The scope of the term “manners” was larger at the time. It carried
senses better expressed today by the term “custom.” But the conceptual
center of gravity was the same and it structured the whole constellation of
“civility” terms, including “civilization” and “civil society.” Manners were
as central to the idea of progress as other technologies. The basic semantic
opposition in discussions of improvement suggests the intimate relation.
It distinguished between “gross,” “coarse,” and “rude” on the one hand,
and “refined,” “cultivated,” and “polished” on the other. The terms
applied indiscriminately to people, tools, and institutions. If humanity’s
proprietorial rights over itself meant substituting human for divine labor,
then children, peasants, proletarians, and savages would provide the
“almost worthless” raw materials.
For the Enlightenment’s leaders, manners were the social strategy (Gay
1969, 41–44). The Civilizing Process was undertaken by men of merit
making their way in a world still dominated by men of blood as they
adapted to courtly modes of behavior and moved to the fashionable center
   THE SITUATION OF THE MODERN SUBJECT    27

of salon life (Elias 1978). Manners were also immediate proof of the
improvability of human nature. Hence, Gay’s remark: “For the spokesman
of the Enlightenment, progress was an experience before it became a pro-
gram” (Gay 1969, 56).
Systematic differences distinguished national modes of Enlightenment
in the eighteenth century and those differences conditioned the various
ways modernity would eventually seek to overcome itself when the post-
modern moment came. Objective conditions of life in different places had
profound effects. But such conditions can be rightly understood only if
this fact is grasped to begin with: for the first time in Western history, a
range of “life-styles” (just the right phrase) was distributed across divisions
of nationality and class. In the eighteenth century, a Scottish burgher of
grave Presbyterian mien might see his son become a dancing school fop
while a French noble of the sword might see his son, clad in cloth, on his
knees in a tenant’s field, taking soil samples.
Historians describe large-scale trends in Western Europe in this period:
a population explosion, an uprooting and emigration of peoples, incipient
industrialization, world trade and colonization, new modes of transport
and communication under the control of a rising bourgeoisie, and a
declining rural order transformed by new agricultural techniques and asso-
ciated political developments. All these forces, which would culminate in
the French and the Industrial revolutions, together shaped the eighteenth
century—but at different paces, differently emphasized, according to
national and local circumstances (Braudel 1982). Eric Hobsbawm’s classic
account of France and Great Britain during the “dual revolutions” of the
nineteenth century is rooted in developments already well under way in
the eighteenth century ([1962] 1996). Great Britain was his exemplar of
modernity’s economic aspect and France of its politics, because “England
had already had both its religious reformation and its bourgeois revolu-
tion… whereas in France the forms and privileges of feudalism and medi-
eval religion had survived almost intact into the heart of the Enlightenment”
(Willey 1950, 120). From this fundamental difference flow several conse-
quences that shaped the Enlightenment in distinctive ways.
In France, sumptuary laws prohibited the bourgeoisie, no matter how
wealthy, from adorning themselves as lavishly as nobles, no matter how
impoverished. Other laws prohibited nobles, no matter how equipped or
inclined, from trade or manufacture. The Catholic Church retained its
power over educational and medical institutions, and essential social rituals
were still at its disposal, even after the revolution. Before the revolution,
28   T. DE ZENGOTITA

Church prerogatives—privileges of the “First Estate”—extended into every

aspect of life and were closely coordinated with the interests of noble fami-
lies and the crown. No matter what individuals might do or think, the
feudal order was woven into the fabric of the French society. The enormous
sway of that historical circumstance survived the French Revolution and
persisted into the nineteenth century and beyond. In spite of successful
efforts of the Third Republic (1870–1940) to reign in the Church (and its
Monarchist allies), it remained, as we shall see, a powerful force in the lives
and minds of the intellectuals and artists of the modernist/postmodern
avant-garde in France in the twentieth century. Much of what strikes
Anglo-American intellectuals as excessive in recent French thought is due
to that persisting influence. It is virtually impossible to understand, say,
Georges Bataille or Louis Althusser without taking into account the forma-
tive influence of the Catholic Church.
But in Protestant Great Britain—and especially in Scotland—a “vista of
rising prosperity appeared to lie wide open” before the industrious middle
classes and their enlightened allies during the eighteenth century. The
rational, tolerant deism implicit in the works of the natural philosophers
was openly promoted in public disputes with defenders of orthodoxy. No
enlightened exponent of natural religion in the British Isles was driven to
the pitch of outrage that moved Voltaire to sign some of his private cor-
respondence with Ecrasez l’infame!9 And no promoter of political liberty
or critic of established religion had to disguise his views in allegorical tales
of ludicrous practices observed by some fictitious traveler in the traditions
of Egypt or China. In England the middle class enjoyed equality before
the law; in Scotland the middle class dominated the law and its practitio-
ners constituted a “jurisprudential aristocracy” whose prestige exceeded
that of any other group and included many leaders of the Scottish
Enlightenment (Lehmann 1971, 17).

9
 Not that the radically unorthodox were always welcome in Great Britain. Samuel Johnson
stalked out of a dinner party when David Hume joined the company, and conservative forces
in the Presbyterian Church were able to deny Hume a university chair. But Hume had friends
in that church who prevented his ex-communication and defended his right to his opinions.
In a nutshell, this contrast, known as the “Great Infidel” in Great Britain, was lionized on his
visits to France—but at D’Holbach’s dinners for assorted philosophes, he was cordially chided
for stopping short of atheism. To his hosts, Hume’s principled skepticism was a cop out.
Hume, in turn, was struck by a certain dogmatism in the French radicals—they reminded
him of Churchmen! An irony with a future (Mossner [1954] 1970, 153–163; 475–486).
   THE SITUATION OF THE MODERN SUBJECT    29

The eighteenth century was an age of public fetes, follies, and pastorales
that featured the public as actors and audience, an age of ever-­innovating
clubs, salons, and coffee houses, of Richard Sennett’s “public man” before
his fall (1974). It was also an age of zoos and circuses where the sight of
exotic animals made familiar creatures seem less inevitable as the rage for
exotic spices, coffee, chocolate, and tea made familiar tastes seem more
provisional. It was an age of libraries and museums—which were surely also
“public houses” open to consumers of novelty. At the same time, they were
monumental trophy halls that honored public benefactors and the con-
querors of history, geography, and nature whose prizes were there exhib-
ited for those disposed to emulation. It was the age of the gourmet, the
virtuoso, and the dilettante (a term of praise), of the so-­called bourgeois
family dramas of Diderot and Lessing, and, of course, the age of the “novel”
itself—forms of art designed to provide the productive classes with reflec-
tions of themselves. Finally, and across the board, it was an age of satire, of
cartoons, of social criticism and self-scrutiny. How else was one to improve?
The Enlightenment’s mission was everywhere evident in European cul-
ture in the eighteenth century. Take, for example, “the most influential
magazine in history,” a “civilizing agent” that spawned imitators across the
world: in Addison’s words, The Spectator would “bring philosophy out of
the closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assem-
blies, at tea tables and in coffeehouses.” It aimed to “polish man’s behavior
and purify his intentions” on the basis of the new natural and moral phi-
losophy. The anonymous voice of the journal (referring to itself as The
Spectator of Mankind representing a Spectator Club) spoke as a “Newton
for the average man,” as a painter of “lyrical portraits” of intricate and
beneficent systems of industry, trade, and technology, as a constant critic of
“frenzy and enthusiasm,” as a satirist of superstition, and as a general arbi-
ter of aesthetic and social taste. And good taste depended above all on the
“agreement of the well-bred” and, according to The Spectator, the well-
bred agreed that the artist should avoid Gothic excess and “take as much
pains in forming his imagination, as a philosopher in cultivating his under-
standing.” The Spectator was dedicated to showing its eager readers, “men
and women with a modicum of learning,” how to form themselves on the
same model (Gay 1969, 27, 52–55, 559–660; Whitney 1965).
The very name of this publication makes the point. The vanguard
had found a public. Self-possession through self-improvement was installed
as a central theme in the modern form of life, although it would take time for
the consequences to emerge on a significant scale. God’s designs were not
30   T. DE ZENGOTITA

replaced overnight. Still, the image of the rude, but improvable, device
had given the idea of progress an irresistible purchase on history. Millions
of people would come to understand and treat themselves and others in
accordance with this theme. Self-possession through self-improvement
was potentially the project of the whole species, already being realized in
the “party of humanity.”10 And as partisans of improvement grew more
numerous, so their visions of it became more various. Out of a sense of
duty, out of satisfaction with their own positions, out of disgust with
unnecessary suffering, out of sheer acquisitive ambition—enlightened
Europeans felt their entitlements extend beyond themselves to embrace
the raw material of the entire globe and  all humanity. Upon them
descended the glory, the burden, and the profit of leading it. Economic
and missionary imperialism, abolitionism, public education, and women’s
suffrage were all conceived by the same style of mind.

2.3.2  Romantic Subjectivity
These cultural developments were intricately and ironically related—and
something like a dialectical development is discernible in hindsight. When
Samuel Johnson, for example, traveled to the wastes of Scotland he wanted
to “experience [the] simplicity and wildness” of a “totally different …
system of life.” But he had to content himself with wild landscapes.
Scotland’s ambitious natives received him as civilized hosts, bursting with
civic pride, managers of a booming economy, a united, educated, and
striving people growing daily more enlightened and refined. They refused
to expose the “savage,” “clannish,” “patriarchal family spirit” Johnson
had hoped to see (1958, 92–106). In other contexts, the Scots would find
a residue of virtue in the old ways, but no touring Englishman would be
permitted to judge on so delicate a question.
The French, on the other hand, were inclined to view the English some-
what as the English viewed the Scots. But the French were disposed to a
different kind of tour. The lure was the same, but the means were more
intense and complete psychologically, less strenuous in practice. A “cult of
sensibility,” encouraged by the wave of anglomania that swept through the
salons in the 1750s and 1760s, took shape at the heart of the Enlightenment.
10
 Famously represented in Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?” ([1784] 1966): “the
few who, after having themselves thrown off the yoke of immaturity, will spread the spirit of
a rational appreciation for both their own worth and for each person’s calling to think for
himself.”
   THE SITUATION OF THE MODERN SUBJECT    31

In his Letters Concerning the English Nation (1734), Voltaire’s praise for
English thought and politics had been hedged by criticism of English taste
and manners. But his old-fashioned Classical standards would soon be
overwhelmed by a fad for all things natural, simple, and sentimental, which
often meant things English (Green 1931, 29–59). But the French were
incubating a more radical Romantic discourse soon to be expressed by the
author of, among other things, the wildly popular novel of natural senti-
ment—La Nouvelle Heloise (by Jean-Jacques Rousseau).

Mme. d’Genlis, who laughs at these affectations, is no less affected than the
rest. Suddenly, someone in the company is heard to say to the young orphan
whom she is exhibiting: “Pamela, show us Heloise,” whereupon Pamela,
loosening her hair, falls on her knees and turns her eyes up to heaven with
an air of inspiration, to the great applause of the assembly. Sensibility became
an institution. (Taine [1867] 1931, 160–162)

The French had been performing for more than a century at the center
of European fashion. They had brought manners to the highest pitch of
refinement. In every social situation, “there was a certain way of walking,
of sitting down, of saluting, of picking up a glove, of holding a fork, of
tendering any article, in fine a complete mimicry, which children had to be
taught at a very early age” (Taine, citing a contemporary memoir, 1931,
158). And, Taine adds, “Not only was the outward factitious, but, again,
the inward; there was a certain prescribed mode of feeling” for every situ-
ation as well. The appeal of nature, emotion, sensibility can only be appre-
ciated against that background. One mistress of the drawing room stage
remarked in her diary: “A genuine sentiment is so rare, that, when I leave
Versailles, I sometimes stand still in the street to see a dog gnaw a bone”
(Taine 1931, 157).
Horace Walpole was a representative English gentleman of the eigh-
teenth century. He resented the idea that English styles were the object of
longings that might also be satisfied by the sight of a dog gnawing a bone.
He would have glowed with pleasure at Rude’s description of him as pos-
sessor, “an unrivaled sense of the social proprieties” (1972, 121). Like
Johnson, Walpole loved to deride Scottish backwardness. At the same
time, he mocked the French fancy for the natural—with their passion for
doing things “A l’Anglaise” in mind, he remarked: “Their next mode will
be ‘A l’Iriquoise” (1972, 152). But fashion was fashion and the French
32   T. DE ZENGOTITA

were still its masters. Walpole built his neo-Gothic estate at Strawberry
Hill under the influence he mocked.
The “cult of sensibility” is itself testimony to the breadth and depth of
proprietorial humanism’s dominion. Rightly associated with an immanent
Romanticism, it was not necessarily opposed to Enlightenment rationality
and pragmatism. The situation of Romanticism at its outset was essentially
similar to its situation in decline a century later—thoroughly domesticated
in ways described by Raymond Williams (1958). It began as one of many
fashions in a fashioned world, hanging together with utilitarian rationality
in the cupboard of the public mind as easily as day and evening dresses in
the cupboard of the boudoir. And that was something hard-core Romantics
would not countenance.
Scholarly efforts to define Romanticism have been legion. History
of ideas distinctions are most familiar. They often come in pairs, to
contrast with the Enlightenment: transcendence versus immanence,
mechanical versus organic, control versus spontaneity, calculation versus
imagination/feeling, society versus community, sincerity versus authen-
ticity, abstract versus concrete, static versus dynamic, and liberty versus
self-­determination. Taken together, the traditional polarities point to a
constitutive gesture in the underlying phenomenology. Romantic inten-
tionality is the ongoing effort of the abstracted modern mind to refuse
itself, as abstracted, and so re-fuse itself as embodied in the world. This
dialectic of refusion, an attitude of thought in motion, evokes the gesture
on the wing, as it were—it is more like a pun than a category. Actually,
this pun recalls the Hegelian notion—for what was Hegel’s project if not
the refusion of Absolute Mind? Hegel would repudiate Romanticism’s
sentimental excesses, but he was its ultimate philosopher (Abrams 1971,
67, 173; Taylor 1979, 5–13).

2.3.3  Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)

Seeing that I am so little master of myself when I am alone, imagine what I
am like in conversation, when in order to speak to the point one must think
promptly of a dozen things at a time. The mere thought of all the conven-
tions of which I am sure to forget at least one, is enough to frighten me. …
I have only to be absolutely required to speak and I invariably say something
stupid. But what is even more fatal is that, instead of keeping quiet when I
have nothing to say, it is just at those times when I have a furious desire to
chatter. (Rousseau [1781] 1953)
   THE SITUATION OF THE MODERN SUBJECT    33

With his influence on the next generation of German thinkers in mind,

it is helpful to think of Rousseau as “the first Romantic.” That was why
language itself was a problem for him—not only in his life, but in his
thought. He had to express essentially Romantic ideas in an Enlightenment
vocabulary. That made his work prophetic, his place in history ambiguous,
and his relations with his fellow philosophes problematic. The passage from
The Confessions just cited provides the interpretive key. Rousseau was not
comfortable in the salons that made him famous; he was not self-possessed
and self-governing, and his misery was the proof. Like so many Romantics
since, Rousseau celebrated his misery as a token of authenticity in an arti-
ficial world. More flexible spirits, with that fashionable taste for the natu-
ral, made him the first victim of radical chic.
Rousseau’s Romantic visions can look like Enlightenment abstractions
because they were necessarily cast in the “nature” idioms of Locke and
Condillac. A Romantic jargon of organic embodiment had yet to be fash-
ioned. But that embodiment was expressed in the anguish of Rousseau’s
life as well as the substance of his proto-evolutionary speculations about
the origins of language and property, and his hymn to the “general will,”
his dream of an authentic social existence.11 In the hollow settings of salon
life, the tawdry liberty of the Enlightenment style of mind was to calculate
convenience and pleasure and a self-governing reason produced only man-
ners, the appearance of virtue. In such contexts, faux-pas and ineptitude
were manifestations of genuine virtue—and of genius. The passage cited
earlier was actually introducing Rousseau’s account of his own creativity.
Like ineptitude, he said, illumination washed over and through him, tak-
ing him as its vessel. True genius—like true virtue, like the truly natural—
was beyond calculation.
The Second Discourse (1754) was especially well regarded by Rousseau’s
later admirers. In his conclusion to a reflection on the origin of language,
Rousseau left the reader with a “difficult question” that Derrida would
one day confront in his own way (see Chap. 9). He asked “which is the
more necessary assumption: that language could not have been invented if
society had not already been established or that society could not have
been established if language had not already been invented?”

11
 Rousseau in particular and Romanticism in general are often rightly associated with soli-
tude, rather than with what I have called “refusion” (see Rousseau’s own Reveries of a
Solitary Walker [1782] 1979). But an alienated spirit, with no authentic social connections,
has no choice but seek solace in that solitude, especially in the company of nature.
34   T. DE ZENGOTITA

No wonder he inspired the great Romantics. They would become mas-

ters of paradox—and lovers of those they could not master. The tremor of
undecidability, the slippage into opposition—these sensations of dialectic
would be experienced as the very life of the mind, an alternative to the
dead categories of Enlightenment thought. If Romantic sensibility longed
for refusion of mind and world, it also relished reaching for it—often to
the point of collaboration with the unthinkable for the sake of sheer move-
ment. For what is life, if not movement? That taste for sensations of living
thought and its promise of refusion persisted long after “Romanticism”
lapsed—and postmodernism owes much to that persistence: Nietzsche’s
unmasking of atheistic anarchists as crypto-Christians; Freudian para-
praxis: Adorno and Horkheimer’s exposure of Enlightenment rationality
as a return of mythos; Heidegger’s revealing/concealing of Being and
beings; Derrida’s differAnce, Deleuze’s delirium, Lyotard’s differend—
instances multiply indefinitely. What they all have in common, what they
retain of the Romantic impulse, is what Rousseau first found in his famous
paradoxes: liberation from settled thought, from institutionalized mind—
from abstracted subjectivity and its monotonous world.

2.3.4  The German Enlightenment

The Enlightenment in Germany deserves separate mention because the
essence of Romanticism was philosophically articulated by Hegel in over-
coming Kant—and Hegel, even in decline, was very much an influence on
the creators of French theory. A central argument of this book involves
this claim: Romanticism was the first “postmodernism” and, inevitably,
when the poststructuralists set out to dismantle modernity’s constructions
they re-iterated much of the Romantic response to Enlightenment abstrac-
tion. That reiteration was not apparent to them because, as we shall see,
they had turned decisively away from the Hegelian legacy and embraced
Structuralism, which involved them with issues that seemed far removed—
formal, even “scientific”—from stereotypical notions of Romanticism.
In any case, Kant was a principal foil for both Romantic and postmodern
efforts to move beyond the modern.

2.3.5  Subject and System in Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

When Anglo-Americans think of the Enlightenment, they often think first
of Voltaire and Hume, Adam Smith and the philosophes, maybe Thomas
   THE SITUATION OF THE MODERN SUBJECT    35

Jefferson. But when Adorno and Husserl, Heidegger, Foucault, and

Derrida thought of the Enlightenment, they thought first of Kant. But not
because of his essays dealing specifically with the Enlightenment as a
movement—human progress, perpetual peace, and so on. Kant’s writings
on such topics were standard fare, modeled closely on the French and
Scottish examples that inspired the German modernizers. And, contrary
to entrenched stereotype, it seems that Kant managed his career and
sought advancement in society as self-consciously and effectively as
enlighteners in settings more glamorous than Konigsberg (Kuehn 2001).
There is not much to distinguish Kant from his contemporaries in more
fashionable venues on the level of opinion and deportment.
But the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) is in a class by itself in modern
philosophy. It surpasses in depth and breadth the influence even of
Descartes. The fact that Anglo-American philosophers are as likely (to this
day) as the continentals to frame their concerns in broadly Kantian terms
testifies to the centrality of this work. Kant is the ancestral figure even for
those radical European intellectuals who would one day hold the
Enlightenment style of mind accountable for the imperial depredations of
bourgeois society. The Critique was the modern philosophical system upon
which Hegel depended for his means and aims and Nietzsche took for his
intimate enemy. Husserl himself admitted that his project was fundamentally
Kantian and, no matter how determined the early Heidegger and the exis-
tentialists were to historicize and personalize Husserl’s super-science, they
too were inextricably bound up with what the French poststructuralists
would call the “philosophy of the subject.” Heidegger himself gave credit
where it was due, noting that it was Kant “who for the first time came
upon this primordial productivity of the subject” (in Braver 2007, 177).
In a nutshell, what Kant offered was an account of the constitution of
the phenomenal world by the subject. The Cartesian cogito, confined ini-
tially to solipsism and understood subsequently, and more generally, in
terms of mind/world dualism, was a poor tentative creature by compari-
son to Kant’s transcendental ego. Destined to peer forever through a veil
of ideas that separated mind from reality in search of what knowledge it
might secure and obliged to assert its dominion over nature and society
indirectly, through contrivances of technology and politics—the Cartesian
subject took on a labor of centuries in pursuit of the status of Maker. But
Kant’s transcendental subject turned out to be, in effect, the creator of the
knowable world all along! This was idealism in the service of empiricism,
designed to rescue experience from Humean contingency and secure the
36   T. DE ZENGOTITA

natural sciences on rational foundations. The forms of the transcendental

subject’s intuition were time and space. The (12, no more, no less) catego-
ries of its understanding (Verstand) gave the world its intelligibility. For
the first time in the history of Western philosophy, subjectivity was no
longer an obstacle to knowledge. It became the very site of truth, a frame-
work—of plurality and unity, of possibility and necessity, of causality and
substance—of basic structures without which human experience simply
would not be what it is. This was indeed a “stunning reversal of attitude”
toward the subject’s contribution to knowledge (Braver 2007, 37). That
is why it was Kant, even more than Descartes, with whom continental
thinkers contended ever since Hegel resolved to overcome through
Dialectic the limits upon reason the Kantian system had imposed.
Above all, the Critique was just that—a system. Its claims were compre-
hensive and absolute. It was the first and the last word. Nothing had ever
happened, or could ever happen, that violated its rules—for those rules, in
articulating transcendental conditions on all possible experience, ruled out
whatever might lie beyond them. It was this “totalizing” quality of Kant’s
system that was most apparent to his heirs—whether they sought, like
Hegel, to extend and complete the project or, like Nietzsche, to expose its
pretensions. It is no exaggeration to say that when the structuralist/post-
structuralist movement in France set out to topple Sartre from his throne
and escape the Hegelian Dialectic, what they were also attacking was the
Kantian idea of a system of thought that nothing could escape or disrupt
because the transcendental subject, the source of world-ordering princi-
ples, was beyond the reach of history.

2.4   Nineteenth-Century “Evolutionism”: Hegel,

Comte, Spencer—Prophets of Consolation
Locke and the philosophes conceived of Hobbes’ Maker as an engineer and
a mathematician. His natural laws, as Newton showed, were a synchronic
blueprint. After the traumas of the French and the Industrial Revolutions,
that blueprint had to be replaced. Modernizers had to face the fact that
those revolutions were the work of their own “new reason.” Something
had gone terribly wrong, some profound misunderstanding of nature, and
especially human nature, had misled the thinkers of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. A course correction was desperately needed and the
great thinkers of the nineteenth century rose to the occasion, constructing
   THE SITUATION OF THE MODERN SUBJECT    37

diachronic schemes based on some principle of inevitable development

that comprehended natural and social history and gave moderns faith in the
ultimate outcome of their enterprise. Hegel’s version endured, by way of
Marx, and it became the archetype of the tendency in modern historical
thought toward “totalization,” toward what would seem like death-by-­
explanation to postmodern thinkers when their moment came. But first, a
sense of how those evolutionist works shaped and reflected this iteration
of the modern form of life.

I have read some of the speculations on the perfectibility of man and of

society … a writer may tell me that he thinks man will ultimately become an
ostrich … before he can expect to bring any reasonable person over to his
opinion, he ought to shew that the necks of mankind have been gradually
elongating, that the lips have grown harder and more prominent, that the
hair is beginning to change into stubs of feathers. (Thomas Malthus 1798)12

That was how Thomas Malthus chose to introduce “An Essay on the
Principle of Population, as it affects the Future Improvement of Society with
remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M.  Condorcet, and Other
Writers.” In that hugely influential work he argued for the inevitability of
poverty and starvation due to differential reproduction rates in human
populations and food supply. In the paragraph quoted earlier, he framed
his theory with a mocking critique of the Enlightenment faith in human
progress, lampooning its lack of an evidence-based developmental per-
spective and affording a telling glimpse of his own commitment to it.
It is widely known that Darwin’s concept of natural selection was inde-
pendently formulated by Alfred Wallace, but it is not so widely known that
both men were reading Malthus’ essay at the time of their respective
“Ah-hah” moments. A cursory reflection on the concept of natural selec-
tion on the one hand and Malthus’ basic argument on the other makes
that coincidence unsurprising and sets the stage for the great intellectual
12
 The “Idea of Progress” has a long history going back to antiquity if the concept is con-
strued broadly enough (Bury 1932; Nisbet 2017)—but the modern idea has been uniquely
ideological, an aspect of popular belief. In the eighteenth century, it took on certain features
that prepared the way for its specifically “evolutionist” form. Robert Turgot, for example,
anticipated the Marquis de Condorcet’s schematic of progress (Manuel 1962). Both posited
a certain direction in history on the grounds that the obvious benefits of rationality (thanks
especially to literacy) would create momentum for human self-cultivation. But, for a trauma-
tized nineteenth century, that just wasn’t enough. A more comprehensive guarantee was
needed and the place of the idea of Providence was open, pre-pared for a secular occupant.
38   T. DE ZENGOTITA

adventure of the nineteenth century—the quest for a new kind of natural

law, an “evolutionist” law, a law of necessary development grounded on
evidence of it. That is precisely what the metaphor of the ostrich is intended
to show. A “phylogeny” of history was required.
The specifics of Malthus’ “dismal science”—reminiscent of the harsh
discipline of a Puritan God’s Providence and bound therefore to appeal to
some Englishmen—were not as widely adopted as the overall attitude of
objectivity he assumed. European evolutionists would one day appear to
professional academics of the twentieth century as victims of fantasies
more outrageous even than those that animated the natural law theorists
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the evolutionists thought
of themselves as “facing the facts,” however grim. They were determined
to be empirical.
Most of the influential thinkers of the nineteenth century were more
optimistic than Malthus—even in England. Jeremy Bentham, for example,
held the tattered banner of Enlightenment aloft, convinced that if a utili-
tarian regime were implemented, the dream of the new reason could be
immediately realized. And he had many followers, in politics and in phi-
losophy. But Benthamism, with its faith in synchronic natural laws of plea-
sure and pain, mathematically calculable and susceptible of human
administration at every institutional level—from schools and prisons to
cities and nations—was a relic of the past. The prolixity of Bentham’s
prose, spelling out his behavioral calculus to the last jot and tittle, was
what places him alongside other nineteenth-century thinkers.
It is worth a trip to the stacks of an old-fashioned library—just to gaze
for a moment upon the collected works of the most eminent among them.
The sheer footage and poundage on the shelves has to be seen to be
believed. And then, leafing at random through the volumes—the attention
to detail, the scrupulous descriptions, the exhaustive cataloguing, the manic
charting, thousands of pages of “facts” and theories, from the most ele-
mental levels of the natural sciences to epochs of world history and galactic
topography—these are monuments to a desperate labor of containment,
almost all of it useless in the long run, distorted, irrelevant, surpassed, or
just plain wrong, a Borgesian compendium, as ponderous and absurd and
touching as Mr. Ramsey of To The Lighthouse, through whom Virginia
Woolf bid farewell to eminent Victorians, fading away in her time.
Those volumes suggest two important things to remember about the
nineteenth century that bear directly on the advent of postmodernism in the
twentieth century. The first is the sense of responsibility these writers carried
   THE SITUATION OF THE MODERN SUBJECT    39

with them. They lived with the consequences of the French and the Industrial
revolutions—and those consequences appeared as a bitter comeuppance to
modernizers who identified with the whole enterprise, now threatened
with disaster. So they felt obligated in a way no traditional authority ever
had. For they were not merely responsible for some time-­honored office
they happened to hold. They were responsible for inventing the offices or
radically reforming them—for inventing the social order, the technology,
the economy, the settings of human life. And things were not going well.
The second thing to remember is that this was the last generation of
(more or less) sane moderns who could still hope to comprehend everything.
To Hegel, Comte, and Spencer, it still seemed possible to work through all
the books that mattered, in every department of learning, and master them
all. And then—the crowning achievement—possible also to cast that great
sprawl of material into a systematic whole. No wonder the determination
to face facts, to be empirical, was overwhelmed. The imperatives of such
an aspiration were bound to move these men to reach too far, and hammer
the facts into shapes that would fit their elaborate theoretical receptacles.
When modernists at last decided that there was no telos to be found in
nature, they also gave up on the idea of a comprehensible world. In hindsight
it is obvious: two aspects of the same moment. Without a purposeful narrative
to contain its history, the world was bound to fall apart and lose its meaning.
This section cannot describe the systems of these thinkers in detail. But
the selection of Hegel, Comte, and Spencer permits an overall contrast
between national styles of evolutionist thought while foregrounding what
they had in common. The aim is to highlight elements in those systems
that conditioned the emergence of modernism.
Over the whole scene hovered the mystery of the “forces” of nature in
the absence of a deity—especially life forces and their derivatives on the
social level, including “forces of production” and the like. The challenge
for a contemporary reader is to imagine how compelling this mystery
became for thinkers who could no longer fall back on a general sense, how-
ever vague, that a deity had somehow set the cosmos in motion. What to
make now of gravity, magnetism, electricity? Were they on a continuum
with hunger and lust? With ambition and love?13 What of hysteria, mesmer-
ism, patriotic fervor, aesthetic uplift, ecstasy?14 Most urgently, perhaps, what
13
 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein belongs in this context: a motley of body parts; the light-
ning; “It’s Alive!”
14
 Interest in religion actually intensified during the nineteenth century. From Strauss’ Life
of Jesus to James’ Varieties of Religious Experience—here was a force to be reckoned with all
40   T. DE ZENGOTITA

force “ran through” an enraged mob?15 When Comte went to exhaustive

lengths to distinguish the social from the physiological in his taxonomy of
life sciences, it was not because he was conceiving of society on analogy with
an organism; it was because he thought of society as a kind of organism.
When taxonomists of modern ideas contrast the Enlightenment’s mecha-
nism and atomism with Romanticism’s organicism and holism, they miss
the essential difference if they do not also highlight the feeling of forces.
For a Romantic sensibility, such feelings were direct engagements with
what holds things together in the world—or sunders them apart.
The role of angst in a cataclysmic twentieth century can make it difficult
to recognize anxiety16 as a dominant influence on nineteenth-century
European minds, though it demonstrably was. Hegel, Comte, and Spencer
were providing, not merely reassuring arguments, but reassuring experiences—
a way of being in the world that might allay the anxieties that plagued so
many thoughtful people swept along by the aftermath of Hobsbawm’s
“Age of Revolution” (1996). It is only when they are read as offering ersatz
religious support in an age beset by frenzied change that we understand
how radical a transformation would ensue when the ground it provided fell
away. Hence, the focus on forces in this account. It will lead, through
Schopenhauer, to Nietzsche. “Will to power” has a genealogy of its own.

2.4.1  G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831)
The only thought which Philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of
History, is … that Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of
the world … presents us with a rational process. (Hegel 1837)
All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he pos-
sesses only through the State. … For Truth is the unity of the universal and
subjective will; and the Universal is to be found in the State … in which
Freedom obtains objectivity. (Hegel 1837)

the more seriously as belief in literal validity waned. The philosophes and the men of ’89 had
fatefully underestimated the power of religious emotion.
15
 This question in particular haunted the period. The “revolutions” of 1830, 1848, and
1871 were potential reruns of 1793. For all their differences, Hegel, Comte, and Spencer
were united in their opposition to democracy. They feared the “mob.”
16
 W.E.  Houghton (1957) convincingly interpreted characteristics we associate with the
Victorians—prudishness, hard work, ambition, earnestness, respect for authority, and so
on—as responses to an underlying anxiety. Both Spencer and Comte suffered severe nervous
breakdowns more than once, and Hegel had to cope with depression.
   THE SITUATION OF THE MODERN SUBJECT    41

Hegel delivered the lectures from which these quotes are drawn in the
1820s in Berlin, often to overflowing public audiences. He addressed the
cream of Prussian society under a reactionary Hohenzollern monarchy
that may have been more securely situated than the House of Bourbon in
post-Napoleonic France but, with the Revolution of 1830 a looming pros-
pect, still in need of as much reassurance as its state philosopher could
provide. And that turned out to be a very great deal.
One must picture Hegel—now catching up with his boyhood nick-
name, old in fact as well as demeanor—standing before the audience just
described. He is gravely explaining to the hushed throng why the events
of the French Revolution in 1789 constituted a “splendid dawn” that all
“thinking people greeted with celebration.” And one must imagine
them—given what they had already heard and could rightly anticipate—
nodding their plumed heads in agreement just as grave (Althaus 2000,
186). And they would continue to nod as Hegel plodded methodically on,
showing that even the Terror and Napoleon (who brought down the Holy
Roman Empire of the German Nation in 1806) had a place in the great
scheme of things, the ultimate scheme of things—the story of the self-­
realization of Absolute Spirit in World History. There was nothing that did
not have a role to play in that story, as Hegel told it—including Nothing
itself. That was the sovereignty of Reason.
And his audience was willing to accept it all. For, as it turned out, they
were being introduced to themselves, in their very being, as a climactic
step toward some ultimate resolution—as the Absolute Spirit’s chosen
ones. Much could be overlooked, gazing back from such an elevation, if it
could be shown that, like labor pains, those awful historical “moments”
had been necessary tribulations.
From his early teens, Hegel’s mission had been reconciliation. He was
driven, above all, to reconcile his youthful Christianity with Greek phi-
losophy, to synthesize the two determinative Western traditions. Because
the French Revolution had appealed so incessantly to ancient models of
citizenship in its attack on the medieval order, it seemed to Hegel and
many of his peers that the crisis of their time could only be resolved on the
basis of that reconciliation. Hegelian Dialectic developed in service of that
project; it became the means by which Hegel would preserve and trans-
form whatever was essential through aufhebung—sublation.17

17
 For example: Jewish monotheism severed the immediate and irrational fusion of the
divine and earthly that was ancient paganism. This separation of God and World was in turn
42   T. DE ZENGOTITA

After his death, Right and Left Hegelians divided over a question that
had dogged Hegel over his whole career—the question of his atheism.
Hegel’s basic claim was that the self-realization of Absolute Spirit in the
World lifted Christianity in its (merely) representational form to the pure
truth of its Idea. That means, for example (as with the incarnated God him-
self), that the doctrine of transubstantiation during communion—the
wafer becomes flesh, the wine becomes blood—was a representational
(imagistic, symbolic) evocation of Absolute Spirit recognizing itself as an
invisible conceptual being “incarnated” in the world as the world’s order.18
Add a dash of tolerance for ordinary folk who need visible representa-
tions of truth, however imperfect, and it became plausible for many
Hegelians (and for Hegel himself) to claim that Hegelianism was the ful-
fillment of Christianity—one that promised reconciliation across the sec-
tarian divisions that image-based dogmas inevitably entail. On the other
hand, it was possible (and dialectically sound) to find in the same claim the
end of Christianity—for what was left of that faith, as it had always been,
faith in the truth of icons and doctrines, if they turned out to be mere
images of abstractions to be found in Hegel’s Logic?19
There is no need to dwell on Hegel’s efforts to bring the Dialectic to
the natural sciences. Even Goethe, otherwise so supportive of him,
thought it a “bad, sophistical joke” to speak of growing plants “negating”
seeds and eating as a “negation” of food and so on (Lowith [1941] 1991,
14). If Hegel was doomed in the long run to more ridicule than any other
major philosopher has suffered, it is in large part because his account of

overcome by Christian incarnation which preserved (in sublated form) that separation in the
paradox of an “embodied God”—and that preserved what had been true in paganism to
begin with. See also the oft-cited Master/Slave dialectic.
18
 Hegelianism is usefully described as Platonism historicized. Karl Lowith summed up his
account of Hegel by saying that “As the philosopher of the Christian-Germanic [i.e.
Protestant] world, Hegel understood the Spirit as will and freedom.” His problem was to
reconcile this modern notion with the eternity of ancient Idealism. A narrative account of
Absolute Spirit expounding itself as the world, over time, was his solution (Lowith [1941]
1991, 210–219).
19
 Feuerbach rallied left Hegelians around the claim that “Whoever does not surrender
Hegelian philosophy does not surrender theology … the doctrine that reality is determined
by the idea is only the rationalistic expression of the theological doctrine that nature was cre-
ated by God.” Left Hegelians overtly did what Hegel’s orthodox critics had suspected him
of doing covertly.
   THE SITUATION OF THE MODERN SUBJECT    43

nature would one day appear so ludicrous.20 But this much of how he
integrated geist and nature must be grasped if we are to understand, not
only Hegel’s appeal, but Comte’s and Spencer’s as well. For Hegel, Spirit
was not only alive in the usual sense; it was continuous with all activity, it
was force in general, it was motion in the world—and in the mind.21 The
deepest appeal of Dialectic was the sensation it conferred of motion in
thought, in thinking. The actual feeling of reversal that attends the experi-
ence of thinking dialectically was apprehended as the movement of Spirit
in the individual mind. And, as we shall see, the most influential group of
postmodernists, the creators of what would be known as French “theory”
who defined themselves in opposition to a “philosophy of the subject”
that went back to Hegel, were manifestly in his debt when it came to for-
mulations of mentality that depended on its essential motility.
So, if one asks how Hegel’s Berlin audience could have (thought they)
understood a philosopher who strikes us today as so obscure, part of the
answer lies in this: as good (or at least practiced) Lutherans, they were
accustomed to the idea of personal salvation, accustomed to the idea of
the Holy Spirit as something to be experienced.22 It was no great leap for
them to the idea that there was a more modern supreme being, one that
traditional religions had struggled, impossibly, to picture—a World Spirit
that was the true agent of history. And when they felt uplifted and
redeemed by oratory, or moved by a storm or a symphony, it was not dif-
ficult to decide that this was the force of that Spirit, the ultimate will that

20
 Karl Kautsky, who presided over the literary legacy of Marx and Engels, decided not to
publish their Dialectics of Nature. It finally saw the light of day in the Soviet Union in 1925.
21
 Goethe and Hegel first bonded over their opposition to Newtonian concepts of color
and force. What horrified (that is not too strong a word) them was how mathematics substi-
tuted itself for the phenomenon (see Adorno and Husserl on the same issue). How could a
theory of color or force that did not convey color and force be true in any full sense of that
word? Or consider Chevalier de Lamarck, most notorious of the Romantic failures in science,
best remembered as Darwin’s displaced predecessor. But his biological work came late in
his life’s work, as “an epilogue to an attempt to save the science of chemistry for the world
of organic continuum.” Lamarck “attached primary importance to the element of fire. …
Fire is the principle of activity in nature” and, since “life and activity are ultimately one,”
chemistry would be a life science (Gillispie 1960, 271–276).
22
 It is striking that when Hegel refers to the doings of the World Spirit in his personal cor-
respondence, the syntax, the phrasing is eerily familiar. It can seem as if the expression “World
Spirit” was simply substituted for “God” or “God’s will” in the correspondence of an ortho-
dox believer—as if by a search and replace function.
44   T. DE ZENGOTITA

sustained the world through all changes, the being of becoming, that held
the world together—with mind. It was all very empirical.
Here are the words with which Hegel, addressing his students, greeted
the triumphant arrival of Napoleon (Hegel called him the “World Spirit
on horseback”) at Jena in 1806:

Gentlemen …. We find ourselves in an important epoch … when Spirit has

taken a leap forward, where it has sloughed off its old form and is acquiring
a new one. The whole mass of existing ideas and concepts, the very bonds of the
world, are dissolving and collapsing into themselves as if in a dream. A new
product of the spirit is being prepared. (Hegel in Lukacs, The Young Hegel
[1806] 1938; italics mine)

“Ideas and concepts” are the very bonds of the world—its forms, in
other words. But they are subject to change, sometimes cataclysmic
change. No wonder Lowith saw Plato historicized in Hegel’s thought.

2.4.2  Auguste Comte (1798–1857)

For not only, in Comte’s vision, does the Positively reconstructed project of
industrialism assign to humanity objectively a cosmic mission to improve on
the pre-given material world, it does so subjectively as well, as the most
sublime expression of human love. That love—which Comte calls l’amour
universel (viii:91) is … not just a love of each for all … but an affection
which suffuses the whole world humanity touches. (Wernick in Auguste
Comte and the Religion of Humanity 2001, 176–177)

Andrew Wernick23 is here tracing Comte’s l’amour universel back to the

quest of his mentor, the Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), to his search
for “a moral principle, which could connect a scientific understanding of
cosmic order to St. Paul’s dictum that God is love.” Saint-Simon had
hoped that “Newton’s law of gravity, converted into a thesis of ­‘universal

23
 For Karl Lowith, Hegel was the philosopher who tried to make Christianity modern—to
“secularize” it without losing what was spiritually fundamental. Andrew Wernick’s study of
Comte proposes a revealing parallel to Lowith’s account. Hegel’s path to modern secularity
proceeded “inward,” to the realm of spirit, before turning outward, to politics and the
Ethical Life (sittlichkeit); and it was bound to, argued Lowith, because Protestantism pro-
vided its basic orientation. So it makes sense that, in Catholic France, Comte began with
external institutions and practices, with a Positivist Church that would shape the inward life
of the modern citizen.
   THE SITUATION OF THE MODERN SUBJECT    45

attraction’ might provide the requisite link” and he envisioned a modern

religion in which a “new clerical body” would be “united by a common
belief in the law of gravity” elaborated in that way (Wernick 2001, 177;
Pickering 1993, 85).
Hegel’s sense that the “very bonds of the world” were dissolving and
reassembling with the arrival of Napoleon and his revolutionary army res-
onates nicely with the idea that gravity might turn out to be continuous
with moral forces that ensured the solidarity of the social organism. Similar
aspirations and images are to be found across the whole spectrum of
European thought in this period. Something experiential, something
more comprehensive than philosophical doctrine, was obviously at work.
Could the world actually fall apart?
From the beginning, Comte’s mission, like Hegel’s, was reconciliation.
Because he was an academic outsider, he framed his vision in more idio-
syncratic terms than Hegel had. Because he was French, he responded
more directly, politically, to the crisis of transition from old to new. He
looked, on the one hand, at the sciences (the new) and, on the other hand,
at a doomed traditional order (the old) and saw what was needed: a sci-
ence called “social physics” (later, “sociology”) would make possible the
manufacture of a social order with all the advantages of the old one but
none of the defects. Sociology would be the most advanced of all the sci-
ences that had developed in succession from the original one, astronomy,
because it marked the moment when humanity finally made itself an object
of reason—a culmination, in short, of reason’s own evolution.
That, in a nutshell, was Comte’s Positivism. There is little in it of dia-
lectic, but it relies in its own way on the idea of human beings coming to
objective self-consciousness, with the concomitant implications for per-
fected self-government. And it committed Comte to a lifelong struggle to
attract supporters from both sides of the social-political divide in restora-
tion France after 1815—to appeal somehow to Enlightenment-inspired
republicans and to defenders of the old regime, especially the Catholic
Church. Comte’s views changed over time—more a 1789 republican in
his youth, more a political elitist as he aged—but his commitment to that
reconciliation never wavered and he continued through his whole career
to borrow and transform elements from the institutions and ideologies of
both sides, as if to sew them together by dint of the sheer density of his
arguments and arrangements.
And “arrangements” is the word. Positivism was a philosophy, however
elaborate, only by way of prelude. It was, above all, a gargantuan project,
46   T. DE ZENGOTITA

a venture in social and political construction built around an idea (inher-

ited from Rousseau) for a new religion, a religion that would transform
European society (and eventually the world’s). It would not, however, be
dedicated to that metaphysical abstraction of Deism—that Maker of
Nature, that figment of the imagination of seventeenth- and eighteenth-­
century modernizers which had led them so astray. No, the Positivist
Church would worship something undeniably real, and really responsible
for making the world—Humanity.

The great object which Positivism sets before us individually and socially is
the endeavor to become more perfect. … Towards Humanity, who is for us
the only true Great Being, we, the conscious elements of whom she is com-
posed, shall henceforth direct every aspect of our life. … Thus Positivism
becomes, in the true sense of the word, a Religion. (Comte 1848)

The Positive philosophy was designed to provide its polity—and espe-

cially its church—with the firmest possible foundations. Facts. Scientific
facts. The ring of that phrase, even today, carries just the connotations that
Comte and like-minded thinkers wanted to give it.24 Sociology owed its
position at the summit of the hierarchy of the factual (“positive”) sciences
because, in taking humanity as its object, it became the most inclusive of
the life sciences—the science of those special forms of life that had emerged
from the historical interactions among those neuro-physiological packages
of instincts and faculties that we know as human beings. These highest and
latest forms of life were societies, and the laws of natural history that gov-
erned their emergence and functioning were as determined as those that
govern the “fall of a stone.” Those laws had ensured the sequence of
stages that culminated in the Positive phase itself. Now, with Comte’s sci-
ence, that phase was in a position to accelerate the very process that had
brought it into being.
For, at the very summit of the summit (there could never be too many
summits for Comte) of the sciences stood what Comte called the “subjec-
tive synthesis.” This synthesis would occur when Positivism—as a polity
organized around social, educational, and ceremonial procedures spelled
out in exhaustive detail—succeeded in configuring the neuro-­physiological
human packages that constituted it so they would spontaneously realize
24
 Besides, the Saint Simonians, there were the physiocrats and ideologues in France, utili-
tarians in England, and political economy and common sense philosophy in Scotland—and
Marxism. All were counting on the aura of science to convince.
   THE SITUATION OF THE MODERN SUBJECT    47

themselves, intellectually and emotionally, in and as that polity. At that

moment of secular rapture, universal love would assume its rightful place
in the economy of instincts and faculties and the social organism would be
perfected—permeated with a moral force as dependable as gravity.
There was no Hegelian Dialectic then—but, from the perspective of a
general audience of educated Europeans at the time, there was a remark-
able overlap of aim and ethos and, above all, the consolation of that
promise.25
Positivism did not gain the kind of traction that communism eventually
did. But as conceived by its principal author, it was intended for historical
fulfillment. And to those associated with Positivism it seemed a plausible
project under the circumstances. The fact that people like J.S. Mill, George
Eliot, and Harriet Martineau took Positivism as seriously as they did is a
challenge to our moral imaginations. To a today’s  observer Positivism
looks more like a cult than a serious political movement. To make intuitive
sense of its original appeal is to take a significant step toward understand-
ing nineteenth-century evolutionism.

2.4.3  Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)

But rightly to understand progress, we must inquire what is the nature of
these changes, considered apart from our interests. … In respect to that
progress which individual organisms display … this question has been
answered by the Germans … the series of changes gone through during the
development of a seed into a tree, or an ovum into an animal, constitute an
advance from homogeneity of structure to heterogeneity of structure. …
Now, we propose in the first place to show, that this law of organic progress
is the law of all progress. (Herbert Spencer 1857)

Upon this foundation of objectivity Spencer constructed an irresistible

vision. As inexorable as the process itself, Spencer’s argument compre-
hended eons of evolutionary development and ended by placing man at
the pinnacle of biological heterogeneity, Britain at the pinnacle of social
and historical heterogeneity, and British professionals—scholars, lawyers,
industrialists, and administrators—at the head of Britain’s heterogeneous
population.

25
 It is hard to determine how much exposure Comte had to German thought. He denied
any influence, but there was a lengthy correspondence with a protégé who was studying in
Germany and various other indications of interest and some familiarity.
48   T. DE ZENGOTITA

It is easy now to laugh at so massive an absurdity—as foolish in its way

as Hegel’s discovery of Absolute Mind in 1820s Prussia and Comte’s fan-
tastic utopia. But it is more interesting to notice the relief and renewed
sense of purpose that Spencer’s work engendered in thousands of his fol-
lowers for almost a century. To absorb Spencer in that age of spiritual crisis
was to feel blessed by cosmic dice. A state of grace, as it were, for secular
souls. But these were souls that also pined for softer forms of uplift and
Spencer would provide that as well. Leading figures of the time—John
Tyndall, T.H. Huxley, Alfred Wallace—regarded Spencer as the “prophet
of a new religion” because of the aura of transcendence he bestowed upon
the sciences (Francis 2007, 155).
Our image of Spencer—adjusted to suit more recent polemical needs—
is dominated by the doctrine of “social Darwinism” he espoused in one
form or another at various stages in his career. And it is true that when he
coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” he provided biological justifica-
tion for ruthless social policies. But Spencer would never have commanded
the following he did if that had been all he had to offer.26 What made his
harsh short-term prescriptions palatable was the rhetoric of wonder he
brought to his accounts of the fate of the universe and humanity’s place in
it, a rhetoric that always led to reconciliation and a gesture toward the
empty throne of God. He concluded his most influential text, First
Principles (1862), as if channeling Spinoza:

he who rightly interprets the doctrine contained in this work, will see that
neither of these terms [Spirit and Matter] can be taken as ultimate. He will
see that though the relation of subject and object renders necessary to us
these antithetical conceptions of Spirit and Matter; the one is no less than
the other to be regarded as but a sign of the Unknown Reality which under-
lies both.

26
 This reduced image of Spencer is due in large part to W.G. Sumner, the first teacher of
“sociology” in an American university. He edited out the last chapter of Spencer’s Study of
Sociology (1896), a chapter in which Spencer posited a final stage of social equilibrium sus-
tained by refined emotions, much like those Comte proposed to cultivate immediately in his
Positivist polity. Spencer, of course, would not countenance the imposition of any Frenchified
regulations. His science was British—the perfected social life-form had to be an evolutionary
outcome. Spencer’s nature did not just inform rational government, it governed—as
Providence had before.
   THE SITUATION OF THE MODERN SUBJECT    49

When Spencer waxed eloquent about The Unknown and, later in his
career, on the tendency of living things27 toward equilibrium, he almost
invariably remarked as well upon the inexplicable presence of beauty in
the world. The panorama of Life in all its forms was most precious to
Spencer precisely because its beauty lay beyond the reach of his dogged
efforts to explain the myriad adaptations he found in living forms. It was
impossible to explain the beauty of the natural world in terms of
adaptation—and yet beauty there was, and Spencer never tired of singing
its praises. It was authentic appreciation of this gratuitous beauty that
moved Spencer and his cohort to catalogue and depict so reverently. One
has only to peruse the works—especially the sketches—to recognize them
as expressions of devotion.
Spencer’s philosophical meditations are marked, over time, by an
increasing emphasis on the significance of instinct and emotion inspired
first of all by his own personal experience and confirmed by his reading of
the Scottish “common sense” philosophers with their psychological inter-
pretation of Kant. When he exempted beauty in nature and art from sci-
entific explanation (as Kant had noumena), he forgave himself, as it were,
for betraying his Methodist upbringing by providing a vessel into which
he could pour residual religious feelings that were harder to jettison than
doctrine. And in so doing, Spencer—like Hegel and Comte before him—
met deep-seated needs in his followers as well.
Early on, Spencer was involved with a “New Reformation” undertaken
by a group that included Thornton Hunt (son of Leigh) and G.H. Lewes.
They established a journal, The Leader, to promote their cause. Its flyleaf
displayed a quote from Alexander Von Humboldt’s great work of Romantic
science, Kosmos, and carried pieces by Harriet Martineau, J.A. Froude, and
Robert Owen, along with some of Spencer’s most inspirational essays. The
new reformation was an agnostic, yet intensely spiritualized, vitalist move-
ment that was looking for a middle way between Christianity and rational
materialism. Once again, the parallel with Hegel and Comte is obvious, but
the principles Spencer articulated for his readers were British to the core. In
language Locke himself might have approved, Spencer followed the most
influential Scots in asserting that whatever the psycho-­physical apparatus of

27
 As with Comte and Hegel, life for Spencer was very broadly defined. “Science,” for
example, was classified as a living thing in accordance with a definition Spencer cribbed (he
cribbed so much!) from Cuvier’s “law of organic correspondences.”
50   T. DE ZENGOTITA

human nature supplied by way of perception, belief, and feeling had its
own kind of necessity—and thus provided, without further ado, a basis for
justification and truth. And this principle applied as well to the awe we feel
in contemplation of the absolute and infinite, however unknowable. The
feelings in and of themselves were valid. They were facts.28 Thus were the
materialist reductions of utilitarianism avoided and the irrationalities of reli-
gious orthodoxy given—at long last—a natural place.
The mission of the new reformation supplied Spencer’s essential frame-
work long after the movement itself had disintegrated. No matter how his
formulations varied over the decades—as they did continuously, depend-
ing on what ideas or findings this omnivorous autodidact had most
recently absorbed—Spencer was always looking for ways to endow scien-
tific fact and reason with transcendent value. For Spencer, as for Comte
and Hegel, the idea of the whole, on the one hand, and immediately expe-
rienced life forces, on the other, made this synthesis possible, whatever the
content of their systems. It is above all important to remember that scien-
tists and philosophers were not Spencer’s real audience. He wrote for gen-
erally educated Victorians who had a “desire to see the living universe as
personally significant” (Francis 2007, 184).
And that, of course, is precisely what modernists in the arts and the
academy would not be able to see.

If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection
must end in darkness, cold, and silence. In a dispassionate view the ardor for
reform, improvement, for virtue, for knowledge, even for beauty is only a
vain sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut
of one’s clothes in a community of blind men. Life knows us not and we do
not know life—we don’t know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use
have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each
word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs
shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die;
and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow. (Joseph
Conrad 1897 (italics mine))

28
 “All reasonings must be from first principles; and for first principles no other reason can
be given but this, that by the constitution of our nature, we are under a necessity of assenting
to them” (Thomas Reid, 1764).
   THE SITUATION OF THE MODERN SUBJECT    51

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 PART II

Modernism
 CHAPTER 3

New Authorities, Works, and Disciplines

Dada aimed to destroy the reasonable deceptions of man and recover the
natural and unreasonable order. … Dada is senseless like nature. (Jean Arp
(in Karl [1948] 1988, 349))

Of all the modernist schools and movements, Dada can plausibly lay claim
to that coveted encomium, “most radical.” How typically provocative of
Arp to frame the project as an attempt to “recover the natural.” It was
heresy to challenge the self-sufficiency of art, especially its independence
from or dominance over nature. But the first impression is immediately
undermined and an article of faith restored—for Dada was out to “recover”
a modernist nature seething with aimless forces and quantum uncertain-
ties, obedient only to the laws of chance, the nature Nietzsche had
described.
John Locke and Adam Smith had God’s designs to guide and restrain
them when they imagined constituting governments and political econo-
mies based on natural law. Hegel, Spencer, and Comte could no longer
rely on a Deistic or orthodox Creator, but history for them was still
going in some direction, however painfully. They felt supported by a
natural process of social evolution—an essential continuity retained.
Nietzsche’s announcement of God’s death stood apart from a chorus of
nineteenth-­century atheistic proclamations because he wasn’t just talk-
ing about religious faith. Nietzsche meant that there was nothing for

© The Author(s) 2019 57

T. de Zengotita, Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics,
Political Philosophy and Public Purpose,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90689-8_3
58   T. DE ZENGOTITA

humanity to turn to for guidance—not natural law, not historical prog-

ress, nothing. Coming to terms with that condition distinguishes mod-
ernism from modernity in general. Whatever designs might give
significant form to human life had now to be conceived by human beings.
Nature and history supplied the matter (instincts, bodies, resources,
environments) and that matter set limits on what forms were feasible—
true, adaptive, functional, even beautiful. But all meaning and value
would derive from modern subjects, now alone again, with no external
support—as foreshadowed in the cogito moment.
In his landmark account of modernism, After Babel (1975), George
Steiner builds upon the concept of “the lacking word.” It marks the “prin-
ciple division in the history of Western literature,” he says, and its irrup-
tion “occurs between the early 1870s and the turn of the century. It
divides a literature essentially housed in language from one for which lan-
guage has become a prison.” He adds in a footnote, by way of caveat, that
“the whole question of the etiology and the timing of the language crisis
in Western culture remains extremely involved and only partly under-
stood” (1975, 176–177).
This chapter will argue that modern subjectivity was also, and more
fundamentally, at issue during this period—that the “lacking word” was a
symptom of a larger crisis of representation, in the Kantian sense of vorstel-
lung, which includes perception itself; a crisis, that is, for consciousness as
being-in-the-world, a world that could no longer be comprehended by a
self that no longer knew its own mind. It cannot be a coincidence that
literature and art turned to experimental reflexivity as the modern uncon-
scious was admitted to existence. A commitment to interpreting subjectiv-
ity as Heideggerian being-in-the-world (see Chap. 4) invites this question:
what in the world of the late nineteenth century corresponded to this
larger crisis of representation and to apprehensions of an unconscious at
the core of the cogito?
If Descartes or Locke or Thomas Jefferson had been told that they were
possessed of thoughts they weren’t thinking and feelings they weren’t feel-
ing, they would have rejected the very idea as self-contradictory, like
“round square.” They took for granted Derrida’s “transparency of self-­
presence.” That is why the idea of an unconscious, especially as deployed
by Nietzsche and Freud, can seem to mark the beginning of the end for
the Cartesian/bourgeois subject—but it also spurred that subject to heroic
labors in its own defense.
   NEW AUTHORITIES, WORKS, AND DISCIPLINES    59

So what in the world corresponds to an unconscious mind within?

Could the beginnings of an answer be this simple: sheer complexity, sheer
volume, sheer speed—a crossing of some quantitative threshold in the
conditions of life in refashioned cities transformed by technologies and
teeming with crowds of strangers? Was “the unconscious” actually a name
for being-in-a-world that had lost its worldhood?1 Did the modern mind
lose its unity and transparency because the impossibility of comprehend-
ing the world became so obvious?2 Is the modernist retreat from the world
to “the work”—and to the psyche—essentially an escape from that incom-
prehensibility? Did the sheer presence of so many engines, grunting and
pumping and shoving; so many vehicles passing, departing, arriving; so
many transmitting wires crossing and recrossing between so many mouths
and ears; so many agencies, offices, and bureaus forming and collapsing
and meeting and merging and ordering and reordering and urging so
many people to do and wear and say this or that or the other thing; so
many roads and bridges and tunnels and lights and signs and memoranda
and directives announcing and cautioning and directing and enticing and
reporting on unimaginably many other such circumstances—did this vast
and aimless jumble of embodied intentions, this monument in history to
Max Weber’s “irrational rationality,” constitute the decadent heir to
Barzun’s argument of the device? (See footnote 7, Chap. 2) Had the proj-
ect of progress culminated in a mass Dada exhibit that simply showed that
man could not be God—not in the real world, anyway?
For what would God amount to, in a modernist register, if not the
worldhood of the world—the sense of the world, as Wittgenstein put it in
“The Lecture on Ethics”? And what does the analysis of postmodernism
since Frederic Jameson—the analysis that stresses ahistorical surface, frag-
mentation, pastiche—come down to if not the absence of that sense? This
chapter will show that, if we look beyond the arts and think of “modern-
ism” as a crisis in the mode of existence for modern subjectivity more
generally, certain features emerge as characteristic of cultural develop-
ments on many fronts:

1
 “Worldhood” is the term Heidegger used to evoke the ultimate “there” of Da-sein, the
environing horizon of all actualities and possibilities that constitute Dasein as
being-in-the-world.
2
 This passage focuses on everyday experience but, for the modernist elite, the impact of
relativity theory and quantum mechanics reinforced the basic message. The intuitively acces-
sible Newtonian cosmos, a monument to modern rationality, was no more.
60   T. DE ZENGOTITA

1. Most fundamentally, the absence of design in nature and direction

in history become manifest, as just described. Responsibility for
authorship of meaning and direction falls to humanity. A certain
toughness and/or vulnerability emerges among those who take up
the challenge—and an unprecedented elitism.
2. Diachrony lapses and synchrony rises. Depths of origin in evolution-
ist histories are displaced by present, often elusive, psychological ori-
gins and depths (“depth psychology”) and by various functionalisms.
The ancient and exotic become a storehouse of resources for con-
temporary intellectual and artistic projects.
3. Abstraction in various forms becomes the principle strategy for gaining
authority—with “abstraction” understood most generally as a ges-
ture that separates the authored work from the senseless world, for
example, “abstract art” per se, of course; but also the distinction
between function and origin in the social sciences; bracketed versus
actual experience in phenomenology; parole and langue in linguistics.
4. The cogito divides—with the emergence of the unconscious, first of
all, but in a range of other ways, improvised in various contexts, to
suit various temperaments and undertakings. The “abstraction” of
the modernist work corresponds to an “abstracted” subjectivity—a
new authority, the modernist creator. In Proust’s words, “A book is
the product of a different self from the one we manifest in our hab-
its, in society” ([1913] 1998, viii).
5. Universals of some sort—however elusive, however defined—remain
vital to the projects of these new authorities.
6. The distinction between fact and value is drawn in the social sciences
and analytic philosophy, complement to the collapse of evolutionist
narratives. Without a story, there can be no moral.

3.1   Creators and Works

Abandoned by God, adrift in natural history, besieged by mass society and
culture, modernists found consolation in art. There—on the canvas, on
the page, in concrete and steel—there could be a world with meaning and
value, one that had truly been authored. Hence, the obsession with the
purity of the work or the genre, with its self-sufficiency—its abstraction in
the broadest sense. And these new authorities were not merely producing
works, but they were defining the kinds of works that were worth produc-
ing in the first place. Hence, the multiplication of secessions and
   NEW AUTHORITIES, WORKS, AND DISCIPLINES    61

­ ovements, founded one day, dissolving the next, and then founded once
m
more—always in pursuit of an ineffable something that lingered just over
the horizon of what had already been done. The true artist was bold
enough to reject a world that no longer made sense, to decline to repre-
sent it, first of all—but to repudiate all traditional themes and methods
and attitudes as well. While philistines wallowed in the kitsch of history,
the modernist artist refused to look back, except in search of images and
allusions appropriate to present purposes. The rubble of time, the chaos of
city life—it was all grist for the mill. Hence, above all, the cult of original-
ity, the mad desire to be a genius, to prove oneself a genius through an
authored work that transcended the given.
That is why modernist art was such an elitist undertaking. What else
could be expected of an enterprise that supplied a lack bequeathed by a
departed God?3
An assembly of reminders follows—staples in the voluminous literature
on modernism. They point to a manifestation of a modernist way of being
in the world that sets the stage for the emergence of postmodernism. We
have already heard from Proust: “A book is the product of a different self
from the one we manifest in our habits, in society.”
Consider also these remarks from other writers:

Madame Bovary is based on no actual occurrence … it contains none of my

feelings and no details from my own life. The illusion of truth (if there is
one) comes, on the contrary from the book’s impersonality. … An artist
must be in his work like God in creation, invisible and all-powerful. (Gustave
Flaubert, letter to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie 1857)
The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round
and round the persons and the action like a vital sea. … The artist, like the
God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his hand-
iwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
(James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 1914)
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of
personality. … It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by
particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interest-
ing … the business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the

3
 William Cronin, speaking of Frank Lloyd Wright, said that “job of the artist (is) to create
a vision of nature more natural than nature itself” (Frank Lloyd Wright, Ken Burns [1997]
2014).
62   T. DE ZENGOTITA

ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings

which are not in actual emotions at all. (T.S.  Eliot “Tradition and the
Individual Talent” 1920)

And from artists:

Shapeless emotions such as fear, joy, grief, etc. … will no longer greatly
attract the artist. He will endeavor to awake subtler emotions, as yet
unnamed … his work will give to those observers capable of feeling them
lofty emotions beyond the reach of words. (Wassily Kandinsky Concerning
the Spiritual in Art 1914)
the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from a labyrinth beyond time
and space, seeks his way out to a clearing. If we give the attributes of a
medium to the artist, we must deny him the state of consciousness on the
esthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. (Marcel Duchamp
“The Creative Act” 1975)

Examples could be multiplied indefinitely. A particular experience of

what Nietzsche called “self-splitting” was common to most, if not all, the
modernist creators. It shaped their self-understanding, even though they
lived and worked in different times and places, across all the arts and—as
the next section of this chapter will show—the academic disciplines as
well. Whence this experience of a division between the everyday person
and a mysterious, anonymous, agent of creation within? What in the world
of artistic production specifically—given the overall context just
described—can account for this?
Consider the founding principle of the New Criticism. It distinguished
between “internal evidence”—the words on the page—and “external evi-
dence,” which meant anything outside the work, including especially the
author’s personal feelings and intentions. The upshot was that “the design or
intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judg-
ing the success of a work of literary art” (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1946, 3).
Spontaneous reports of divided subjectivity offered by creators found
doctrinal expression in this central tenet of the New Criticism. An explana-
tion suggests itself: these artistic enterprises had the effect of splitting a
creator’s sense of self because that division of subjectivity corresponded to
the “abstraction” of the work from the uncontainable flow of contempo-
rary lived experience, shot through with random moments and meaning-
less routines. That correspondence is phenomenologically expectable; it
   NEW AUTHORITIES, WORKS, AND DISCIPLINES    63

follows from the nature of intentionality. The more separated, the more
exalted and purified, the more unprecedented—in many cases, the more
literally abstract—the work, the more the creator felt as if the everyday
person who ate and drank and chatted, the person immersed in the natural-­
historical flux, the person “fallen” into average everydayness—that person
couldn’t possibly be the author of something so radically unsuited to the
plane of ordinary existence.
Flaubert famously quipped, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”—which can
seem inconsistent with what he wrote to Mlle de Chantepie, cited earlier.
But Flaubert was speaking of himself as a person with a biography in the
latter case—of himself as creator of a work in the former. Joyce and Eliot
were making essentially the same point. Personal biography provided mate-
rial for the creator’s work, resources like any other—but the works did not
express the accidental wretch the artist happened to be. That view of art
went out with the Romantics, the predecessors modernists most loved to
loathe. Instead, works “expressed” the potentialities of the very media of
the arts with which the creators had somehow managed to merge.
It is worth recalling what “surrealism” literally means. Breton and his
cohort, tapping into the depths of what they took to be the Freudian
unconscious, the other-self from whom their works surged forth, fully
intended the imputation of superiority.4 A sense of privileged access
founded the elitism, the contempt for mass society and sensibility that was
so typical of the great modernists.5 In Search of Lost Time was surreal in
this enlarged sense too; not dogmatically, of course, but just as improba-
bly—and even more strikingly when one considers the characteristic
Proustian effect, the “heightened” experience of experience, the transcen-
dence of experience by itself, as it were—thanks to a rendering more faith-
ful than the original.
And—once again, and at a further degree of removal—modernist cre-
ators were not only producing sur-worldly works from sur-selfly sources,
they were also defining art, defining what sort of thing a poem or a paint-
ing or a building ought to be—creating values, in accordance with
Nietzsche’s challenge to the “midnightly men” of the future for whom he
4
 Contemporary usage “it was so surreal” seems not to carry that connotation. High
Culture brought low under the postmodern regime.
5
 Said Ezra Pound, writing from Stone Cottage, where he was at work with Yeats: “to
explain a symbol is to destroy its ability to embody the divine or permanent world; knowl-
edge that could be understood by the uninitiated masses would not be knowledge at all” (in
Longenbach 1988, 91).
64   T. DE ZENGOTITA

had written.6 Parameters of the kind traditions took centuries to establish

were being determined by a few friends sitting around a café table, orga-
nizing the Vienna secession or the publication of BLAST.
From this point of view, the intense focus on the elements of art—on
actual media, as opposed to whatever art might be “about,” if anything,
besides itself—makes perfect sense. Steiner’s “lacking word” takes its
proper place in this context. The feeling that conventional methods were
inadequate may have been most pronounced among writers, but that must
be understood as part of a larger conversation about the exhaustion of
traditional means and techniques across the board. Opposing that exhaus-
tion was what stimulated modernist attempts to start again—from scratch,
from the level of the most elemental materials, often to be found in uni-
versals of human psychology. Take, for example, Le Corbusier, his ambi-
tion proportional to the scale of his art, setting out to lead a movement
Towards a New Architecture ([1923] 1986). He was planning, not just
buildings, but cities, and not just cities, but a way of life, a modern way of
life—“machines for living in,” a way in which masses, in both senses of the
term, could be contained. And “plan” is the word. He literally proposed a
master plan for that gigantic undertaking. Convinced that a “a great epoch
has begun,” that “architecture is stifled by custom,” he decreed that only
“primary forms,” like cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders, and pyramids
abstracted from the morass of historical styles, could “make the work of
man ring in unison with the universal order.” The neuropsychology of
vision guaranteed that universal order and Le Corbusier anchored his plan
upon that guarantee. The determination to give significant form to sense-
less history is perhaps even more palpable in the structure, the rhetoric, of
the plan itself—section titles in bold, subtitles in caps, single sentence
paragraphs marching down the page at the behest of those titles and sub-
titles, issuing orders to generations of architects to come (in Cahoone
1996, 200–206).
And when Arnold Schoenberg was “loosening the shackles of obsolete
aesthetics,” he was, at the same time, asking himself “for the theoretical
foundation of the freedom of my style” that he could identify with math-
ematical rigor (1952). Or, as Constantin Stanislavski, creator of what
would be aptly called “The Method,” recollected, “the founding of our

6
 Says Nietzsche’s biographer: “All of the significant currents in the early 20th century,
from symbolism to art nouveau and expressionism, were inspired by Nietzsche. Every self-
respecting member of these circles had a ‘Nietzsche experience’” (Safranski 2002, 323).
   NEW AUTHORITIES, WORKS, AND DISCIPLINES    65

new Moscow Art and Popular Theater was in the nature of a revolution,”
he said, in which “we protested against the customary manner of acting,
against theatricality … we needed a new beginning. We needed new bases
and foundations” (1924, 330, 483). Those foundations were also psycho-
logical and would eventually be represented in a chart known as “The
Stanislavski System.” (This particular chart is too complex for anyone not
driven by obsession to decipher, but the fondness of modernist authorities
for such devices will be considered in some detail later. See especially the
discussion of Structuralism in Chap. 5.)
The upshot is this: a gesture of authorial definition, of completed con-
struction in defiance of senseless surroundings—that is the intentional act
that constituted modernist “foundationalism.” It will become a principal
target of the counter-gesture of deconstruction when it comes, a counter-­
gesture that the modernist avant-garde anticipated in various ways.
Because that avant-garde played an essential role in shaping French
theory, Part IV will consider it in some detail. Here, a simple comparison,
to highlight what is at stake:

An immense pride was buoying us up, because we felt ourselves standing

quite alone at that hour, like proud beacons or sentinels facing an army of
enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs. … We are on the last
promontory of the centuries! Why should we look back when what we want
is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? … Museums,
cemeteries! Truly identical. (Filippo Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto 1909)
if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose,
not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not
upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love
interest or catastrophe in the accepted style. … Life is not a series of gig
lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi transparent
envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is
it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and
uncircumscribed spirit? (Virginia Woolf, “The Common Reader” 1925)

It would be difficult to find two more sharply contrasting exemplars of

modernism than Woolf and Marinetti. Yet both saw themselves standing
against a world, a universe, that was incomprehensible, even hostile.
Marinetti’s “army of enemy stars” is echoed in Woolf’s description of an
empty summer house, as spring arrives, and “the garden urns, casually
filled with wind-blown plants, were gay as ever. Violets came and daffodils.
66   T. DE ZENGOTITA

But the stillness and the brightness of the day were as strange as the chaos
and tumult of the night, with the trees standing there, and the flowers
standing there, looking before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing,
eyeless, and so terrible.”7
Both Marinetti and Woolf felt oppressed by conventions of a dead past
deeply embedded in the general culture. Alienated from that culture and
essentially alone—especially Woolf in her Cartesian envelope—each was
nevertheless sustained by a small group of the like-minded, an elite few
profound enough to understand their absurd situation and brave enough
to produce the works that provided what redemption could be had.
Boundless achievement seemed possible to Marinetti’s gang of proto-­
fascist visionaries, or so they proclaimed while the fever lasted. More
ephemeral epiphanies were all that Bloomsbury’s extraordinary souls
could expect, and the fact that they could settle for that testified to their
exalted standing in their own minds. As with Marinetti and Woolf person-
ally, the contrast between the ethos of Bohemian refinement at Bloomsbury
and the hothouse atmosphere of the Futurist school could hardly be more
striking. And yet, at the deepest level, a common form of life is discernible.
Modern subjectivity, in extremis, determined to create. Let Woolf stand in
for a rough-hewn category—call it mainstream high modernism. Marinetti
represents a wing of the avant-garde.
Woolf took note of the experience of self-splitting, of a division in her
psyche corresponding to the production of a work abstracted from every-
day life—though she was not as categorical about it as Flaubert and Joyce.
In “Notes on an Elizabethan Play,” for example, she famously described
the “great artist” as the man who knows “that there is a station, some-
where in mid-air, whence Smith and Liverpool can be seen to the best
advantage” and who knows how to sustain himself in that “place,” nei-
ther too far removed, nor too much involved, with the Smiths and
Liverpools of the real world (1925, 17). No assertion of divine authority,
of absolute separation—no Joycean flourish of pared fingernails, cer-
tainly—but the essential point remains. The truth of Smith and Liverpool,
which was the artist’s special provenance, had to be precipitated in an
alchemy of creation that produced, not reality itself, but an experience of
it—through a work that registered essences and evoked them. It was that
alchemy that T S. Eliot, inclined to the most stringent objectivism, had in
mind when he called for a “depersonalization” so complete that “art may

7
 From “Time Passes” in To The Lighthouse ([1927] 1989).
   NEW AUTHORITIES, WORKS, AND DISCIPLINES    67

be said to approach the condition of science.” He provided a “suggestive

analogy” that today’s reader might find a bit baffling: consider, he said,
“the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is
introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide”—and
left it at that (1920, 7).
Eliot’s analogy evokes more rarified precincts than any opened up by
nineteenth-century realism and naturalism, which had also invoked the
name of science. One imagines a flare, an emanation of light and spark—
and a radical transmutation of the platinum. But, whatever the details, the
underlying message is clear: the creator of artworks functions in his
medium at a level of abstraction and comprehension to which no every-
day personality could aspire. In the case of a poet, the very stuff of lan-
guage and tradition is in process and a synthesis is catalyzed out of that
enormous field, across which the poem on the page echoes in accordance
with its own laws, supplying the resonance that marks a great work.
Proust found a more modest way to evoke the same alchemy from the
point of view of the reader. With his patented blend of sympathy and
condescension, he conceded that Francoise, the family servant, was right
when she said that characters in novels are not “real people” by way of
explaining her scorn for her young charge’s addiction to them. But—
Proust goes on, leaving Francoise to her simplicity—she didn’t under-
stand, perhaps failed even to notice how “opaque” a real person is, hidden
from us by the merely visible, grossly obtrusive, aspect of physicality—like
a “dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift.”
Fictional characters, on the other hand, this “new order of creatures”
who, though they appear to us only “in the guise of truth,” are neverthe-
less a “decided improvement” on real people because “it is in ourselves”
that those lives are lived. Our access is total, our understanding incorri-
gible, even if it changes ([1913] 1998, 116).
Woolf’s description of Lily Briscoe’s struggles with her painting in To
The Lighthouse ([1927] 1989) affords an extended dramatic rendering of
the phenomenological dialectic between work and creator upon which
this account of modernism hinges:

she scored her canvas with brown running nervous lines which had no
sooner settled there than they enclosed (she felt it looming out at her) a
space … what could be more formidable than that space? Here she was
again, she thought, stepping back to look at it, drawn out of gossip, out of
living, out of community with people into the presence of this formidable
68   T. DE ZENGOTITA

ancient enemy of hers—this other thing, this truth, this reality, which sud-
denly laid hands on her, emerged stark at the back of appearances and com-
manded her attention. She was half unwilling, half reluctant. Why always be
drawn out and haled away? Why not left in peace to talk to Mr. Carmichael
on the lawn. (158)

And later:

as she lost consciousness of outer things, and her name and her personality
and her appearance, and whether Mr. Carmichael was there or not, her mind
kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names and sayings, and mem-
ories and ideas like a fountain. (159)

One of the most insistent of the minor motifs in To The Lighthouse

involves the various ways Lily had to maneuver to protect herself and her
painting (itself tending, over time, toward abstraction) from unwanted
intrusions. She “kept a feeler on her surroundings lest someone should
creep up,” guarding against the aimless comings and goings of others in
the house, with their random concerns and passing judgments, so unin-
formed but potentially so hurtful (17). Some of the people—Mrs. Ramsay,
above all—are admirable in their way, and poignantly situated by the
author’s tender hand, but compared to Lily and her struggles (“against
terrific odds,”) she would insist, “but this is what I see; this is what I see
(19),” and, by constant implication, compared to Woolf and her art—they
fall short of transcendence. They belong with the masses, with all the ordi-
nary people washed up on the shore of the historical moment upon which
the modernist visionaries took their heroic stand. They matter, terribly—
but they are never fully aware.
So it is that, at the very moment when Mr. Ramsay and his fractious
son, momentarily reconciled in a common pursuit, finally reach the
­lighthouse of the title—the meaningless goal that means everything, if
they only knew it; at that same moment, Lily, in the grip of a “sudden
intensity,” draws a single line down the center of her picture, completing
it, and knowing it to be complete, knowing that (and with these words,
Woolf in turn completes her book) “I have had my vision.” A triple play,
as it were, on the theme of closure, and a heroic assertion of the privileges
of The Work—“the book” that post-structuralism’s infinite writing will
one day unbind (206–209).
   NEW AUTHORITIES, WORKS, AND DISCIPLINES    69

Let Lily’s experience represent both aspects of the dialectic of abstrac-

tion here identified with modernism, understood not simply as a revolu-
tion in the way the arts were conceived and practiced but as an existential
accommodation that modernist creators of all kinds were obliged to make.
By way of contrast with this mainstream exemplar, consider the situa-
tion from an avant-garde vantage point:

While an artist is labouring at his work of art, nothing prevents it from sur-
passing Dream. As soon as it is finished, the work must be hidden or
destroyed, or better still, thrown as a prey to the brutal crowd which will
magnify it by killing it with its scorn, and thereby intensify its absurd useless-
ness. We thus condemn art as finished work, we conceive of it only in its
movement, in the state of effort and draft. Art is simply a possibility for
absolute conquest. For the artist, to complete is to die. (Marinetti in Ottinger
[1915] 2009, 21; Italics mine)

The loathing Marinetti and his cohort felt for a stifling tradition was so
intense that their expressions of it—the calls for the destruction of libraries
and museums and so on—sometimes feel like a parody of modernist dis-
dain. It was as if Marinetti had appropriated Baudelaire’s classic balance
between the ephemeral and the eternal in art, the necessary descent, as it
were, of the eternal to transitory styles in history that give it expression—
and promoted, by sheer force, the transitory to the level of an absolute in
itself. The doomed logic of that move goes a long way to explain why, at
the limits of the modernist avant-garde, in Vorticism and Dada and early
Surrealism too—wherever manifestos seemed essential!—there was only
so much that could be done. When authorial self-assertion reached the
point where finished works of any kind seemed alien and smacked of con-
formity, art lapsed and dogma produced sects and boredom.
But in the glory days of futurism, in the decade before the Great War,
Marinetti used his inherited wealth to sponsor outrageous public events in
various venues—demanding to be booed, provoking fights and riots.8 When
it took this form—in the name of “action art” under the slogan “art=life”—
Marinetti’s futurism tried to live its creed of opposition to all works, to all
completion—in the name of change, in the name of speed, in the name of
“absolute conquest” by the modernist creator. Mainstream high modern-
ists abstracted finished works from the pointless churn of history in the
8
 The pervasive influence of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896) and his nonsense-science of
pataphysics is most apparent in this aspect of Marinetti’s work.
70   T. DE ZENGOTITA

machine age and so, in a certain way, transcended or contained it. Le

Corbusier’s plan is a striking instance. But Marinetti and his gang were
determined to ride the same furious energies right off the cliff of time:

We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new
beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned
with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath … a roaring motor car
which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory
of Samothrace. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which
crosses the earth, itself hurling along its orbit. … Poetry must be a violent
assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man. …
We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of look-
ing behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of
the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the
absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed. (The
Futurist Manifesto 1909)

It is unlikely that serious artists like Boccioni and Carra actually

destroyed many of their artworks in the name of speed and absolute con-
quest—much as they enjoyed the atmosphere Marinetti created and the
glamorous venues he secured for them. The works of the futurists have
taken their place in today’s museums, cozily ensconced between the cub-
ists and abstract expressionists. A bitter fate but a revealing one—with
implications for how best to approach postmodernism as a historical phe-
nomenon. With that reckoning ahead, only the main point of this analysis
need be stressed here.
Marinetti referred to himself often, and in grandiose terms. But it was
himself in the first person of everyday life he talked about. In a manifesto
written in 1921, for example, he announced, “last summer, at Antignano,
where the street named after Amerigo Vespucci, discoverer of America,
curvingly coasts along the sea, I invented Tactilism.” He described how he
was swimming naked in a sea “torn by rocks, foamy scissors knives razors,”
how he “drank from the goblet of the sea filled to the rim with genius,”
conceiving at that moment of tactilism (an art form for the sense of touch)
and indulging in some banter with a boy on the shore who teased him
about the board he was manipulating, asking if he “was having fun build-
ing little boats.” Yes, Marinetti replied, “I am building a craft that will take
the human spirit to unknown waters.”
Or, again, writing in 1915 on the genesis of futurism he said:
   NEW AUTHORITIES, WORKS, AND DISCIPLINES    71

On 11 October 1908, having worked for six years at my international maga-

zine in an attempt to free the Italian lyrical genius that was under sentence
of death from its traditional and commercial fetters, I suddenly felt that it …
was absolutely crucial to switch methods, get out into the streets, lay siege
to theatres, and introduce the fisticuff into the artistic struggle. … My
Italian blood raced faster when my lips coined out loud the word. It was the
new formula—of Action-Art. (in Ottinger 2009, 21)

So—a very large ego, no question about that. But not a transcendental
ego, mysteriously removed from everyday events and its own proper name.
Quite the contrary. One might say that Marinetti took on the role of god/
author openly, without much sublimation, making a personal commitment
to directly confront the senseless mix of entrenched routine and meaningless
accident that was history and, in effect, to try to beat the flux of life itself into
a work, ranting and roaring the while. Hence, the corresponding emphases
at the pole of the object—the stress on incompletion, on creative destruc-
tion—and on the original practice of “Action-Art”—genuine attempts to live
a refusal to separate the work from the world. It was a radical response to
the circumstances, but it too played out in the phenomenological space
structured by the subject/object dialectic of modernism so far described.
Steiner’s “lacking word” can now be situated more comprehensively.
The fact that language was so promiscuous a medium, so irretrievably woven
into the fabric of everyday life in mass society, made it that much harder to
reconceive and renew. There was a near limit to what one could get out of
arranging words in new ways on the page, after the manner of Mallarmé’s
Un Coup de Dés. The same goes for experiments with automatic writing and
neologisms and all the rest. At the end of the day, there were just those 20
odd letters to work with, and just so many words—all of them shamelessly
available to journalists and bureaucrats as well as the literary vanguard. So
it was inevitable that writers, reaching for glimpses of the eternal in the tran-
sitory flux, would feel more frustrated with their depreciated medium than
creators in the plastic arts. Here are two representative expressions:

once again words desert me … something entirely unnamed, even barely

nameable, at such moments, reveals itself to me. … A pitcher, a harrow
abandoned in a field, a dog in the sun, a neglected cemetery, a cripple, a
peasant’s hut—all these can become the vessel of my revelation … can sud-
denly, at any moment (which I am utterly powerless to evoke), assume for
me a character so exalted and moving that words seem too poor to describe
it. (Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Chandos Letter 1902)
72   T. DE ZENGOTITA

More and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear
apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it.
Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a
Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It
is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has,
when language is best used where it is most efficiently abused. (Samuel
Beckett, letter to Axel Kaun 1937)

As the mimetic imperative lost its grip, the possibilities for innovation
in painting, sculpture, the performing arts, and architecture would seem
almost unlimited by comparison with literature. And in those media inno-
vations were evident at first glance. The “shock of the new” depended
upon immediacy—as does any genuine shock—and that was provided by
Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Duchamp’s Fountain, and Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring. So modernist painters did not typically complain about the
“lacking color,” nor did sculptors feel betrayed by their material just
because, say, bronze was also used in hackneyed statues of Great Men on
Horseback in the public square. The sheer appearance of Brancusi’s
Princess X overcame the happenstance of “bronze” at a stroke, and with
an immediate and total effect that no amount of wordplay in Finnegans
Wake could match.
So the difference in attitude between writers and artists toward their
media was essentially an accident, a by-product of intrinsic characteristics
and customary social deployments. The common ground shows through
with the realization that all of them were self-consciously concerned with
artistic means per se. And, whatever the medium, that concern tended to
intensify as a function of artistic aspiration—the more ambitious the proj-
ect, the more exalted and transcendent the aim, the more concerned with
the how-of-it creators became.
Beyond that, it seems impossible to generalize much further. The sheer
experimental variety is boundless and accompanying accounts—the trea-
tises and tracts—almost as various. But whether, like Le Corbusier,
Malevich, or Mondrian, a creator had identified (often on psychological
grounds) axiomatic aesthetic elements or, like Kandinsky and de Chirico,
was intent on eternal ineffables (or both), the characteristic rhetorical ges-
ture—the tone, the style—is unmistakable; ultimate matters had been
consigned to one’s care in the absence of God and an aspect of one’s being
had risen to the occasion.
   NEW AUTHORITIES, WORKS, AND DISCIPLINES    73

A final illustration of the essential point: Wassily Kandinsky spent much

of his career in thrall to Schopenhauer’s claim that “all art aspires to the
condition of music.” His greatest works, his “Compositions,” were reach-
ing for a kind of synesthesia—they were overt efforts to “musicalize paint-
ing.” Master critic Clement Greenberg (who thought Kandinsky
“provincial”) was convinced that the triumph of the modern arts had
revealed that each art attained its apotheosis when freed from models sup-
plied by other arts and devoted itself exclusively to its proper medium—
each to its own compartment in the master chart in Greenberg’s mind.
Diametrically opposed views as to the content of modernist art, then—
but both couched in terms of high authority, framed and declaimed by
one with special access to truth. And it is that frame and tone that point
the way. If it has proved impossible to define modernism when the proce-
dure has been to generalize about style and the contents of works, that
should not be surprising. It was the form of subjectivity in its situation, its
way of being in the world, that constituted the phenomenon.
Other new authorities, working on another kind of creation during the
same period, will serve to illustrate this core point more clearly and pre-
pare the way for an account of academic postmodernism.

3.2   Founders and Disciplines: Durkheim,

Ferdinand Saussure, G.E. Moore, I.A. Richards
To take a practical political stand is one thing, and to analyze political struc-
tures and party positions is another. When speaking in a political meeting
about democracy, one does not hide one’s personal standpoint; indeed to
come out clearly and take a stand is one’s damned duty. The words one uses
in such a meeting are not means of scientific analysis but means of canvass-
ing votes and winning over others. … It would be an outrage, however, to
use words in this fashion in a lecture or in the lecture-room. (Max Weber
“Science as a Vocation” 1918)

In this famous speech, Weber was concerned with one of the most
important of modernist abstractions—the one separating “value judg-
ments” from “judgments of fact.” The social scientist, like anyone else,
must live on the level of incorrigibly messy everyday experience where all
factors come into play, including the values and interests of the scientist.
Disciplined study depends upon the abstraction of a well-defined object
from that messy actuality. When the object is society, the most urgent of
74   T. DE ZENGOTITA

all the disciplinary tasks must be to neutralize the “values” that the man
the scientist happens to be cannot help but have. The establishment of the
fact/value distinction enacts a split in the consciousness of founders of the
modernist (human) sciences that parallels the division between the artist
as creator and the artist’s personal biography. The correlations of
Husserlian intentionality are operating here as well.
Weber’s aim, of course, was to cleanse these sciences of bias to the
extent possible and study human beings objectively, as preceding genera-
tions of moderns had somehow failed to do, in spite of all their efforts.
That long record of failure to live up to the example of natural science
accounts for Weber’s tone—alternately steely (toward those committed to
objectivity) and contemptuous (of those who lacked the right stuff). It was
as if he were rehearsing the extremes of personal discipline that the purity
of his academic discipline had required of him. As indeed he was. So
sternly committed was he to his science that the neo-Romantic poet Stefan
George and his circle saw in Weber a prototype of the alienated man of
reason living through what Weber himself called the “disenchantment of
the world.” To them—and to many others—Weber was an impressive but
tragic figure who embodied the almost inhuman resolution it took to
assess the world he lived in without allowing values to cloud his judgment.
Edgar Salin, of the George circle, had a ready explanation: “Weber was
profoundly insensitive to the arts … instead, he created his ‘sociology’ in
order to approach through conceptual means phenomena he could not
reach by way of experience” (in Marianne Weber [1926] 2017, xli). Details
of Weber’s biography cut against that assessment, but there is no doubt
that he made heroic efforts to live the discipline he advocated.
This section will show certain parallels between modernism in the arts
and the way academic disciplines were defined by their “authors” in the
academy during the same period, under the same circumstances. If the
modernist context made the “lacking word” a problem for creators of lit-
erary works, creators of knowledge were hard hit as well. As the credibility
of the master theories of nineteenth century evolutionism eroded, espe-
cially under pressure from developments in the natural sciences, students
of humanity’s ways—of history and society, culture, language, religion,
and psychology—found themselves almost literally picking up the pieces
of those shattered systems. Yet another embarrassment for modern
thought, but this one was even more disruptive than the one that had led
evolutionists to mock their Enlightenment predecessors (see Chap.  2).
That had been a difference over what nature’s plan was like. Now it looked
   NEW AUTHORITIES, WORKS, AND DISCIPLINES    75

as if modernizers since the seventeenth century had been deluding them-

selves entirely, and in the most fundamental way. There was no plan at all.
It seemed that reason and language, even when restrained by common
sense empiricism or Kantian critique, could not be trusted to distinguish
truth from fantasy—at least not when it came to the study of humanity
and its productions.
As artists were driven to attend to their media, so academic theorists
were driven to reflect upon what methods to apply to their objects of
study—and upon the terminologies they contrived to ensure the precision
a real science demanded. Only then, ran the common assumption, could
the speculative excesses of Spencer and Hegel be avoided, and the truth at
last be told about a world (without worldhood) being divided into fields,
into specializations—into disciplines.
These nascent sciences obviously cannot be described in detail here.
The focus is on taken-for-granted aims and assumptions—on the rhetoric
of the founding gesture, the defining line, the quest for a new level of
intellectual and moral rigor only a special few could attain. Emile
Durkheim’s The Rules of Sociological Method (1895a, b), G.E.  Moore’s
Principia Ethica (1903), Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General
Linguistics (1915), and I.A.  Richards’ Principles of Literary Criticism
(1924) supply the sample.

3.2.1  Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)

For sociology to be possible, it must above all have an object all of its own
… a reality which is not in the domain of the other sciences. (Emile
Durkheim 1895a, b)

The first chapter of The Rules of Sociological Method (1895a, b) is called

“What is a Social Fact?” The answer to that question would supply Emile
Durkheim with the “object” his discipline required. It would also make
the distinction between fact and value essential to the enterprise. Weber—
heir to Hegel and Protestantism—would stress subjective self-discipline.
Durkheim—heir to Comte in Catholic France—stressed the object pole.
For him, the key to objectivity lay in treating the social fact as a “thing.”
Durkheim begins his “Preface” to The Rules on a cautionary note: “We
are so little accustomed to treating social facts scientifically,” he warns,
“that certain propositions contained in this book may well surprise the
reader.” Is there an echo of Descartes’ seductive tactics in that collaborative
76   T. DE ZENGOTITA

pronoun? (see Chap. 2). The confiding tone certainly makes a promise, the
title alludes to the Discourse on Method—and Durkheim’s ambition for his
science would become almost as comprehensive as Descartes’ had been.
But the promise of the modernist is more selectively directed. The reader is
not going to be told, as he was by Descartes, that reason and good sense
are naturally equal in all men, and likewise the ability to judge of truth and
falsity. On the contrary, in the very first paragraph, the “accepted opinions”
of the “ordinary man” are stripped of all authority when it comes to assess-
ing social facts—Ezra Pound could not have asked for a more definitive
exclusion. The reader Durkheim addresses is being invited to join him in an
unprecedented quest for detachment from the “promptings of common
sense” which so implacably “imposes its judgments upon us unawares” that
only a “sustained and special practice can prevent” its corrupting influence
([1895b] 1982, 31–32). But this practice must be undertaken, for the
“state of mind of the physicists, chemists, and biologists,” a state of mind
to which sociologists must aspire, is more difficult for them to attain. That
is because, as Durkheim explains in a later text, “we live our lives in society”
just like everyone else (1982, 37, 246).
Once again, the essential distinction between the personal-historical
subject and the transcendental observer/founder/creator arises in a sys-
tematic practice that abstracts the object/work from the flow of lived
experience.
The problem with common sense notions about society is that, “because
they have been developed unmethodically … they no more exactly express
social things than the ideas the ordinary person has of substances and their
properties (heat, light, sound, etc.)” express the realities of the physical
world (1982, 246). And so, full circle—back to Galileo and his particles
on the other side of the veil of ideas (see Chap. 2). Hence, the built-in
advantage of social facts over psychological facts: they appear to us, they
“display much more naturally and immediately all the characteristics of a
thing” in legal codes, statistics, monuments, manners, fashion, and so on.
Theories about hidden factors, based on such facts, conform to the
Classical model of natural science. Facts of the personal psyche, on the
other hand, are “internal by definition” and cannot be treated as things
“save by doing violence to their nature.” That difference led Durkheim to
expect that “once the principle of sociological method is universally
acknowledged,” it would challenge the imperial claims of that other
human science and “make up the lead of psychology, which it owes solely
to its prior historical place” (1982, 71–72).
   NEW AUTHORITIES, WORKS, AND DISCIPLINES    77

As it happened, however, the more Durkheim came to view social facts

as “collective representations,” the more he was driven to admit that “all
sociology is a psychology” while still insisting that it was a “psychology sui
generis,” that social facts occupy “a different substratum” in the mind
from individual psychological facts properly so called (1982, 247, 40). It
is as if he hoped that italics alone could somehow make his problematic
distinction real, for the existence of his discipline depended upon it. That
is why he, like Husserl, kept incessant watch along the border with psy-
chology, fending off encroachments by proponents of psychology’s uni-
versal application—but also those that issued, more disturbingly, from his
own meditations.
He tried various formulations. With his mind on customs and tradition
and education, he called it “supremely evident that the beliefs and prac-
tices which are handed down to us ready fashioned by previous genera-
tions” are social facts and noted that the “vast majority of social phenomena
come to us in this way.” But his need for consistency and completion
could not be satisfied by mere majorities, however vast. The vexing issue
of “the crowd”—always so central for French social thought—had to be
tackled, and Durkheim found a way. He managed to corral “outbursts of
collective emotion in a gathering” into his disciplinary domain as well. It
seems that unquestioned customs and mass rage both involved thoughts
and feelings installed in the psyche by “external coercion” and so—unlikely
companions though they seem—belonged to the psychological “substra-
tum” he has defined as distinctly social (56).
No wonder Durkheim fell back on nineteenth-century tropes of force
and energy when insisting upon the coherence of the disciplinary object
he had to posit. He was at his most Comtean, speaking of a “special
energy” that animated each individual in a crowd because “it is derived
from its collective origin,” and of a single “force … propelling them in the
same direction.” Steven Lukes sees the great weakness of Durkheim’s soci-
ology in its neglect of a “micro theory” dealing with the meaningful
actions of individuals—and he rightly blames a methodology that ruled
such considerations “out of bounds” on principle (18). Such was the
strength of Durkheim’s implacable determination to define.
In other respects, however, Durkheim shows the signature disdain
for nineteenth-century conventions of various sorts. So, for example,
one of the “surprises” sociology has in store for the “ordinary man” is
the claim that “crime is necessary” to society and that the criminal “plays
a normal role in social life” (101–102). Like doctors willing to engage
78   T. DE ZENGOTITA

dispassionately with excrement and recognize its functions, sociologists

could see that social cohesion depends upon limits and that limits can-
not exist without something to limit—and criminal behavior provides
exactly that. The elaborate matter-of-factness of his tone as he delivers
the shocking news betrays the satisfaction Durkheim felt in distinguish-
ing himself from the common man in this way.
His attitude is much the same when he discusses the great nineteenth-­
century thinkers—he is looking back, and down. There is some praise for
Comte—who at least recognized that “social phenomena are natural facts”
in his “general philosophical statements” and wrote one chapter in his
Cours that was of real value. But, alas, his obsession with the “sequence of
evolution” drove him to bypass the proposed science before it had been
“worked out” and he concentrated instead on the “wholly subjective idea”
of the “progress of humanity” instead of the social facts of “particular
societies which are born, develop and die independently of one another”
(48, 63–64). Durkheim recognizes different degrees of development
among known societies—but he sees no evidence of a unifying ladder, as
it were. What the evidence does call for is a typology, an essentially syn-
chronic taxonomy based on observable criteria.
For his part, Herbert Spencer is regularly chastised, beginning with the
very first page of the introduction when the reader learns that “in the
whole of Spencer’s work the methodological problem has no place” and
that his “voluminous” sociological studies have “hardly any other purpose
then to show how the law of universal evolution is applied to societies”
(48). When Spencer crops up in subsequent discussions he serves as an
object lesson, showing how fatal to his sociology was the absence of meth-
odological rigor. Again and again, it turns out that Spencer failed to prop-
erly define things in accordance with their actual nature. He didn’t define
“simple society” though it was essential to his scheme (112), he didn’t
really distinguish social facts because he was using them to validate an
evolutionary theory inclusive of biology and even cosmology (179), and
worst of all, he didn’t distinguish sociology from psychology (127, 133).
The basic problem was that, in general, throughout his work, “a certain
conception of social reality is substituted for that reality” (65).
Durkheim would not make that mistake—or any of the others his pre-
decessors had made. Completely detached at last, free of all subjective
impulses and presuppositions, the science of sociology could start from
scratch, founded upon an “object all its own.”
   NEW AUTHORITIES, WORKS, AND DISCIPLINES    79

3.2.2  G.E. Moore (1873–1958)
What, then, is good? How is good to be defined? (G.  E. Moore [1903]
2005, 6)

The first chapter of Principia Ethica is called “The Subject Matter of

Ethics.” Not a word-for-word reflection of Durkheim’s first chapter title—
“What is a Social Fact?”—but close enough. The book reads as if
G.E. Moore had been standing by as social scientists turned social facts
into things and abstained from value judgments—ready, willing, and able
to build his science out of what their science had banished from their
domain. In effect, he envisioned a perfectly compartmentalized neighbor-
ing discipline. Moore’s “science of ethics” would depend upon a uniquely
non-natural and undefinable predicate—“good,” the name of a simple
quality that Moore had discerned in the welter of events that make up
daily life within which “the good” (“the” makes all the difference) sub-
sisted as a certain kind of situation Moore’s science would define with the
aid of its first principle.
His procedure was, of course, systematic. First, he took on ethics as it is
encountered to begin with—in the messy terrain constituted by “our
everyday judgments” where people talk indiscriminately about good and
bad people and actions—but also good and bad meals and schools and who
knows what else. Clearly, “there are far too many persons, things, and
events in the world, past, present, or to come, for a discussion of their indi-
vidual merits to be embraced by any science” (1–3). Moore began, that is,
with that same sense of an uncontainable, incomprehensible world that
conditioned the way modernist creators typically conceived their various
works. That phrasing—“persons, things, and events” coupled with the
“past, present, or to come”—registers his sense of the vast unraveling
within which he assigned himself the analytic philosopher’s particular task:
to make sense, where it was possible, and exorcise confusion where it was
not. Moore’s prose—so very English—is restrained in tone, but often elab-
orate in structure, especially as he works his way through a legacy of useless
ways of seeing and doing things until he reaches his own transparently
simple resolutions. One is left feeling that what Moore asserts should have
been obvious all along—and would have been, if it weren’t for the hope-
lessly confused doctrines inherited and promulgated by his predecessors
and the sloppy habits of mind that pass for thinking among regular folk.
80   T. DE ZENGOTITA

Of all the clarifying moves Moore made as he abstracted his primary

object (the property that will help define “what is good,” or “the good”)
from the cacophony, none was more compelling than his conclusion that
this property, “good,” could not be defined at all! Millennia of futile debate
rendered ridiculous at a stroke. So much wasted ink and energy, alas, but
what liberation! Now Moore could begin again, from a real and present
foundation—from “good” understood as an absolutely simple quality
(compare Wittgenstein’s terminal “objects” in the Tractatus, see Chap. 5).
To be sure, before Moore could arrive at this conclusion—a perfect exam-
ple of modernist origins/foundations—he had to clear a path, this time
clogged with inherited ideas about what constitutes a “definition.” Above
all (it should be obvious, but it needed to be said anyway, because extrane-
ous threats must be specifically neutralized), founders of a science of ethics
were not interested in what is commonly understood by the term “defini-
tion,” namely, the kind found in dictionaries. A sample of Moore’s tactics:

But this is not the sort of definition I am asking for. Such a definition can
never be of ultimate importance to any study except lexicography. If I
wanted that kind of definition I should have to consider in the first place
how people generally used the word “good”; but my business is not with its
proper usage, as established by custom. … What I want to discover is the
nature of that object or idea, and about this I am extremely anxious to arrive
at an agreement. (6)

Durkheim would have understood perfectly.

The reason “good” cannot be defined is because the quality it refers
to has no parts. It is, in this respect, like “yellow.” But, unlike “yellow,”
“good” refers to a non-natural quality.9 Moore’s discovery of this quality
allowed him to identify a “naturalistic fallacy” in the logic of his predeces-
sors. For as long as an intuitively accessible non-natural quality “good”
was accepted, that fallacy would act as a sentinel on the border of Moore’s
domain, deflecting intruders, including especially—and yet again—that
ubiquitous interloper, psychology.
The naturalistic fallacy occurs when ethical philosophies fail to distin-
guish certain regularly co-occurring properties from each other—when,
for example, Hedonism mistakenly reduces the non-natural quality “good”

9
 Evil, beautiful, and ugly are the other non-natural predicates Moore identifies. They are
also non-physical, invisible, intangible—but intuitively discernible in ways that depend ulti-
mately on “taste.”
   NEW AUTHORITIES, WORKS, AND DISCIPLINES    81

to the natural (psychological) quality “pleasure” and proceeds to define

good as pleasure. It would obviously be idiotic to conclude that because
sugar is both white and sweet, that “white” means “sweet.” (Moore
stressed the idiocy. He sounds as if he is spelling out a lesson for a slow-­
witted school boy. The reader feels the pressure. One wants to be on
Moore’s side.) If people don’t make that mistake, it is because both the
predicates involved are natural—sense accessible. But when it comes to the
non-natural predicate “good,” men who presumed to call themselves phi-
losophers made precisely that elementary error for millennia.
Yet all one has to do to detect the fallacy is follow the linguistic turn:
focus on language and place the sentence “pleasure is pleasure” next to
the sentence “pleasure is good.” It is immediately evident that they are not
synonymous and that, while “good” may (sometimes) be a quality that
things which are also pleasant have, it does not mean pleasure. It is absurdly
simple—but beautifully so—a coup.
Wielding this logical rapier, Moore settled accounts with the historical
pantheon. He touched on Plato (who got a pat on the back for realizing
that good is an “intrinsic value” of its own kind), Aristotle (whose virtues
were, all too obviously, mere means to what is good in itself), and Kant
(who hopelessly conflated moral and natural law—the naturalistic fallacy
writ large), but he gave most attention to immediate predecessors, to
Professor Sedgwick, the utilitarian, and especially to Mister Herbert
Spencer, “perhaps the best known” among “the very numerous and very
popular” (not a good thing  in the professionalized academy now being
instituted) writers responsible for the “modern vogue of evolutionism.”10
Many modernist thinkers found an ideal target in Spencer, in whom an
always suspect popular opinion and evolutionist convictions combined
forces. Moore added extra spin by suggesting (after selecting Spencer in
the first place) that he was not so propitious a choice after all because
“Mr. Spencer’s doctrine, it must be owned, does not offer the clearest
example of the naturalistic fallacy used to support Evolutionist Ethics.”
What it does is:

10
 Moore skewers Spencer immediately, in his typical way, as he introduces the fallacy: “It
is absolutely useless, so far as Ethics is concerned, to prove, as Mr. Spencer tries to do, that
increase of pleasure coincides with increase of life, unless good means something different
from either life or pleasure. He might as well try to prove that an orange is yellow by shewing
that it is always wrapped up in paper.”
82   T. DE ZENGOTITA

use the naturalistic fallacy in details; but with regard to his fundamental
principles, the following doubts occur: Is he fundamentally a Hedonist?
And, if so, is he a naturalistic hedonist? … Does he hold that a tendency to
increase life is merely a criterion of good conduct? Or does he hold that such
increase in life is marked out by nature as an end at which we ought to aim?
… his language in various places would give color to all these hypotheses,
though some of them are mutually inconsistent. I will try to discuss the
main points. (46)

Poor Spencer. New standards were obviously being set—and none too
soon, it seems, for the old standards had countenanced a way of thinking
so undisciplined that a really qualified commentator, one who had defined
his field and methods with sufficient rigor, could do no more than “try”
to discuss the main points made by its most prominent representative.
After Moore finished with his predecessors, he used his foundational
predicate to identify and define “the good” in itself, not as a means, but as
that which has the quality “good” intrinsically. He offered two kinds of
“complex organic unities” summarily characterized as “personal affec-
tions” and “aesthetic enjoyments”—with a crucial proviso: the affections
and enjoyments must involve people and objects that are actually worthy,
which would boil down to “judgments of taste” (189, 192–193).
In After Virtue (1984), Alasdair MacIntyre was out to update Aristotle’s
socio-biological functionalism in hopes of reviving a battered Marxism in
some form by at least moving beyond bourgeois “emotivism.” His experi-
ence of working-class realities in mid-twentieth-century Great Britain
allowed him to give, by way of contrast, an unforgettable image of Moore
as a darling of the Bloomsbury group—which had received his Principia
Ethica with rapturous enthusiasm. He cited Maynard Keynes, who was pres-
ent as Moore and Woolf, and all their friends persuaded themselves that
their personal tastes in matters of art and love were actually neo-­platonic
universals that their supremely cultivated sensibilities enabled them to intuit.
The fact that they were so easy to persuade is what makes this anecdote
relevant here. As MacIntyre puts it, they envisaged “the whole of the past
… as a burden that Moore helped them cast off” in discussions of love and
art in which, “as Keynes tells us … ‘victory was with those who could
speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and
could best use the accents of infallibility’ and Keynes goes on to describe
the effectiveness of Moore’s gasps of incredulity and head shaking, of
Strachey’s grim silences and Lowes Dickinson’s shrugs” (16–17).
   NEW AUTHORITIES, WORKS, AND DISCIPLINES    83

MacIntyre calls all this “a great silliness … but the great silliness of
highly intelligent and perceptive people,” so it is worth “asking if we can
discern any clues as to why they accepted Moore’s naïve and complacent
apocalypticism (16).” This chapter is providing some of those clues.

3.2.3  Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913)

In setting up the science of language within the overall study of speech,
I have outlined the whole of linguistics. (Ferdinand de Saussure [1916]
1966, 17)

It is not until the third chapter of the Course in General Linguistics that
we reach the title “The Object of Linguistics.” The titles of the first two
chapters, however, make this a difference without distinction as compared
to Durkheim and Moore.11 The first chapter (5 pages) is called “A Glance
at the History of Linguistics” (no more than a glance was called for) and
the second (2 pages) is called “Subject Matter and Scope of Linguistics; its
Relations with the Other Sciences.” It amounts to a brisk house-cleaning
operation in which old-fashioned diachronic studies of language evolution
are allowed to retain a place under the broad umbrella of “linguistics”
understood as the study of “all manifestations of human speech.” The
relevance of other sciences—like sociology and physiology—is admitted
under that broad umbrella as well. But it is only when “The Object of
Linguistics” is actually defined that those “other viewpoints” that have had
linguists “going around in circles” for too long can be banished at last—
along with “the superficial notions of the general public (16).” At that
point, a science of language becomes possible and serious work begins.
Langue, the synchronic code, the grammar of a language, makes that sci-
ence possible thanks to the abstraction of this “well-defined object” from
“the heterogeneous mass of speech facts” (14).
Another prototype of academic self-definition and containment, then,
to be discussed in some detail in the section on Structuralism (Chap. 5).
Here, the point is simple, categorical: Saussure’s enormously influential
modernist science of language was founded through the same basic ges-
tures and tropes as the other disciplines considered in this chapter.

11
 The fact that this “book” was actually assembled by students from their notes on
Saussure’s lectures may account for this divergence.
84   T. DE ZENGOTITA

3.2.4  I.A. Richards (1893–1979)
The first chapter of Principles of Literary Criticism is called “The Chaos of
Critical Theories”—and I.A.  Richards was, if it be possible, even more
aghast at the spectacle of past confusion than were the other founders:

if we now turn to consider what are the results yielded by the best minds
pondering these questions [of artistic value] in the light of the eminently
accessible experiences provided by the Arts, we discover an almost empty
garner. A few conjectures, a supply of admonitions, many acute isolated
observations, some brilliant guesses, much oratory and applied poetry, inex-
haustible confusion, a sufficiency of dogma, no small stock of prejudices,
whimsies and crochets. (6)

Richards concluded that “of such as these, it may be said without exag-
geration, is extant critical theory composed.” To ensure that his readers
are aware of the scope of this archly phrased indictment, he mentions
names. Beginning with Aristotle, Longinus, and Horace and ending with
Coleridge, Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold—he provides a “few specimens
of the most famous utterances of each” to justify the overall assertion.
Another list, another long paragraph—and an impression of historical
chaos is established, over which Richards presides by implication of his
controlling style. Obviously, only a completely fresh start on the soundest
possible foundation could dissipate this fog of doxa. The style is infectious.
Delicious sensations of authority attend it.
Shifting to what he seemed to think was a moment of becoming mod-
esty, Richards allows that “some of these apices of critical theory, indeed
many of them, are profitable starting points for reflection” but (having
relieved us of the suspicion that Aristotle was actually stupid) he moves on
to the real point, which is that “neither together, nor singly, nor in any
combination do they give what is required.” And what is required? By
now we know roughly what to expect. Someone who feels supremely
qualified to give an incontrovertible answer to that portentous question is
about to give it. “Explanations” are required, explanations that answer
“the central question, what is the value of the arts, why are they worth the
keenest hours of the best minds, and what is their place in the system of
human endeavors?” (7).
So there it is again. To build a disciplinary compartment among other
such compartments by appropriate abstraction of criteria that will define
what needs explaining (in this case, the value of art) and provide the
   NEW AUTHORITIES, WORKS, AND DISCIPLINES    85

methods and the technical language in which the explanations can be

expressed. Some more preliminary work has to be done first, however.
Richards has to free the reader from several specific illusions, particularly
those imposed by “prescientific speculation” and by “ordinary conversa-
tion,” before he can proceed. That meant, above all, that the “paralyzing
apparition Beauty” and a “flock of equally bogus entities” that had long
dominated the language of criticism had to be exposed for the “Mystic
Beings” they are. Also some of “a less august nature”—like “Design,
Form, Rhythm, Expression” and other such “vacua in discourse”— had
to be expunged from the language of criticism (19–20, 33). For Richards,
attending to tradition, lacking words were everywhere.
It is not until Chapter 6 (“Value as an Ultimate Idea”) that Richards
offers his affirmative claim: in “modern times,” the chaos of tradition is
superseded by a simple question: can value be explained by psychology? He
praises G.E. Moore for “brilliant statements” in his arguments against psy-
chology but, alas, it was all for naught. Moore’s “cryptic account” of the
alternative—invisible and undefinable qualities hovering about like wraiths
at a séance—would not hold up against science in the long run. Having
dispatched his most credible rival, Richards proceeds to Chapter 7 (“A
Psychological Theory of Value”) and introduces his program. He was not
intending to found an exact science in The Principles of Literary Criticism.
He was frank to admit that the science of psychology had not reached
maturity. While he looked forward to that day, he wanted only to claim for
now that “a general outline of kind of thing a mind is has begun to take
shape.” That outline, in turn, meant that “enough is known for an analysis
of the mental events which make up the reading of a poem to be attempted.”
And this he does in Chapter 16—called “The Analysis of a Poem” (Note
the “The,” unthinkable today). He offers a visual aid (Fig. 3.1):
This graphic is worth a closer look. It is hard for me to imagine how any
literary critic, in any era, could be so positioned as to find it illuminating.
The actual discussions of levels I–VI are classic Richards’—witty, categori-
cal, dogmatic, and of interest on their own. But why the diagram? Why the
little logos distinguishing “auditory verbal image” from “articulatory ver-
bal image,” the little springs that stand for emotions and the arrow stand-
ing for thoughts of other things and situations? By all accounts, Richards
was a passionate and brilliant reader and teacher, not unusually reductive
in his substantive critical work. Yet he thought this image would help
define the discipline of literary criticism.
86   T. DE ZENGOTITA

Fig. 3.1  Reading a poem: a neurological mapping

While researching this book, I confess I took a certain satisfaction in

thinking (hoping?) that I had recovered something of the aims and motives
of a lot of very different people in very different settings, had managed to
get some sense of “what it was like” to be this one or that one in relation
to some argument or figure. But this is beyond me. I can see that Richards
took an interesting discussion of why images are not really that central to
the impact of poetry and he attached levels II and III to it. I can see that
his discussion of the role of incipient action impulses in shaping attitudes
“goes with” with level VI—but why do it at all? Why did Richards think
the visual attachment was revealing?
Certainly, this diagram testifies to the grip of psychology on the mod-
ernist imagination.12 Could the value of the diagram have been purely
totemic? Were the sheer associations charged with some power—like con-
tagious and homeopathic magic in Frazer’s classic treatment? Was the
depiction serving as a complex symbol of the integrative function of lan-
guage in human experience? If so, then it will serve here as an introduction

12
 See Mark Micale The Mind of Modernism (2004) for a revealing overview.
   NEW AUTHORITIES, WORKS, AND DISCIPLINES    87

to a veritable fetish in the modernist academy: the chart, the diagram,

sometimes even formulas—visual tropes of definition and containment, to
be more extensively discussed in Chap. 5.
So, without actually following a handbook called How to Found a
Modernist Academic Discipline, the authorities just described proceeded
with remarkable consistency. The rhetoric they deployed hammered home
a simple message: we must exorcise the past and start anew; we must
attend to what we can observe directly and build explanations on the basis
of those observations; above all, we must define precisely the object of
study by abstracting it from the welter of senseless historical events and
mindless daily routines, distinguishing it systematically as well from the
objects of neighboring disciplines. Only if we organize the vast and intri-
cate field of human phenomena into such compartments can we hope, at
last, to make some progress—not because progress has been granted to us
by God or Nature, but because we have decided upon it.13
All these discipline-defining books were short. They were not manifes-
toes exactly, but they had some of the same qualities. They presented
parameters within which empirical work might unfold over years to come.
They did no more than sample such work, by way of illustration, for these
treatises were self-consciously intended as founding documents—intended
as “origins” of a new kind. And, while they might sample the work of
benighted predecessors, it was only to show how misguided they had
been; there was no credible legacy to build on. The most salient feature is
the overall sense of authorial entitlement, the feeling that one had a per-
fect right to say things like: “What, then, is good? How is good to be
defined?” or “In setting up the science of language within the overall
study of speech, I have outlined the whole of linguistics” or “The qualifi-
cations of a good critic are three.” Try to imagine contemporary academ-
ics in good standing in the humanities presenting their work in such terms.
A sample, then, of well-defended compartments in the modernist acad-
emy, of disciplines as analogues of artworks and their genres. “Well-­
defended” is not too strong a term. Much of the rhetoric, verbal and
visual, that these creators deployed around their domains relied on figures
13
 It is interesting to notice that, from the point of view of a French poststructuralist like
Julia Kristeva, this modernist compulsion to compartmentalize looks like “totalizing frag-
mentation.” That paradoxical characterization nicely highlights why the Cartesian subject, in
its positivist form, can only totalize (its prime directive) by way of compartmentalizing. That
subject itself is unexamined and so (unlike Kantian, Hegelian, Husserlian versions) is “out-
side” of all phenomena presented to it—there is as yet no phenomenological immanence.
88   T. DE ZENGOTITA

of purity and contamination, and this is what accounts for the ferocious
debates that broke out over the ensuing decades—debates about whether
or not some issue at hand qualified as “philosophy” or “anthropology” or
“history” or whatever. And, of course, the stakes would be that much
higher when the whole idea of—the very institutions of—these modernist
disciplines finally came under attack.14
It will be no surprise then, when we get to Part IV, to find Derrida,
Foucault, Barthes, and all the rest of them taking such delight in figures of
transgression, dispersion, and contamination at the expense of categorical
purities and ab-solutes (not soluble, not mixable) of all kinds. In Anglo-­
American contexts, the politics of academic postmodernism will play out
in the same conceptual arena, broadly construed. The rise of “interdisci-
plinary studies” in itself, of course—but the unity and purity of the disci-
plines would be eroded from within as well. The multiplication of
perspectives and “discourses”—women, gays, ethnicities—but also, in the
fabric of “theory” itself as it ramified across the humanities, the reach for
margins, for multiple readings and aporias, for problematics that eschew
solutions. The uncontainable play of Nietzschean forces that drove the
modernists to abstraction was welcomed by postmodernists determined to
participate in it—the only reality.
Writing, writing, writing.

References
Cahoone, Lawrence E., ed. 1996. From Modernism to Postmodernism: An
Anthology. Cambridge: Blackwell.
de Saussure, Ferdinand. (1916) 1966. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade
Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Duchamp, Marcel. 1975. The Creative Act. In The Essential Writings of Marcel
Duchamp. London: Thames and Hudson.
Durkheim, Emile. (1895a) 1938. The Rules of Sociological Method. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
———. (1895b) 1982. The Rules of Sociological Method. Trans. W.  D. Halls.
New York: The Free Press.

14
 Margaret Mead was my advisor at Columbia in the 1970s. She was a student of Franz
Boas, a disciplinary founder of American Anthropology at the beginning of the twentieth
century. Only a few decades from modernist founding to postmodern crisis, then—but in the
heat of battle it felt to all concerned as if ancient testaments were at issue.
   NEW AUTHORITIES, WORKS, AND DISCIPLINES    89

Eliot, T.S. 1920. Tradition and the Individual Talent. In The Sacred Wood, 47–59.
London: Methuen.
Frank Lloyd Wright. Directed by Ken Burns. [1997] 2014. Public Broadcasting
System (PBS.)
Joyce, James. (1914) 2003. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New  York:
Penguin Classics.
Kandinsky, Wassily. (1914) 2010. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Whitefish:
Kessinger Publishing.
Karl, Frederick Robert. 1988. Modern and Modernism: The Sovereignty of the
Artist, 1885–1925. New York: Atheneum.
Le Corbusier. (1923) 1986. Towards a New Architecture. Trans. Frederick Etchells.
New York: Dover Publications.
Longenbach, James. 1988. Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1984. After Virtue. Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. (1909) 1996. The Futurist Manifesto. In From
Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence E.  Cahoone.
Cambridge: Blackwell.
Micale, Mark. 2004. The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the
Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880–1940. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Moore, G.E. (1903) 2005. The Subject Matter of Ethics. In Principia Ethica.
New York: Barnes and Noble.
Ottinger, Didier, ed. (1915) 2009. In Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger. Paris:
Éditions de Centre Pompidou.
Proust, Marcel. (1913) 1998. Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time: Volume 1.
New York: Modern Library.
Richards, Ivor Armstrong. 1924. The Analysis of a Poem. In Principles of Literary
Criticism. London: Routledge.
Safranski, Rüdiger. 2002. Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. New  York:
W.W. Norton & Company.
Schoenberg, Arnold. 1952. My Evolution. The Musical Quarterly 38 (4): 517–527.
Stanislavski, Constantin. 1924. My Life in Art. Trans. J.J. Robbins. Boston: Little,
Brown & Co.
Steiner, George. 1975. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation.
New York: Oxford University Press.
von Hofmannsthal, Hugo. (1902) 2005. The Lord Chandos Letter. In The Lord
Chandos Letter: And Other Writings. Trans. Joel Rotenberg. New  York:
New York Review Books/Classics.
Weber, Max. (1918) 1946. Science as a Vocation. In From Max Weber: Essays in
Sociology, Trans. and ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford
University Press.
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Weber, Marianne. (1926) 2017. Ancestors. In Max Weber: A Biography, Trans. and
ed. Harry Zohn, 1–30. New York: Routledge.
Wimsatt, William K., Jr., and Monroe Curtis Beardsley. 1946. The Intentional
Fallacy. The Sewanee Review 54 (3): 468–488.
Woolf, Virginia. (1925) 1984. In The Common Reader, ed. Andrew McNeillie. San
Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, A Harvest Book.
———. (1927) 1989. To the Lighthouse. New  York: Harvest Books/Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich.
 CHAPTER 4

Phenomenology

Therefore, if we think of a phenomenology developed as an intuitively apri-

ori science purely according to eidetic method, all its eidetic researches are
nothing else but uncoverings of the all-embracing eidos [essence], transcen-
dental ego as such, which comprises all the possibility-variants of the de
facto ego and this ego itself qua possibility. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian
Meditations (1929, 71)

If the modernist moment can be characterized in terms of self-splitting,

then the Hegelian aphorism on this book’s title page could not ask for
more striking confirmation than the phenomenological reduction,
Husserl’s epoche—here described in terms he came to favor in his later
work. It was the ultimate act of abstraction. The entire life experience of
the philosopher, as personal-historical (de facto in the quote above) ego,
was to be “detached” from itself, as it were, and treated as the “object” of
philosophical inquiry. Descartes’ epistemological prison was transformed
from something one hoped to escape, with God’s help, as quickly as pos-
sible to the enduring basis of philosophical contemplation. An anonymous
creator-self necessarily emerged in tandem with that abstraction. It was
Husserl’s transcendental ego, to whose essence-grasping vision the de
facto ego of the philosopher would now appear as one (actualized) possi-
bility among an indefinite number of possible ego/worlds to be accessed
by the method of “eidetic variation” in philosophic fantasy.

© The Author(s) 2019 91

T. de Zengotita, Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics,
Political Philosophy and Public Purpose,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90689-8_4
92   T. DE ZENGOTITA

Notice that the transcendental ego did not merely grasp essences in
philosophic contemplation; it was the source, by way of its “intentional-
ity,” of world-constituting essences. Could there be a more ambitious
expression of the modernist aspiration to author meaning in nature and
history? In the context of this narrative, Husserl looks like the Western
mind’s last desperate lunge toward comprehension of an incomprehensi-
ble world. He feels inevitable.
With the centrality of this distinction for modern phenomenology
established, we will turn to Heidegger for a more accessible (and perti-
nent) account of phenomenology’s pivotal role in this story. Heidegger
was both a principal foil and an enduring, if subterranean, influence on
postmodern theory.
But first, four very general and (once again) organizational and rhetori-
cal elements of Husserl’s work show how this discipline and this disciplin-
ary founder belong to the same moment as Durkheim, Moore, Saussure,
and Richards:

1. Husserl was obsessed with identifying the foundational elements of

his enterprise, the essences (eidos) that would distinguish “regions”
of conscious experience and apodictically guarantee their universality.
2. He was as obsessed with method and definition, perpetually tinker-
ing with (“purifying”) boundaries that would distinguish philo-
sophical activities from each other and philosophy itself from other
enterprises, especially psychology.
3. He wanted the empirical sciences to found themselves on the basis
of the regions of experience identified by phenomenology. Such
foundations, he hoped, would rein in the excesses of modern enter-
prises, especially those with technological application, shaped as
they were by sciences that did not understand themselves. In this
forlorn hope, a remnant of nineteenth-century philosophy’s orienta-
tion toward the historical world was still operating in Husserl, as it
was in Adorno and Horkheimer.1
4. The gesture that abstracts the Transcendental Ego from the

Personal-­Historical Ego is also called “abstention” (as in abstaining
from judgment and belief about what presents itself phenomenally).
Under that rubric, it shows itself as a more comprehensive version of
the social sciences’ fact/value distinction.
1
 Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology ([1954]
1970) and Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) ought to be read
together.
  PHENOMENOLOGY   93

Husserl played an influential role in the French academy right through

the 1960s. The emphasis he placed in his early work on phenomenology
as a kind of super-science that provided conceptual (eidetic) foundations
for the empirical sciences made him part of the Kantian lineage and com-
plement to French philosophers of science like Georges Canguilhem and
Gaston Bachelard, who passed along their version of Husserl in a “phi-
losophy of the concept” (as opposed to a “philosophy of the subject”) to
Althusser, Lacan, and Foucault, especially—and to Derrida as well  (see
Baring 2011). And when attention was given to Husserl’s as yet unpub-
lished and untranslated later works, available in the archives at the
University of Leuven, he became even more relevant. Those works dealt
with “genesis” and “the other” at length and were consulted and cited
extensively by Merleau-Ponty and by Derrida in ways that made Husserl
very much a part of the poststructuralist return to history, the body, and
performance. But it was Heidegger’s existential phenomenology and his
critique of Western metaphysics that most directly shaped the emergence
of French theory. For that reason—and thanks to its relatively accessible
presentation—Being and Time ([1929] 1969) is best suited to our present
purposes and what follows is, in effect, a gloss on the basics of phenome-
nology as depicted in that work.
What is ultimately at issue in phenomenology is easy to state, but diffi-
cult to grasp, not because it is complicated, but because it is so simple.
Consciousness doesn’t exist the way a thing exists. It has a different kind
of existence. That kind of existence cannot be apprehended unless it is
approached in a suitable way. All efforts to think of consciousness as a
mental entity with special sorts of mental properties (i.e., as analogous to
a physical thing) are doomed from the outset (I would recommend, once
again, the first chapter of Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949). It
gives a lucid account of this profoundly mistaken analogy and its roots in
the seventeenth-century epistemology directed at readers unacquainted
with phenomenology.)
Martin Heidegger called the kind of being that consciousness has
“Being-in-the-World.” I will use the expression “embodied mind” to con-
vey the same idea. Heidegger also parsed the word Dasein in naming con-
sciousness, to emphasize its constituents—Da-sein. That literally translates
as “There-being”—which sums up the essential claim very neatly.
The kind of existence that sheer things have is, so to speak, enclosed.
Consider a rock on a path. A path has direction—it has a “there.” For a
rock, there is no such thing as a path. But the “there” of a path is as much
a constituent of a person’s conscious existence as the “here” of one’s own
94   T. DE ZENGOTITA

point of view. Or look at it this way: a rock may be in contact with the
ground—but it cannot touch the ground.
If you are thinking “that’s because a rock hasn’t got a central nervous
system,” you have fallen back into the science-inspired mode of objectifi-
cation which phenomenology is out to dismantle. Nervous systems may
indeed be necessary conditions, as a matter of scientific fact, for touch-
ing—but that’s beside the point. The lived experience of “touching” has
nothing to do with facts of neurology, but with the phenomenology of
touching itself.
Do we suppose that premodern people with no knowledge of neurol-
ogy don’t know what “touching” is? It is important to dwell upon this
question. It may help to “carve out,” as it were, the phenomenon of
touching itself—and, by extension, the whole realm of experience that
concerns phenomenology.
Back to the rock, in contact with, but not touching the path. Beyond
the sensation itself, touching is directional—just as paths are. Not only can
a rock not feel, it has no orientation in the world, no directionality in time
or space, no implicit connections to anything else. For a rock, the world
has no significance.
That’s why equipment is such a special kind of thing, a sort of interme-
diary between rocks and people. A screwdriver wouldn’t be a screwdriver
if it didn’t have its orientation, its functional segments all “pointing” to
their purpose. It would not be “ready-to-hand,” as Heidegger put it, but
“present-at-hand”—a sheer thing, like a rock.
To say that we are embodied mind, “being-in-the-world,” does not
imply that screwdrivers are conscious. But it does imply that we are con-
scious only through the totality of oriented things that constitute our
world as a world—screwdrivers, paths, tables, chairs, hands and feet, and,
yes, rocks too can come in handy, or, in the limiting case, prove to be
interesting, even beautiful, strewn across a silent landscape.
Unlike a sheer thing, which exists in an enclosed way, consciousness
exists, not merely in an open way, that’s not radical enough—conscious-
ness literally ex-ists, which means it is outside itself. Hence, “there-being.”
Once that becomes evident across the board, a different way of thinking
becomes possible.
In the case of the screwdriver, for example, you could say, just to get the
idea started, that you exist not just “through,” but as the pointing of the
screwdriver. That idea takes on more force when you begin to realize the
general implication, which is that you exist as all the orientations of all the
  PHENOMENOLOGY   95

things that constitute your world—that is, all their interrelated pointings,
some in the foreground, most in the background—and, finally, you exist
as that which weaves all their pointings together as a world.2
Hence, “being-in-the-world.”
Or take time. You ex-ist outside yourself in time constantly. That is,
outside the present. This is easy to see. Just monitor your activity without
interrupting it (as suggested by Husserl’s abstention). Notice how com-
pletely your present moments are infused with past moments that “put”
you in your present context and with future moments that are constantly
in the process of actualizing—or not. If you do that, you will find that you,
as you are now, exist almost entirely in past and future moments. And then
you will notice that those moments merge with the directionalities and
orientations of all the significant things and settings that make up your
world. Your past and future consist of possibilities, implicit in those things
and settings, some irrevocably actualized and others not yet. The future
just is possibility and you ex-ist as possibility. The present moment, as an
instant, can’t actually be experienced at all. If you try to “fix” it with your
attention, you will find that it has not quite arrived or just slipped away.
Even Husserl, for all his emphasis on “presence,” called the present instant
an “ideal”—and Derrida would make much of that, as we shall see.
At first, as an objectifying modern accustomed to thinking of yourself
as a present-at-hand mental entity lodged somehow “in” your body, you
may be tempted to say, “Oh, nonsense, I exist entirely in the present and,
in the present, I have memories of the past and plans for the future that
condition my present activity.”
But that’s just how things look to you when you adopt that objectifying
attitude toward yourself—which, as a modern, you automatically do when-
ever discussions like this get under way. Then you appear before the gaze
of your own mind’s eye as a mental-thing that “has” memories and plans
(and feelings and so on). But when you are actually living your life you are
not really like that at all—you are the way I have been describing you.
Consult Proust for confirmation.
Finally, to complete the inventory of your existence as being-in-the-­
world, in addition to the pointings of things and the determinations and
possibilities of time, there are the people with whom you share the world—
2
 You might feel like saying that the screwdriver is really a piece of plastic and metal with
such-and-such shape and so-and-so mass and so on. Its functions, you might want to say, are
really knowledge that makers and users of screwdrivers have in their Cartesian mind/brains.
When you talk this way, you use sciencey language (that is true in its own explanatory way)
to cover up how you actually live in the world.
96   T. DE ZENGOTITA

a world that embodies you all, more or less intensively, more or less recip-
rocally, depending on the circumstances.
Heidegger thought of his “existential phenomenology” as radically
opposed to the “transcendental phenomenology” of his teacher, Edmund
Husserl—mainly because he had jettisoned the transcendental ego. On
Heidegger’s account, that remnant of Platonic/Kantian Idealism had to
go if consciousness was to recognize itself as the meaning of Being unfold-
ing temporally, and nothing besides, nothing transcendent. But that does
not mean that Heidegger somehow eluded the modernist moment. The
characteristic sense of self-splitting was displaced in his thought to a sense
of himself as divided between an asocial and authentic “being-toward-­
death” and a socialized “they-self” unavoidably “fallen” into “average
everydayness.” In a way, Heidegger’s urgent phrasing makes it a more
cogent and value-laden expression of the special sense of destiny that ani-
mated the modernist creator.
It is also worth noting how much Heidegger’s account of time had in
common with Henri Bergson’s distinction between experienced time
(elastic duration) and measured time as well as the affinities between both
and, as already suggested, Proust’s literary treatment of time. The point is
that, for all these modernists, time was no longer just an objective con-
tainer of unfolding historical and natural events; it was, more primordially,
a dimension of the psyche.
With temporality understood as elastic “stretches” of experience,
sometimes punctual, as with an abrupt interruption, sometimes indefi-
nitely extended, as when we “lose track” of it (meaning clock time), so
immersed are we in duration. Time flies when you’re having fun and
slows to crawl when you are waiting for the test results. It seems likely
that the internalization of time3 was an aspect of the gesture of abstrac-
tion, giving ­ modernist creators the authority, as it were, to simply
stipulate—by fiat, by definition—the eternal instants upon which logic,
grammar, and code depend. As we shall see, many French
poststructuralists—steeped as they were in Classical philosophy, thanks to
the French educational system—may have been too quick to read Plato’s
distinction between Being (the Ideas) and becoming into this. The mod-
ernist moment supplied motives of its own for seeking shelter from the

3
 See Husserl’s Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness ([1928] 1964). See also Ann
Banfield “Time Passes: Virginia Woolf, Post-Impressionism, and Cambridge Time” in Poetics
Today Fall, 2003.
  PHENOMENOLOGY   97

flux of becoming in the coherence of formal structure, though Heidegger

and Derrida could still be right to think that the foundational categories
of Western Metaphysics determined the space within which historically
more particular moves have been made since.
Phenomenology’s influence on postmodernism would be most directly
realized after it was temporalized by Heidegger, historicized by Kojeve—
and then folded into a critique of Structuralism.4 In that encounter, French
“post-structuralism” was born. Once the critique of the sign got under-
way, all of phenomenology, going back to Hegel, would come in for with-
ering criticism as well, as we shall see. But something very basic went
largely unnoticed by the most influential French critics of “the philosophy
of the subject”—though it should be more evident to Anglo-American
intellectuals: the phenomenological standpoint was essential to the emergence
of postmodern thought, and not merely as a foil. A narcissism of small differ-
ences was often at work when French theory launched its attack on Sartre,
especially, and the tradition he represented.5
First of all—and going back to Hegel—phenomenology was funda-
mentally a “romantic” effort to reunite mind and world, to heal the breach
of Cartesian dualism. Simply characterizing consciousness as Being-in-the-­
world, as Heidegger did, announces that aim. With their sweeping cri-
tique of the philosophy of the subject, the creators of French theory
obscured crucial differences between the modern cogito and the subject of
phenomenology. Just compare, for example, Descartes’ sixth discourse—
which calls upon modern scientific man to become “Lord and Master of
Nature”—with the urgent critiques of science and technology by Husserl
and Heidegger (Husserl The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology [1954] 1970 [originally written in 1936]; Heidegger “The
Question Concerning Technology” [1954] 1977). Phenomenology was
opposed from the beginning to reducing the world to Galileo’s particles
and Newton’s equations and relegating all meaning and value to the sub-
ject. It celebrated the concrete and denounced the abstract. It was deeply
suspicious of Enlightenment utilitarianism and instrumental reason and
deeply critical of the technological domination of nature and society.

4
 See L.  Lawlor “Phenomenology and Metaphysics, and Chaos: on the Fragility of the
Event in Deleuze” (2012, 104–106).
5
 Gary Gutting calls Sartre “the perfect whipping boy for the attack on Subjectivity”
(2013, 81–82).
98   T. DE ZENGOTITA

In other words, phenomenology aspired to a sort of “postmodernity”

from the beginning. That means that the basic aims and values of phenom-
enology were retained by postmodern projects. If I had to pick the main rea-
son for the misunderstandings that attended French and American efforts
to communicate about “theory,” this would be a leading candidate.6 When
Americans deconstructed foundational categories and refused essential-
ism, they were typically thinking of “natural kinds” in a positivist sense—
of race or sexuality as biological givens for example. But when the French
went after “the concept” for doing violence to the real, they were typically
thinking of how Kantian categories or Hegelian Dialectic or Husserlian
essences contained and determined all possible experience. They were
lashing out at a “resolution” of Cartesian dualism by a phenomenological
subject that only pretended to give the world (the object, the body, the
other, temporality) its due—and found nothing to contemplate at the end
of the day but itself.7
So when the textualistes and the “philosophers of desire” joined forces
to denounce the phenomenological tradition and put postmodern theory
in its stead, they were attacking it for failing to realize those basic aims and
values. They were attacking it for still being caught up in modern subjec-
tivity, conceptuality, and practice. Like humanism itself, phenomenology’s
re-fusion of mind and world—whether in Hegel or Heidegger—turned
out to be a sham, another form of domination, an idealist form of domina-
tion, a domination of difference (object, other, time, desire) by identity
(subject, the same, concept). What was wanted was the actual return of
subjectivity to the play of disruptive events in a Nietzschean history.8
In their determination to do better the creators of French theory
launched an attack on all fronts, a gang-bang effort to humble the proud
subject of modern enterprises by showing that it was actually a site, a mere
locus, a subjectivity divided and essentially subjected—to discourses, to regu-
latory practices, to ideological apparatuses, to pulsions of desire and repres-
sion, to anything and everything but its own free will and intentionality.
But to expose the autonomy of the cogito as a sham is not the same thing as
actually doing without it, in practice. Deleuze and Derrida didn’t actually

6
 For accounts of such mishaps, see Cusset (2008), Derrida (2001), and Mathy (2000).
7
 Compare Adorno on the “aura of materiality” that lured adherents of phenomenology
away from history.
8
 Says Gary Gutting of the creators of French theory: “for each of these philosophers there
is a Nietzsche who is the primary historical antecedent to his anti-Hegelianism” (2013, 84).
  PHENOMENOLOGY   99

stop using subject-assuming pronouns in daily life. So were the ferocious

attacks, the insinuating critiques, the subtlest deflations—above all, the tor-
tured language devoting thousands of pages to avoiding conventional refer-
ences to the subject and exposing the subject as an effect of such
references—was it seriously intended, serious politics? It’s hard to tell; so
much was performance, so close to radical art. It was being openly asserted
that “cultural politics” just was politics (see Danielle Marx-­Scouras The
Cultural Politics of Tel Quel (1996), discussed in Chap. 8). But all that
effort, while it does suggest some awful disappointment with life as a mod-
ern self, also conjures up a lingering specter of—if not Marx—hope?
Democracy a venir (Derrida), the freedom of ecriture (Barthes), perfor-
mance as the scene of agency (Butler)—on and on. Even Adorno insisted
on his utopian moment. Even Lacan came down on the side of desire—and
of comedy. But, as we shall see, in the European context, such moments
were typically experienced as heroic gestures in the face of tragic necessities
and lost causes.
As for Structuralism, to which we turn in the next chapter, the auton-
omy and unity of the modern subject and the synchronic perfection of
Structuralism’s formal codes (Structuralism’s “object” or “work”) came
to be seen as essentially affiliated, an instance of modernist intentionality
as we have described it. And, in the charged political atmosphere of the
day, that affiliation seemed to reflect of a parallel relation in totalizing
political regimes, capitalist or communist. Abstract modernist theorizing
became a political issue and postmodern theory became “post-structural”
as it undermined not only the imperial codes of Structuralism but also the
anonymous agent responsible for the formalisms that turned living reality
into a timeless realm of “signs.” Levi-Strauss denounced the subject of
phenomenology in his anthropology, but Levi-Strauss the author presided
over his abstract works as serenely removed from history as they were.
Excluding the subject for methodological reasons, structuralist theory
seemed in effect to be sheltering it, incognito, disguising humanism as a
“science de l’homme,” protecting it from heterogeneous historical forces no
theory could contain.9

9
 See Merquior (1987, 52) for the difference, on this crucial point, between Levi-Strauss
and Foucault. This also explains why Levi-Strauss was perfectly comfortable talking about
everyday subjectivity when he wasn’t practicing his “science.” Indeed, several of the most
compelling moments in his work revolve around such anecdotes (see, e.g., the description of
the French peasant custom of wine exchange in The Elementary Structures of Kinship ([1949]
1969) and the account of a Bororo chieftain’s appropriation of writing in Tristes Tropique
([1955] 1992)).
100   T. DE ZENGOTITA

References
Baring, Edward. 2011. The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cusset, Francois. 2008. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co.
Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Trans. Jeff Fort with
Josephine Berganza and Marlon Jones. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Derrida, Jacques. (1966) 2001. Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the
Human Sciences. In Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London:
Routledge.
Gutting, Gary. 2013. Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1969 (1929). Being and Time. New York: Harper and Row.
———. (1954) 1977. The Question Concerning Technology. In Basic Writings
from “Being and Time” (1927) to “The Task of Thinking” (1964), Ed. David
Farrell Krell, and Trans. Frank A. Capuzzi with J. Glenn Gray and David Farrell
Krell. New York: Harper & Row.
Husserl, Edmund. (1928) 1964. Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness.
Ed. M.  Heidegger and Trans. James S.  Churchill. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
———. (1929) 1977. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology.
The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
———. (1954) 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Lawlor, Leonard. 2012. Phenomenology, and Metaphysics, and Chaos: On the
Fragility of the Event in Deleuze. In The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze, ed.
Daniel W. Smith and Henry Somers-Hall, 103–125. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1949) 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Trans.
James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer. Boston: Beacon Press.
———. (1955) 1992. Tristes Tropique. New York: Penguin Group.
Marx-Scouras, Danielle. 1996. The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel: Literature and the
Left in the Wake of Engagement. University Park: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
Mathy, Jean-Philippe. 2000. French Resistance: The French-American Culture
Wars. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Merquior, José Guilherme. 1987. Foucault. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Ryle, Gilbert. (1949) 1984. The Concept of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
 CHAPTER 5

The Linguistic Turn

This chapter takes its title from a landmark anthology, edited by Richard
Rorty, that contains seminal papers in the analytic tradition dating from
the 1930s to the 1960s. But most attention will be given to the develop-
ment of Structuralism on the continent, from Saussure’s linguistics already
mentioned to the work of Claude Levi-Strauss. It will also focus on certain
themes developed by Wittgenstein. Together, these make up the modern-
ist treatments of language that influenced postmodern theory most
directly. This chapter aims to highlight the importance of this question:
what was it about language, and about “signs” more generally, that under-
mined the modern sense of subjectivity when signification itself became
the object of academic study?1

5.1   A Tale of Two Wittgensteins

Thus the fate of all “philosophical problems” is this: some of them will dis-
appear by being shown to be mistakes and misunderstandings of our lan-
guage and the others will be found to be ordinary scientific questions in

1
 “No doubt that is why Western thought took so long to think the being of language: as
if it had a premonition of the danger that the naked experience of language poses for the self
evidence of I think” (Michel Foucault in “The Thought from Outside” in Foucault/Blanchot
1987, 13).

© The Author(s) 2019 101

T. de Zengotita, Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics,
Political Philosophy and Public Purpose,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90689-8_5
102   T. DE ZENGOTITA

disguise. These remarks, I think, determine the whole future of philosophy.

(Moritz Schlick “The Future of Philosophy” 1932)2

The modernist assumption of authority verges unintentionally on self-­

parody in this summary announcement of the world historical significance
of the linguistic turn in philosophy. But this section will pass over the
quintessentially modernist project of Schlick’s “Vienna Circle” as well as
those of Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970).
They are mentioned now, by way of introduction, simply to provide con-
text. In these projects, the creators of modern logic were working in self-­
conscious opposition to the historical philosophizing of the nineteenth
century and the influence of Hegel in particular. They turned instead to
the creation of works so abstract and self-contained that they could count
as perfect paradigms of modernism as it has been described here—were it
not for an even more perfect exemplar, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
composed by their student, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1950).
And “composed” is the word. The Tractatus ([1921] 1961, written
1913–1918) gave ultimate expression to logical positivism and its style of
mind. In substance, in structure, in tone, it is the archetypal modernist
work—an age grasped in thought, indeed. So “complete” was this cre-
ation that, at the age of 29, Wittgenstein felt able to announce in its
Preface that he had found, “on all essential points, the final solution of the
problems” of philosophy (1961, 4). And, being who he was, he gave up
its practice accordingly and retired to Austria to teach grammar school
mathematics and design a house for his sisters. An awed Bertrand Russell
found himself unable to do fundamental work in philosophy for the rest of
his long life. Wittgenstein had said, in essence, all that could be said. “In
essence,” because of course he hadn’t actually written down all the true
and all the false (but possibly true) propositions that would have consti-
tuted the final corpus of all the sciences, a complete “picture” of all the
facts and possible facts in the universe. The actual sciences were far from
complete and likely never would be. No, what Wittgenstein did was show
what the logical characteristics a symbolism that could do that would have

2
 Multiple ironies, and a lot of moral credit, attend a comparison of Bruno Latour’s “Why
Has Critique Run out of Steam?” (2004) with Schlick’s assertion that science, unlike phi-
losophy, is actually about something. In that essay, Latour appeals for a new realism and asks
“Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies?”
   THE LINGUISTIC TURN    103

to be.3 He had created, at a mind-boggling level of abstraction, the specs

for a perfect language.
But members of the Vienna Circle, pilgrims to the Master’s retreat in
Austria, found that a very great deal had—in the now famous words of the
final proposition of the Tractatus—been “passed over in silence” by that
perfect language. What could not be said was not, as they believed, mere
nonsense. It was simply not sense (as in not definable or referential), a very
different matter. It was beauty, goodness, freedom, being—everything, in
fact, that Wittgenstein himself cared most about. The idol of positive anal-
ysis turned out to be a mystic rendered mute by his own words.
But the Tractatus was grounded on an absence. None of the founda-
tional atomic propositions, whose forms atomic facts shared, had actually
been stated. There were no examples of such facts and propositions. If
there had been examples, they would have conducted us to the edge of a
minutely fine, indefinitely extended fissure dividing language from the
world. The logical forms of language could “picture” the forms of facts on
the other side of that absolute divide only because simple names (if we had
any) would point to simple things (if we had any). But we didn’t have any.
The perfect fissure was assumed—justified by its glorious consequences.
Wittgenstein could dismiss the absence of examples programmatically. It
was an empirical problem and his subject was logic. In his youth, a humili-
ating encounter with Frege had taught him to scorn all naturalistic reduc-
tions—especially “psychologism,” so there was no expectation that the
perfect language could actually be spoken either.
One day—goes an apocryphal story—a young Italian economist with
an interest in philosophy paid Wittgenstein a visit. He was a Marxist and
he didn’t like the idea that language and meaning were essentially inde-
pendent of the material conditions of life. Conversation grew heated.
“What about this,” the youth demanded, flicking his downturned hand
outward from beneath his chin in the characteristic Italian gesture of con-
tempt, “what about this? Is this language?” Wittgenstein stared at the
young man’s hand. The picture of the fissure between symbol and world
began to dissolve; the flicking hand was (part of) contempt. Sublime and
world-spanning logic (beyond all “empirical cloudiness,” the “hardest
thing there is,” the “purest crystal” (1953, 97)) billowed like gossamer
and began to melt into the living world.

3
 He also (this is less often remarked) showed how the world would have to be in order for
such a symbolism to be viable.
104   T. DE ZENGOTITA

So Wittgenstein went back to Cambridge and spent the rest of his life
doing for logic and language what Hume had once done for experience:
rendering it contingent. Now there could be no conclusion to philosophy’s
problems. They arose in specific contexts, consequences of specific confu-
sions. The most accomplished abstractionist of the modernist age was
returned to temporality, to history, to speech and performance—to the
“human form of life” in its myriad actuality. That is why the Philosophical
Investigations (1953) is full of little stories, often absurd and comical, for
they are meant to render how things might go on at the very margins of the
“language games” that human beings could possibly play—or maybe not.
The trajectory just described represents the passage from (Enlightenment)
modernity and modernism to what came to be called postmodernism. It
does so with unique cogency, since Wittgenstein made the journey on his
own, in serious dialogue only with his past self, the author of the Tractatus.
But the Philosophical Investigations conveys a sense of the human form of
life that parallels Heidegger’s “Being-in-the-world” remarkably, especially
with respect to the pivotal place of “equipment” (“tools” and “projects”)
in that form of life—with language itself very much a part of the tool kit
(compare Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari below). Even more remarkable
is the convergence with Derrida. In particular, Wittgenstein’s critique of
sense data and private language—that is, of the modern subject—is
remarkably similar, even in points of detail, to Derrida’s critique of pres-
ence in Husserl’s foundational notion of purely expressive interior mono-
logue (see Chap. 9).4
The point here is this: if Wittgenstein, on his own, navigated a parallel
path from modern to something like “postmodern” thought, then there
must be something—if not logically or causally “necessary,” at least deeply
revealing—about the way the collapse of abstract synchronic systems (gram-
mars, codes) into temporality leads to dissolution for modern subjectivity
and indeterminacy for its essential concepts. Something very real in language
and mind, in the human condition, is at work here. I find that heartening.

5.2   The Rise of the Sign

5.2.1  Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913)

The fact that this naïve image could ever have seemed illuminating is a
measure of the distance traveled since systematic reflection on language
got under way at the beginning of the last century. Most modern
4
 See N. Garver and S. Lee in Derrida & Wittgenstein (1994) for an overview.
   THE LINGUISTIC TURN    105

assumptions about subjectivity are implicit in this poignant little sketch,

for unexamined Cartesian/Kantian assumptions shaped Saussure’s lin-
guistics and made it as representative of modernism as analytic language
philosophy. And Saussure’s basic concepts, applied eventually to every-
thing that had meaning, would lead to dissolution for that form of subjec-
tivity as well (Fig. 5.1).
Here are the three essential elements of Saussure’s structural linguistics
that bear directly on the advent of post-structuralism in France:

1. Langue as a system of signs, a grammar—is a system of differences.

As in “bat” and “pat” are meaningful signs in English, thanks to the
difference-­constituting “distinctive features” voiced (vocal chords
vibrate) and voiceless (they do not vibrate) that alone distinguish
the phonemes “B” and “P.” The same difference distinguishes “gat”
and “cat.” “B,” “P,” “G,” and “C” do not in themselves, as sounds
on their own, have any linguistic “value.” The same holds, at the
level of meaning, for “Man” and “Woman” and, indeed, for seman-
tic distinctions in general.
2. Langue, grammar, is, in principle, complete. In practice, linguists
may not succeed in completely reproducing it in their theories, but
the grammar itself contains all, and only the elements and rules for
their combination that constitute a particular language. The gram-
mar is a psycho-neurological code that determines how speakers of a
language produce and interpret messages, insofar as the messages are
grammatical—that is, conform to the code. Other factors impinge
constantly on actual speech (fatigue, distraction, interruption, etc.),

Fig. 5.1  Communication through speech

106   T. DE ZENGOTITA

so actual speech (parole, performance) is very often not in perfect

conformity with grammar—hence the need for the abstraction in the
first place. But the code itself is complete. It has “structure”—hence,
Structuralism.
3. The relationship between the signifier (sound-images in the mind/
brain) and signifieds (concepts in the mind/brain) is arbitrary.
“Ham” could mean spinach—there is no internal or necessary con-
nection (like resemblance) between signifier and signified, as there
is, for example, in cases of onomatopoeia (“buzz,” “slosh”).

A view now from a distance of post-structuralism: performance, tempo-

rality, and history return, by various ruses, and Saussure’s differences are
activated, released from the synchronic system—the grammar that was the
product of abstraction. The arbitrary nature of the sign relation, once tem-
poralized, severs the signifier from its conceptual ground and allows it to
“play”—which means, among other things, to take on and discard signifieds
or to relate ambiguously to signifieds in always shifting contexts in the flow
of lived experience. The system, once complete, breaks open. Sheer associa-
tion rises up to take the place of stipulated links between signifiers and
signifieds. Meaning becomes event. “Ham” means a show-­off actor and,
actually, if you knew my insufferable cousin George, “Ham” could also mean
George—or “George” for that matter, depending on what occurs to you—
and George in turn (uh-oh, here he comes, with a sixth beer in hand and that
look on his face) can mean Ham—or “Ham” for that matter. And so on.
The upshot of all this play, as we will see, is that signifiers can signify
other signifiers and signifieds are also signifiers. Everything that can mean
anything (else) becomes a sign.

5.2.2  Claude Levi-Strauss (1908–2009)

For people in the social sciences who got caught up in the “cultural turn,”
who were refusing efforts to reduce humanity to material conditions and
social functions, but were unwilling (as yet) to abandon hope for universal
understanding, Structuralism’s formal approach to meaningful social
arrangements made an irresistible promise. The diagrams and formulas
that distinguished the ethnological work of Claude Levi-Strauss were a
particularly potent influence across many disciplines but especially in
anthropology, of course. To begin with, The Savage Mind (1966) was
redeemed several times over. On the one hand, the depth and scope of
primitive (scare quotes pending) thought was on dazzling display. Here
   THE LINGUISTIC TURN    107

were people confronting basic dimensions of human experience like life

and death in terms that, while not rational in the same way as physics,
nevertheless constituted a “Science of the Concrete” that was as empirical,
as comprehensive, as profound—and more beautiful—than explanations
produced by our sciences. These “signs” reinvested animals and plants and
implements and domestic arrangements with all the meaning modern
thought had banished to the realm of concepts. The result was a breath-
taking vista, human mentality as unconscious code—but code simultane-
ously “inscribed” on the very furniture of the world as well as in the mind/
brain that “structured” that world. Conscious individual subjects and
behaviors were irrelevant. If your concern as a linguist is grammar and you
are describing the rules governing, say, prepositional phrases in English,
you aren’t interested in how Peter or Paul use prepositional phrases and it
matters not a whit if they are aware of the grammatical rules they are fol-
lowing. Similarly, if you are Levi-Strauss and you are concerned with lions
and cows in some pastoral African culture—you understand that actual
lions and cows are also signs, elements of the code, and it is as signs that
the science of Structuralism addresses them.
It is hard to overstate the impact that this synthesis of the concrete and
the abstract had on so many intellectuals across the humanities and social
sciences. It gave hope to those seeking the universals that had always been
the holy grail of modernist inquiry while, at the same time, satisfying
residual Romantic longings for fusional experience. It also became possi-
ble to jettison Western condescension toward primitive thought once and
for all (the patronizing quality of this “primitivism” was not yet evident).5
At the same time, the critique of modern industrialized society found new
inspiration: how much we lost when we abandoned an unconsciously and
spontaneously structured world for a consciously administered one—no
wonder Levi-Strauss credited Rousseau for conceiving anthropology.
Finally, the long sought re-fusion of mind and world had been attained at
a level of generality that transcended the subject entirely. The Cartesian
claim was neutered. A potent brew it was.

5
 “We can understand, too, that natural species are chosen not because they are ‘good to
eat’ but because they are ‘good to think’” (Levi-Strauss, Totemism 1963, 89). This widely
quoted remark elevated La Pensee Sauvage above social science explanations that typically
showed how irrational tribal beliefs had latent adaptive functions and so made a kind of
“sense”—our kind of sense.
108   T. DE ZENGOTITA

What was it about the diagrams and formulas in Levi-Strauss’ works on

kinship and myth that cast such a powerful spell in their day?6 I was myself
a graduate student in anthropology at the time and I can report from first-­
hand experience that there was indeed something magical—in the techni-
cal sense—about them. One got caught up in deciphering (an apprenticeship
was served) and even more caught up in creating, not least because of the
almost sensual—though exquisitely refined—satisfactions involved, sensa-
tions of precision and Olympian perspective, rigorously attained. Take, for
example, this template (Fig. 5.2):
This shows the universal, biologically given elements of any human kin-
ship system—male (triangle), female (circle), mating, offspring, sibling.
Poised over this chart, one felt present at the great divide between nature
and culture, the “moment” of the sign’s emergence. Not that Levi-Strauss,
epitome of modernism, proposed an historical hypothesis as Freud and the

Fig. 5.2  Biological universals of human kinship

6
 It was not only Structuralism that deployed these tools, of course. It seemed the obvious
way to define disciplinary compartments and fundamental subject matter—a visual jargon,
emblems of expertise. And it was not just Levi-Strauss who relied upon the iconic kinship
charts in particular; all the schools in modernist social and cultural anthropology were deeply
invested in them and associated formalisms.
   THE LINGUISTIC TURN    109

nineteenth-century anthropologists had. This was a “conditions of

­possibility” analysis, a logical basis for generating the kinds of kinship sys-
tems known to anthropology. Those kinds were constituted by rules
imposed on the universal template by different cultures—rules like matri-
lineal descent or patrilateral cross-cousin marriage. “As different cultures”
rather than “by different cultures,” actually, for with the rules of a kinship
system the givens of biology became cultural, became signs. From “male
genitor” to “father” from “female sibling offspring” to “niece” and so on
in the case of the kinship system most familiar to me.
Out of millions of logical possibilities, less than a dozen basic kinds of
kinship system were discovered among thousands of historically unrelated
societies in the ethnographic archive. Anyone who mastered this formal
apparatus could contemplate that chart of biological givens and, in effect,
take in at a glance all known forms of human sociality at a level of abstrac-
tion analogous to Chomsky’s universal grammar. Expressions like “mas-
ter” and “take in at a glance all known forms” dramatize how central to
modernist (not just structuralist) theory were the sensations of power that
attended its practice. Postmodern critique would be fully aware of that.
The (logical) emergence of human kinship depended on the Great
Rule. The incest taboo. This, the primal “No,” was central to Freud’s
work as it would be for Lacan’s—but Levi-Strauss emphasized a positive
aspect. Prohibiting endogamy (marrying in) instituted exogamy (marry-
ing out). Ties between family groups—society—were the result. At the
foundation of the whole enterprise was what Levi-Strauss called the “atom
of kinship” (Fig. 5.3):
Instead of the nuclear family, it’s the nuclear family plus the sister’s
brother, the one who cannot have his sister and must look elsewhere. The
implication of this atom of kinship—thanks to Marcel Mauss’ principle of

Fig. 5.3  The atom of

human kinship
110   T. DE ZENGOTITA

reciprocity—was the basic marriage rule “sister exchange.”7 The

­implication of that, in turn, was the “simplest form” of human society, a
“moiety” of two clans each dependent on the other for the reproduction
of their own group over time.
Field workers found moieties in unilineal descent systems all over the
world. Thanks to the binary and reciprocal relations and customs character-
istic of these arrangements, moieties provided a wealth of opportunities for
the creation of diagrams and formulas that could be applied, at a certain level
of abstraction, to hundreds of historically unrelated societies all over the
planet. The impression of discovery—of the discovery of grammar-like rules
for social organization—was overwhelming, and all the more so when other,
more complex, social arrangements were also subjected to formalization.
Levi-Strauss’ figures and formulas, so meticulously set out, were little works
of art in their own right—and that aesthetic was not incidental to the impact
of Structuralism. It reflected a fabric of connections between the avant-garde
arts and radical social theory in the work of French intellectuals generally,
going back to Georges Bataille and his cohort (see Chaps. 8 and 9). It also
implied that the new “human science” of Structuralism might aspire to
unprecedented standards of rigor and yet, somehow, retain a sense of the
significance of human existence—indeed, of its value.
By methods at once figurative and suggestive of mathematics, Levi-­
Strauss generated a set of “systems of exchange” that were The Elementary
Structures of Kinship (1969). Andre Weil of the Bourbaki group of math-
ematicians contributed an appendix to the original 1949 edition in which
essentials of the analysis were codified algebraically. There was much talk
about realizing at last the possibility of “hard” human sciences, thanks to
the formal capacities of linguistics and the possibility of applying them to
sign systems in general. Those were heady times. Consider a sample from
Levi-Strauss’ The Raw and the Cooked (1964)—the title returns to the
central nature/culture opposition. It comes from a chapter titled “The
Opossum’s Contata”8 (Fig. 5.4):
Imagine a book—actually, there were four volumes of the Mythologique—
with dozens of such figures, presenting the myths of native peoples of the

7
 Modernist kinship theory in the work of Levi-Strauss was built around the idea of women,
as signs, being exchanged. That idiom—especially!—would not survive postmodern critique
in anthropology.
8
 The preceding chapter is called “Fugue of the Five Senses.” Every chapter of the book
makes reference to music. In an earlier analysis, music and myth had showed up as congruent
opposites in the structure of the human mind—the one a chorus of senseless sound, the
other a chorus of soundless sense.
   THE LINGUISTIC TURN    111

Fig. 5.4  Transformational relation between Bororo and Ge origin myths

Western hemisphere as formal, quasi-topological, “transformations” of

each other, expressions of some common code underlying them all. It
wasn’t only that these charts purported to show something like the DNA
of a group of cultures, the depth grammar of their sign systems—there
was, once again, an aesthetic, a Gnostic aura, which enhanced the effect
enormously. Fire/Water, Death/Resurrection, Burnt/Fresh—how ele-
mental, how profound. A spell was cast. For many, for a while—Levi-­
Strauss was the shaman of universal mind.9 To the skeptics—workaday
ethnographers and positivist theorists who were unmoved by auras and
Gnostic charts, who wanted to know “where” and “what” these structures
actually were—Levi-Strauss offered this stupendous, stupefying response:
9
 Contrary to recent accounts, Levi-Strauss’ turn from phenomenology and humanism to
semiology did not entail jettisoning universal foundations, as this chapter’s concluding quote
makes clear. The incest taboo, the “atom of kinship,” the principle of reciprocity, the meta-
phor/metonym relation, even the binary off/on functioning of neurons, all played that role
in his thought. See, for example, M. Greif’s The Age of the Crisis of Man (2015).
112   T. DE ZENGOTITA

it is in the last resort immaterial whether in this book the thought processes
of the South American Indians take shape through the medium of my
thought or, whether mine take place through the medium of theirs. What
matters is that the human mind, regardless of the identity of those who hap-
pen to be giving it expression, should display an increasingly intelligible
structure as a result of the doubly reflexive forward movement of two
thought processes acting one upon the other, either of which can in turn
provide the spark or tinder whose conjunction will shed light on both.
(1964, 13)

References
Foucault, Michel. 1987. The Thought from Outside. In Foucault/Blanchot.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Garver, Newton, and Seung-Chong Lee. 1994. Derrida & Wittgenstein.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Greif, Mark. 2015. The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America,
1933–1973. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Latour, Bruno. 2004. Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact
to Matters of Concern. Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 225–248.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1949) 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Trans.
James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer. Boston: Beacon Press.
———. 1963. Totemism. Trans. Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Press.
———. (1964) 1969. The Raw and the Cooked. In Introduction to the Science of
Mythology. New York: Harper and Row.
———. 1966. The Science of the Concrete. In The Savage Mind. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1921) 1961. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans.
D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
———. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M.  Anscombe. Oxford:
Blackwell.
 PART III

Masters of Suspicion

Part III represents something of a detour. In various ways and to varying

degrees, the three thinkers introduced in this chapter channeled certain
nineteenth-century attitudes and assumptions into the twentieth century
in enormously influential ways. Their ideas were of the first importance
when recognizably postmodern styles of thinking and writing were
emerging. Nietzsche’s thought, especially, was affirmed in multiple quar-
ters and his name and works still animate the conversation today. Freud
and Marx did not fare as well—though, where Lacan’s banner still flies,
the name of Freud is heard and, as we shall see, a certain Marx lives on in
various forms.

Paul Ricoeur’s felicitous coinage—see Freud and Philosophy (1970).

 CHAPTER 6

Marx, Freud, Nietzsche

6.1   Karl Marx (1818–1883)

The “New International” [an entity Derrida is positing] is an untimely link,
without status … without coordination, without party, without country,
without national community, without co-citizenship, without a common
belonging to a class. The name of New International is given here to what
calls to the friendship of an alliance without institution among those who …
continue to be inspired by at least one of the spirits of Marx or of Marxism.
(Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx 1994)

It seems unlikely that Marx or Lenin or Rosa Luxemburg would take

much comfort from this “idealist” placement of their legacy—but this was
the best Derrida could do under the circumstances. The truth, after 1989,
was too obvious to ignore: as a thinker, Marx belonged to the nineteenth
century, alongside Spencer and Comte. The most obvious reason for the
persistence of his influence was the success of revolutionary movements
acting in his name, particularly in the Soviet Union and China—but even-
tually, even they, in their different ways, lost all credibility. Of course it
was, or should have been, obvious from early on that these regimes were
abhorrent, an affront to the values that had animated modern progressive
movements since 1789. But such were the passions of engagement on the
left and the continuing depredations of global capital—and so manifold
the ways intellectuals can explain things (and explain them away)—that it

© The Author(s) 2019 115

T. de Zengotita, Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics,
Political Philosophy and Public Purpose,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90689-8_6
116   T. DE ZENGOTITA

took decades of maneuvering before newly dominant discourses, aided

and abetted by Nietzsche especially, finally managed to exorcise Marxism
in its Classical (or vulgar) form, along with other “master narratives.”
But the manifold of critical possibilities provided by the Marxist tradi-
tion also contributed to its staying power. To penetrate beneath everyday
routines and taken-for-granted institutions of life in bourgeois societies, to
dwell among the few who are not taken in, who see through the façade to
a hidden truth—that is a deep satisfaction, not easy for followers of this
Master of Suspicion to forgo, no matter how abortive actual efforts to real-
ize communism proved to be. So a certain Marxist thought, broadly mod-
eled on “critical theory” and the Frankfurt School, has survived in a critique
of “late capitalism” and “neo-liberalism” and it strives to accommodate
historical developments Marx could not have imagined. Outstanding
examples are to be found in the ongoing work of Frederick Jamison and
David Harvey, for example, as they labor to account for the impact of
global finance and new technologies in something like Marxist terms. But
I feel compelled to ask: without a dialectical telos, without a proletarian
base, without scientific socialism, without a vanguard party—doesn’t call-
ing this “Marxist” function more as a tribute than as the name of a viable
historical agency? If class-consciousness is true consciousness, and reli-
gious, ethnic, and other “identity” solidarities are false consciousness, and
we look at the politics of the world, look at “History” as the Classical
Marxists always insisted we should—don’t we have to ask: if all that consti-
tutes false consciousness, why has it been so persistent and so powerful?
Marxism’s lasting influence among Western intellectuals had an insidi-
ously complicated influence on the rise of French theory in particular.
“Insidiously complicated” because many creators of theory maintained
nominal loyalties to Marxism, prescribed by deep-seated social expecta-
tions, even as their spontaneous interests were leading them further and
further away from any recognizable form of it. Those developments
unfolded in a context in which the French Communist Party and the Soviet
regimes that controlled it grew more and more repugnant to the postwar
intellectual class for a whole host of reasons. As time went by, memories of
communist heroics during the Resistance could not compensate for reve-
lations of Stalinist atrocities, the invasion of Hungary, the Prague Spring.
The result was a situation in which intellectuals had to concede that offi-
cial Marxist institutions and nations were not, in fact, “really Marxist”—
that real Marxism had, for some reason, been derailed and it fell to them
to salvage and promote whatever real Marxism was or ought to be.
   MARX, FREUD, NIETZSCHE    117

That made for a situation rife with temptations. One could pursue
whatever course seemed most promising, provided only that the results
could be cast in terms that might pass muster as “Marxist” in whatever
sense of the word (as yet to be determined) was emerging. As Part IV will
show, one of the principal motivations for postmodern jargon was to jus-
tify and, at the same time, obscure the fact that Marx was actually being
jettisoned by overlapping generations of twentieth-century intellectuals
who didn’t want to admit they had simply been wrong; wrong about the
workings of history and wrong to excuse the criminality of certain regimes.
Some of the most difficult language in French theory gives an appearance
of solidarity with Marxism when radical moves in very different directions
were actually being made. And if the authors themselves were among
those who had to be fooled, it doesn’t take a Nietzsche to see how cleverly
crafted those rhetorical masks would have to be.

6.2   Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)

The Freud with whom Claude Levi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan would be
most engaged was the Freud who admitted the social, in the form of pro-
hibition, into the psyche—classically represented by the  society-creating
rule against incest. Totem and Taboo (1913) was the seminal text and, as it
happens, it precisely exemplifies the shift to depth psychology from evolu-
tionist history that was characteristic of modernist thought and, at the
same time, introduces the topic with which the so-called French Freud
would be most identified.
Freud remained a nineteenth-century thinker in many respects. He was
steeped in the speculative anthropology of James Frazer and E.B. Tyler,
but he also consulted the work of the first field workers, people like Lewis
Morgan and Lorimer Fison. Based on evidence gleaned from such sources,
Totem and Taboo posited a transitional scenario in the evolution of human
sociality that paralleled the Oedipal stage in individual (male) psychologi-
cal development. It would be hard to overestimate the influence of Freud’s
famous description of the tribal horde of sons, desiring their mothers and
sisters, killing and eating their father—and then imposing upon themselves
an incest taboo and a totemic substitute for the father, thus establishing a
moral imperative and a social order at a stroke. Freud offered this account
as a serious evolutionary hypothesis, but its impact would persist for
decades, long after it had lost historical credibility. It figured centrally not
only in the work of Levi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan but also in Deleuze and
118   T. DE ZENGOTITA

Guattari, for example, and in much feminist critique. And Freud himself
had shown the way out of his own residual evolutionism just insofar as the
actual practice of psychoanalysis, the “talking cure”—the scene of empiri-
cal confirmation—actually did depend on radical innovations in theories of
representation in general and language in particular. Freud himself did not
make the linguistic turn but he pointed prepared minds in that direction.
The key was this: Freud took for granted the psychoanalytic evidence of
unconscious wishes and forces revealed to him by patients committed to
close examination of their dreams and fantasies, symptomatic foibles and
slips of the tongue. And what that scrutiny revealed, with shocking regu-
larity, was the existence of incestuous and murderous Oedipal desires and
conflicts in the nuclear family—and the mechanisms of their repression
and sublimation over the course of a child’s development. Freud grounded
his evolutionist claim in Totem and Taboo on that “clinical” evidence.1 And
that was typical. Freud based all his sweeping cultural and historical specu-
lations (Civilization and its Discontents ([1930] 1961); Moses and
Monotheism ([1939] 1967)) on that immediate evidence. His use of
ancient references was founded on the conviction that universals of human
psychology revealed by psychoanalysis operated in human beings at all
times and places. It was not a question of an unfolding over time—the
deep psychic mechanisms he first described in The Interpretation of Dreams
([1899] 2010) were at work in the production of myths and fairy tales all
over the world, across the ages. The axis of origination was shifting.
What took place in the distant past, after all, could never be empirically
known; even archeology, Freud’s favorite hobby, was necessarily highly
speculative. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, dealt directly with observed
speech and behavior and with theoretical entities in the unconscious that
could account for those observations. The same essential situation as
Galileo and his heat particles but, alas, without the quantifiable precision
supplied by the “primary properties”—which is why, in hindsight, Freud’s
“science” looks more like hermeneutics than physics. But at the time, in
its reliance on empirical immediacy, Freud’s modernist creation felt like a
science in the making (compare I.A. Richards above) because the psychol-
ogy took priority—no matter how tempting the grand sweep of evolution-
ist speculation remained.
1
 “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” was Ernst Haeckel’s way of summing up the general
idea, which was influential throughout the nineteenth century and persisted in one form or
another into the twentieth century, especially in developmental psychology. See, for example,
the work of Jean Piaget.
   MARX, FREUD, NIETZSCHE    119

Freud’s relation to “self-splitting,” identified in Chap. 3 as characteris-

tic of modernist creators, needs little explication. From the point of view
of his influence, the split that counts was the theoretical one between the
unconscious (Id and Superego) and the Ego. But the self-analysis that
Freud undertook as he conceived that theory may be more revealing. It
was a process, a lived experience as significantly representative of the mod-
ernist moment as the emergence of the transcendental ego in Husserl’s
practice of phenomenology. But it was also a heroic effort to contain,
within the “frame” that was the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, the
brute and senseless nature God had left behind.
Finally, in anticipation of the upcoming account of postmodernism, the
roots of Freud’s extraordinary appeal to Marxists in crisis can be
enumerated:
–– Freud was a materialist. He built his account around various
“drives”—reminiscent of the forces Nietzsche would subsume under
“will to power,” but akin also to that diverse array of “forces” that
all the nineteenth-century thinkers, including Marx, had to contend
with (“forces of production,” etc.).
–– But Freud’s drives were more organized than Nietzsche’s. He
offered a virtual “economy” of them, and so accommodated a mode
of thought congenial to Marx’ progeny.
–– What is more, the drive-economies that determine the psyche were
developmental—unfolding, “historical” in that reassuring way (oral,
anal, phallic, genital stages, etc.).
–– Many of the Freudian mechanisms of psychic adjustment were dia-
lectical (reaction formation, sublimation, projection, etc.).
–– And Freud was a “master of suspicion.” Like Marx, he penetrated
beneath appearances and uncovered hidden causes—the very defini-
tion of achievement for modernist thinkers aspiring, consciously or
not, to the place of God.
–– And psychoanalysis had an application, it aimed at improvement, it
was praxis.
–– Perhaps most important: Freud found new terrain. He wasn’t com-
peting with Marx. One could submit to his influence without
betrayal. These two masters of suspicion could be allies.
–– Or perhaps this was most important: Freud could help explain why
history wasn’t cooperating with the original Marxist scheme. The
enduring power of false consciousness was easier to explain with the
unconscious in your tool kit.
120   T. DE ZENGOTITA

6.3   Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

that life can be justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon applies exactly to
himself, to his life, his thinking, and his writing … down to his self-­
mythologizing in his last moment, down to madness, this life was an artistic
production … a lyric, tragic spectacle and one of utmost fascination.
(Thomas Mann 1947)

Thomas Mann’s assessment of Nietzsche’s life would surely have met

with his subject’s approval—for it was precisely as an aesthetic gesture that
“self-overcoming” was conceived as the defining mission of his philoso-
phy. The first moment of truth for Nietzsche came with Richard Wagner’s
Bayreuth festival in 1876. Wagner, who had been something of an idol
and a mentor to him, was introducing the Ring Cycle over the course of
four days to an audience committed to that level of participation and
Nietzsche was hoping for a “total work of art,” reminiscent of the ritual/
dramas of the ancients. But he came away appalled at the boundless capac-
ity for trivialization and pretense on display at the event. With that event,
Nietzsche began to realize that the Romantic dream of a “modern mythi-
cal consciousness” was hollow and that realization allowed him to move
on (Safranski 2002, 141).
But before his break with Wagner, while still in thrall to Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche was essentially the same Romantic youth who had defied his stodgy
schoolmaster and defended Holderlin, his “favorite poet,” against sugges-
tions that he was “unhealthy” and “unGerman.” The refusional aspect of
Romanticism was especially intense for Nietzsche because of his congenital
sensitivity to music, a sensitivity that remained with him long after he had
turned away from his Romantic roots. It was the same with his experience
of weather—especially when violent: “How different the lightening, the
storm, the hail, free powers, without ethics! How happy, how powerful
they are, pure will, untarnished by intellect” (in Safranski 2002, 356).2
The significance of forces of all kinds for Hegel  and Marx, Comte and
Spencer was all the more urgently felt by the philosopher who would make it
official: the death of God left it up to man to create what he could out of the
potent given, the wilderness of will to power at every level of natural process.3
2
 Explains Safranski: “The first lecture already indicates that words bring about the defeat
of music. Logos defeats the pathos of tragedy. … What is language? An organ of conscious-
ness. Music, however, is being” (63).
3
 “Will to power” names all forces for Nietzsche, at biological and chemical levels, as well
as at the level of human history. It does not just mean seeking “power.” So, in a certain way,
the continuity essential to nineteenth-century accounts of natural and social processes
   MARX, FREUD, NIETZSCHE    121

Disciple of Dionysus though he was at heart, he conceded to Apollo

from the beginning a co-equal role in the creation of great art, great cul-
ture, not only in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music ([1872]
1967), but above all in his own attempts to shape himself, to give form to
the forces that coursed through him, to create in and for himself a style.
For a thinker determined, on the one hand, to debunk ideal entities of all
kinds, and committed therefore to materialism but disdainful at the same
time of its usual manifestations in atomism, mechanism, utilitarianism—
for such a thinker, form, style—the shape of things, the tempo of events—
had ontological significance (see especially John Richardson’s Nietzsche’s
System). If Nietzsche’s creed was to prove itself, if existence were to be
justified as an aesthetic phenomenon, where else could he turn?
From the point of view of this narrative, the fact that the young
Nietzsche still hoped for a transformation of German society, mired
though it was in bourgeois enterprises, marks him as a transitional figure.
It would take years for him to fully absorb the implications of the disap-
pointment at Bayreuth, but he would eventually realize that Wagner and
his music revealed the truth of the matter. The blowsy sonorities, the
crashing chords, the moral platitudes dressed up as mythic origins—how
the fashionable ladies swooned in that atmosphere of pseudo-profundity.
Wagner turned out to be the ultimate expression of the decadence of
German culture, not an authentic alternative. And he, Nietzsche, had
been implicated. It had to be faced; self-overcoming demanded it. “I am
as much a child of this age as Wagner; I mean a decadent,” he would write
in The Case of Wagner in ([1872] 1967), “the difference is that I grasped
the fact and resisted it.” At about the same time, looking back on The
Birth of Tragedy, with its tidy reconciliation of primal force and primal
form, he thought it “smelled offensively Hegelian” (Deleuze 1983,
10–11). Nietzsche had been duped.
But never again. Never again would he concern himself with remaking
the world as he found it. He turned instead to his work—to a revaluation
of all values, to the Critique Kant had only pretended to make, clinging as
he had to assumptions of what constituted knowledge (Newtonian physics
in a context supplied by a priori categories) and morality (the golden rule),
searching only for a rational “foundation” for beliefs he never really

remained for Nietzsche, but all sense of direction was gone. This was very much the Nietzsche
Deleuze would introduce to his Parisian audience in 1962—a turning point for their
thinking.
122   T. DE ZENGOTITA

questioned. Nietzsche took up the task of that questioning. In doing so, he

stepped into a modernist frame of mind, characterized above all by disdain
for traditional historical trajectories and bold enough in self-assertion to
create alternatives from scratch. Nietzsche articulated themes of uncon-
tainable dispersal that would shape postmodernism in essential ways. He
exposed the self and all its concepts as generalizations imposed on an irre-
ducibly particular and ever-changing reality in the service of survival and
convenience. But at the performative level of authorship, in his rhetoric of
mastery, his determination to account for it all is impossible to miss.
That is how Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals should be situated for the
purposes of this account. Like Heidegger and Derrida after him, he was as
focused on the grand narrative of Western “onto-theology”4 as Hegel had
been. But his unmasking of metaphysics as a will-to-power strategy serv-
ing the interests of the cunning and the weak was as multifarious as it was
contingent. Priests discovered one tactic; socialists found another; nag-
ging women were especially effective at infecting the strong with guilt.
There was no directional ascent to the story as Nietzsche told it, no point
to it as a whole—that was, above all, the implication of the term geneal-
ogy. If there was progress, it was the “progress” of a disease—decomposi-
tion, decadence. History was unraveling. Forces no conceptualization
could contain were escaping the telos. The hammer of Nietzsche’s philoso-
phy descended on the evolutionism of Hegel, Comte, and Spencer. He
fully grasped and put to work the most profoundly unsettling teaching of
Darwin: not (as appalled reactionaries believed) “we are descended from
monkeys,” but “we are a meaningless accident.”
The emphasis on force and contingency meant that Nietzsche would be
much more accommodating a source for postmodern thinkers than Marx.
Ever since Adorno abandoned the proletariat and turned instead to mod-
ern art in search of history’s redeemer, leftist intellectuals have grown
accustomed to unlikely forms of Marxism that enabled them to soldier on.
But, as already noted, historical events themselves made the inherent
implausibility of it all more and more difficult to ignore. All that was
required with Nietzsche, on the contrary, was to take him at his word and
you could derive almost any version of opposition to the status quo you

4
 Although Kant seems to have coined the term, Heidegger’s usage and Derrida’s appro-
priation of it are most relevant. A conflation of religious and philosophical notions is implied.
That is what Nietzsche intended when he arraigned Platonism and the Judeo-Christian tradi-
tion on the same charge—disguising decadence as idealism.
   MARX, FREUD, NIETZSCHE    123

wanted from his arsenal.5 For a generation of academics driven by the

desire to say something new and advance a radical political cause, Nietzsche
provided this handy platform:

The only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche’s is precisely to use it, to
deform it, to make it groan and protest. And if commentators then say that
I am being faithful or unfaithful to Nietzsche, that is of absolutely no inter-
est. (Foucault, in Schrift 1995, 33)

Nietzsche himself seemed to invite such treatment, it is true—and

Foucault was, of course, the perfect spokesman.6 There was ample room
to overlook his manifest contempt for women, for ordinary folk, for social-
ism, for anarchism, for Buddhism, Africa, India, China, and, indeed, just
about everyone and everything except himself, a few world-historical pre-
decessors, and some oft-addressed band of superior beings yet to be iden-
tified. And once one got past all that and conferred self-making Ubermensch
potential on academic practitioners of identity politics in the conference
rooms at hotels in university towns all over the world—after that, the pay-
off was huge.
It was summed up nicely in Deleuze and Guattari’s “magic formula” (as
opposed to a positive claim or a dialectical positing): “Pluralism = Monism.”
By that they meant that, in accordance with Spinoza’s ontology, Nietzsche’s
polymorphous “will to power” (or “desire”) could take on an unlimited
number of never-to-be-reified forms; texts, jargons, customs could be dis-
tributed along indefinitely various and intersecting trajectories of conten-
tion in indefinitely various contexts and still be “will to power” without
reduction to some bogus sameness. That became the Foucauldian vision of
history and Foucault ascended to an unmatched level of influence in the
anglophone academy thanks in large part to the way it mirrored situations
in which politically committed and personally ambitious academics

5
 Speaking in the name of “youth,” Nietzsche had called for “redemption from the histori-
cal sickness” of his age and urged those still healthy enough to “make use of the past in the
service of life.” This was “effective history” and the lesson was: take what you need from the
past; don’t follow history, create it. On the Utility and Liability of History for Life (1874).
6
 Repelling his followers, Zarathustra demanded “Why then should you not pluck at my
laurels?” More specifically, Nietzsche’s “Effective History” (using the past for life-affirming
present purposes) in Untimely Meditations ([1874] 1997) inspired Foucault as well
(“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice 1980). Compare
Deleuze on “buggering” his favorite philosophers.
124   T. DE ZENGOTITA

pursued their careers, especially in the USA in the last decades of the twen-
tieth century.7 One could read about the power/knowledge dynamics in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century institutions as Foucault described
them and immediately apply the notion to contemporary university battles
over resources, tenure, and curriculum. And likewise for all sorts of specific
institutional circumstances—power/knowledge relations shaped contem-
porary families, prisons, workplaces, hospitals as they were understood by
theory-inspired activists “thinking globally and acting locally” in the 1970s
and beyond.
So politics went on. It was in this context also that the terms “discourse”
and “discursive practices” took up their now familiar mission: to weave
texts and talk into the same fabric as offices and deeds. And this could all
still be very radical, in some sense of the term—Queer Theory and Cyborg
Manifestos were hardly mainstream. At the same time, by virtue of its
diverse and situational orientation, it was generously conceived—a practical
advantage. Women who wanted to run global corporations could find
something for themselves in identity discourses as readily as organizers of
women who labored in the sweatshops sustaining those corporations.8
Nietzsche had imposed some condition on his heirs, however—and the
one that proved most fortuitous was his insistence that the Cartesian ego
was an artifact of a grammar that insisted on a “subject” for what was actu-
ally a multifarious flowing. He thus planted the seed that would become
Heidegger’s “fallen into inauthentic everydayness,” first of all, and then
Althusser’s “interpellation” and Lacan’s “symbolic” and all their kindred
notions. As a measure of the importance of this theme for the account of
postmodern theory to be given in Part IV, consider this from Alan Schrift’s
Nietzsche’s French Legacy: he is explaining Deleuze and Guattari’s use of
the notion “desiring machines” in their account of the play of will to
power in the socius. “Deleuze’s goal,” he says, “is to place desire into a
functionalist vocabulary, a machinic index, so as to avoid the personifiction
or subjectivation of desire in a substantive will, ego, unconscious, or self”
(Shrift 1995, 68, 69).

7
 This helps explain the persistence of theory in the American academy, long after its
moment had passed in France where educational structure and practice is centrally controlled
(See Schrift 2006; Mathy 2000; Kauppi 1996).
8
 I once overheard a young man running a workshop on gender issues in a secondary
school recommending a particular “advocacy camp” to a gay student who approached him
after his presentation. I asked “advocacy of what” and he said “anything.” The camp was
“about skills and methods,” regardless of content.
   MARX, FREUD, NIETZSCHE    125

And that is spot-on, no doubt. But the phrasing is so telling. It reads as

if everyday talk about will and desire as subsisting in a person were prohib-
ited by fiat. Explicit critiques of the modern subject have been plentiful as
well, of course, but so central to the postmodern program had this aim
become that, by the time Schrift offered his account, what I will call
“a ban on subject talk” had become something like the rule against touch-
ing the ball with your hands in soccer, a requirement for anyone wanting
to play the language game of theory. Were we supposed to marvel at how
ingeniously Deleuze and Guattari discuss desire without ever mentioning
a person? Or were we supposed to discover something about desire that
subject talk conceals? And the answer is …
Both/and …
As we shall see, versions of this ambiguity (mere virtuosity of expression
or insight into the impossible?) abound across the spectrum of postmod-
ern works. And both/and is typically the resolution that doesn’t quite
resolve. Something always has to escape—as tribute to the truly other,
sustaining in this way what Deleuze called the “Philosophy of and, and,
and ….”
In any case, from the point of view of this narrative, the takeaway here
is this: Nietzsche’s critique of the modern subject and its deceptively clear
concepts would be embraced by his postmodern heirs partly because it
preserved the Marxist attack on bourgeois society—at its subjective core, as
it were. An understanding was reached: we give up on dialectical material-
ism, we give up on the proletariat, we give up on the telos of history—we
even give up on communism but, thanks to Nietzsche’s aesthetic
­biologism, we are still hard-nosed materialists with our dear enemy before
us: the unified and alienated bourgeois mind imposing its concepts and
projects on the world and exploiting those it has dispossessed and margin-
alized along the way. We can still undermine this figure of modernity phil-
osophically and oppose it politically. That much of Marx was actually saved
by Nietzsche.9

9
 Nietzsche has always appealed to radicals on the right, of course—the very idea of a
Nietzsche for the left once seemed bizarre. One need only recall the many fascist intellectuals
and artists in the 1920s and 1930s who were every bit as contemptuous of the bourgeoisie
as demonstrators in the streets of Paris in the late 1960s. Hence, the importance of Foucault’s
permission slip.
126   T. DE ZENGOTITA

References
Deleuze, Gilles. (1962) 1983. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New  York:
Routledge.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. In Language, Counter-­
Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Trans. Donald F. Buchard, and
Sherry Simon, 139–164. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Freud, Sigmund. (1899) 2010. The Interpretation of Dreams. New  York: Basic
Books.
———. (1913) 1998. Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of
Savages and Neurotics. Mineola: Dover Thrift Editions.
———. (1930) 1961. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey.
New York: W.W. Norton.
———. (1939) 1967. Moses and Monotheism. New York: Vintage Books.
Kauppi, Niilo. 1996. French Intellectual Nobility: Institutional and Symbolic
Transformations in the Post-Sartrian Era. Albany: State University of New York
Press.
Mathy, Jean-Philippe. 2000. French Resistance: The French-American Culture
Wars. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. (1872) 1967. The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of
Wagner. New York: Knopf, Doubleday Publishing Group.
———. (1874) 1997. On the Utility and Liability of History for Life. In Untimely
Meditations, ed. D.  Breazeale and Trans. R.J.  Hollingdale. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Safranski, Rüdiger. 2002. Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. New  York:
W.W. Norton & Company.
Schrift, Alan. 1995. Nietzsche’s French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism.
New York: Routledge.
———. 2006. Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers.
Malden: Blackwell.
 CHAPTER 7

Critical Theory

7.1   Theodore Adorno (1903–1969)

To think about twelve tone technique at the same time as remembering that
childhood experience of Madame Butterfly on the gramophone—that is the
task facing every serious attempt to understand music today. (Adorno in
Muller-Doohm 2005, 511)

How did Adorno’s initially unqualified praise for Arnold Schoenberg’s

musical innovations eventually turn into something like the damning
indictment of modern progress leveled by The Dialectic of Enlightenment
([1944] 2002), which Jurgen Habermas called the “blackest book of criti-
cal theory.” How did that music—of which Adorno had once remarked
“criticism is inappropriate in the case of Schoenberg’s recent works; they
set the standard of truth”—come to be condemned as if it were an expres-
sion of Enlightenment rationality? And finally, more generally, how did this
privileged youth—immersed in “an existence you just had to love, if you
were not dying with jealousy of this beautiful protected life”—come to
hold so bleak a view of humanity’s prospects that many readers of his work
found it unbearable and turned away? (Leo Lowenthal in Muller-Doohm
2005, 30). Another childhood memory provides a clue:

In early childhood I saw the first snow-shovellers in thin shabby clothes.

Asking about them, I was told they were men without work who were given

© The Author(s) 2019 127

T. de Zengotita, Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics,
Political Philosophy and Public Purpose,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90689-8_7
128   T. DE ZENGOTITA

this job so that they could earn their bread. Then they get what they deserve,
having to shovel snow, I cried out in rage, bursting uncontrollably into
tears. (Adorno Minima Moralia [1951] 2006, 122)

Lowenthal had not been taken in by some façade. Adorno was haunted
all his life by the (undeserved) happiness he knew as boy; he referred to it
constantly, almost automatically, whenever he wanted to talk about feel-
ings in ways that might otherwise be mistaken for Romantic indulgence.
Adorno persisted in his pessimism (he idolized Beckett for purity of
vision), but he still insisted that an “anticipatory glimpse” of possible uto-
pias was discernible in the meanest products of the culture industry. And
childhood, recollected, was the prototype for him.1
Notice this about the snow shovelers incident: however pampered he
may have been, the precocious “Teddie” Adorno—who would head a
Frankfurt School that did more to keep Marxism viable in the twentieth-­
century academy than any other body—had not broken into tears out of
pity, at least not as he recalled it looking back. A closer reading (Minima
Moralia’s aphorisms are not explained) provokes the question: was little
Teddie insisting that their plight must be deserved in an effort to subdue
bourgeois sentimentality, even at that age? Or was it because it was dawn-
ing on him that he would not be able accept a society that tolerated the
contrast between their fate and his own (both equally undeserved)? Such
sentiments would, in any case, become a lifelong target of Adorno’s con-
siderable capacity for contempt, starting with his withering attacks on
“comfort music” in concert reviews he was publishing in major venues
while still in his teens. Yet it was not until the mid-1920s that Adorno
began to look to “historical materialism” in a systematic way for specific
intellectual inspiration.
Marxist ideas had been in the air all along, to be sure, and everyone
who was anyone understood that “commodities” were the corruption of
culture. Adorno was against all things bourgeois as a partisan of revolution
in the arts, first of all, in the same way most of the modernists were, as we
have seen—whatever their politics, which were as likely to be right as left.
After WWI, especially, it was almost inevitable that young intellectuals
would blame that catastrophe of modernity on the ascendant bourgeoisie

1
 “in the prohibition of the images of hope, hope has its last dwelling place … and in the
strength to name the forgotten that is concealed in the stuff of experience” (Adorno, in
Muller-Doohm 2005: 395).
   CRITICAL THEORY    129

and all its works—in spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that so many
of them were heirs to that ascendancy. So when the time came for Adorno,
under the influence of Lukacs and Horkheimer, to take up a political posi-
tion, he would frame his commitment this way: “What had to be done to
make the spark leap from the realm of art to that of society?” (Muller-­
Doohm 2005, 81).
That itinerary tells us a lot about how Adorno, and many others, could
maintain themselves as “Marxists” without joining Communist parties,
without much faith in the proletariat or even in “history” in the nineteenth-­
century sense. And, of course, it was precisely those prescient reservations
that helped preserve the credibility of the Frankfurt School as Stalin rose
to power and the Soviet Union asserted imperial prerogatives in Eastern
Europe. Still, reading descriptions of Adorno’s comfortable living arrange-
ments in Los Angeles during WWII—the jolly parties with Chaplin and
Garbo and all that—it is not hard to understand the reactions of more
orthodox believers:

A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno,

have taken up residence in the Grand Hotel Abyss which I described in con-
nection with my critique of Schopenhauer as “a beautiful hotel, equipped
with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss of nothingness, of absurdity.”
And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic
entertainments can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts
offered. (Lukacs 1971, 22)

But one doesn’t have to be an orthodox Marxist, or indeed a materialist

of any kind, to find his faith in the political potential of radical innovation
in the arts implausible on the face of it. Adorno was far from being the
only modernist intellectual to harbor such hopes, of course, but his single-­
minded focus on that possibility, coupled with his uncompromising aes-
thetic, makes him a particularly extreme example. For he was not—like,
say, Bertolt Brecht or Diego Rivera—tailoring his artistic commitments so
as to reach the masses. Adorno was a purist. The more abstract the work,
the more difficult the access to conventional tastes—the more revolution-
ary potential Adorno found in it. He managed to maintain this arcane
modernist aesthetic throughout his life and, at the same time, to insist
upon its political potential in the teeth of all the evidence of the ascen-
dency of mass culture that he himself critiqued in terms that made that
ascendency seem suffocatingly inescapable.
130   T. DE ZENGOTITA

The key to understanding “critical theory” as Horkheimer and Adorno

practiced it in the The Dialectic of Enlightenment ([1944] 2002) is to
highlight something they took for granted—namely, the aim of that cri-
tique, the capitalist world of objects defined and administered by the pro-
tagonist of our story, the bourgeois/Cartesian-Kantian subject.
Descriptions of this world were always couched in terms of a neo-Hegelian
“negative dialectics,” on the one hand, and a neo-Marxian “commodity
fetishism,” on the other hand—but the ultimate target is visible behind
the social and economic determinations. For what distinguished the
Frankfurt School from more orthodox Communist theory and accounts
for its appeal to radicals operating in an increasingly mediated world down
to the present day was the move toward ideology critique—toward cul-
ture, high and low, toward mentality and the subject.
Most typically, Horkheimer and Adorno framed their enterprise as a bat-
tle on two fronts, in a tone that managed somehow to combine an almost
desperate urgency with fatalistic resignation. For it was evident with every
turn of history’s wheel that the forces of irrational rationality were gaining
ground in every department of life.2 On the first front, the most obviously
philosophical front—the enemy was named “idealism” and it did indeed
include the whole range of that term’s application (following Nietzsche?)
from Platonic forms and Christian souls to Romantic passions and the bour-
geois ideals of the politically naïve—or hypocritical. But, as Adorno’s early
obsession with Husserl and his ongoing and bitterly hostile engagement
with Heidegger made evident, “idealism” in all its forms depended in the
last analysis on the one who has ideas—and in the modern context that
meant the Cartesian cogito and the Kantian subject in their most recent
and most seductive manifestations, namely, Husserl’s Transcendental Ego
and Heidegger’s Dasein. “Most seductive” because the language of phe-
nomenology offered an “aura of materiality” that seemed to give historical
substance to its Jargon of Authenticity (1964). In that way, it appealed to
people who had simply seen too much to believe in conventional forms of
idealism anymore but who were still drawn to the flattery implicit in a
philosophy that discovers—guess who?—at the center of the universe after
all. If individuals were to actually, historically, realize their potential for free-
dom, they would have to escape this velvet prison of reified subjectivity.
2
 Both men were partial to the same image of their work—a note in a bottle addressed to
a possible future on the other side of the Dark Age in which they lived. Compare the last
chapter of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue.
   CRITICAL THEORY    131

On the second front, and on the other hand, the enemy was named
“positivism”—or materialism, utilitarianism, scientism. The threat from
that quarter was not so much philosophical as it was economic and social—
above all, technological in the broadest sense. This was Western reason
reduced to an instrument of human enterprises, a generator of formulas
and algorithms that might be tolerable if confined to a chemistry labora-
tory but had long since burst its bounds and assumed the name of Reason
entire. The bureaucracy and the factory were the inevitable consequence.3
Of course, positivism/materialism appeared to be the enemy of idealism—
the whole history of philosophy looked like a series of pitched battles
between these antagonists. But critical theory was not taken in by this ideo-
logical sham. In actual fact, idealism and materialism had been in cahoots
all along.4 While debating philosophers distracted those (few) who were
paying attention, the forces of bourgeois society stepped in to divvy up the
cultural goodies. Natural and social reality were assigned to instrumental
reason, while morals, religion, art, and entertainment—the meaning of life,
if you will—went to the mind, the soul, feelings, the realm of the subjec-
tive, the unquantifiable. There, in a by-definition irrational space apart
from the real world, people were granted their illusory freedoms.
“Traditional theory,” positivist theory, was handmaiden to this arrange-
ment. We have seen how claims to value-free objectivity in the newly
minted social and psychological sciences justified descriptions and explana-
tions of human beings of the kind an entomologist might propose for a
comparative treatment of ant species (see Chap. 3, above)? And that was
trumpeted as a virtue! “Critical theory” would be the very opposite of that.
This refusal of the fact/value distinction in the name of a historical reality
that included the theorist would have been enough all by itself to qualify
critical theory for a place at the table when the postmodern moment came.
Now we are in a position to understand what many find most baffling in
Adorno’s view of art, namely, his counter-intuitive insistence that “aesthetic
experience is not a genuine experience until it becomes philosophy”—that
is, until it becomes rational, discursive. This accounts for Adorno’s turn

3
 The parallels between this analysis and Foucault’s are eerily rich, but Foucault swears he
was unacquainted with the Frankfurt School (Macey 1995, 326). More evidence of a late-
breaking compressed climax for modernism in France, one that melted almost immediately
from structuralist abstraction back into history—but, with Sartre dislodged, a Nietzschean
history.
4
 Compare Derrida on the idealism at the heart of pure materialism in his interview about
Marxism with his former colleagues at Tel Quel (in Positions, (1972) 1981, 39–91).
132   T. DE ZENGOTITA

away from beauty to “truth-content” in works of art (compare Richards

above, Chap. 3). This also explains his compulsive, almost phobic, rejection
of all “pre-ordained” ideas, concepts, theories—no matter what their pedi-
gree—just insofar as their reflexive application threatened to obscure what
the art object itself had to “say.” For, above all, Adorno was out to protect
the claims of these historical objects to truth, whether it be kitsch or high art.
He was determined to bring art (and religion and emotion) back into the
orbit of reason from whence it had been banished when rationality was
reduced to aping instrumental mathesis. Reason could only recover itself in
all its aspects if it committed to free and open engagement with domains of
experience that had been relegated to the irrational subjective. And the same
went for objects in the natural and social world; they too had to be liberated
from the trance of reification—from quantification by science and the mar-
ket, from homogenizing conceptualization by social consensus. Only then
could meanings lodged within particulars be released, thanks to the minis-
trations of Adorno’s “negative dialectics,” a procedure of negation that
refused subsumption by the bogus unities of Hegelian synthesis—or any
other totalizing gesture. “The Whole is the False,” Adorno famously pro-
claimed, and that is what he meant.
“Truth content,” Adorno insisted, was really “in” particular objects—
that is, the work or the natural entity appropriated by culture. Somehow, it
was there, waiting to be disclosed by a conceptuality that would not domi-
nate the object, after the manner of Kantian categories, but would discover
meaning in the object in relation to changing historical context.5 Only in
this way, could conceptual meaning be released from the subjective and
returned to the historical and material world where it belonged. Only then
would the “emphatic experience” of grasping truth in its p ­ articular objec-
tivity be possible (see Bernstein (2006) for discussion of this theme).
But that world was not Marx’ anymore; it was Nietzsche’s and Freud’s.
It was “history” shaped by unconscious forces; it was decadent and frag-
mented, unjust, and likely doomed. But there was nowhere else to go. Not
if you had the courage to ask, as Adorno repeatedly did in his lectures, how
it was possible for “a rightly lived life to be lived within the wrong one.”

5
 This account obviously comes uncomfortably close to Husserl’s intentionality endowing
objects with conceptual identity—as Adorno certainly realized. Hence, the relentless insis-
tence on historical context as the necessary partner in the disclosure of truth content. Hence,
the changing truth content of art works over time. Compare Walter Benjamin on
translation.
   CRITICAL THEORY    133

Adorno’s mood (in the Heideggarian sense) in a nutshell. Some have

found it intolerable, especially if inspiring political action is high on the agenda
(see Cultural Studies discussion in Chap. 10). Some find it heroic—Richard
Rorty springs to mind—and all the more so when combined with action.
It would be dishonest to avoid the most troubling question to be asked
of this noble enterprise called critical theory. In the absence of a phenom-
enological basis for the constitution of objects, in what sense exactly is the
“truth content” of an object “in” it? Making the determination dependent
on the relation of the object to historical context only dilutes the prob-
lem—unless what is meant is that interpretation is entirely a matter of asso-
ciation in a context, that the object brings nothing to the moment of
interpretation but its physical characteristics, that whatever there is of past
or original meaning in those physical characteristics is lodged in, or other-
wise accessible to, the mind of a knowledgeable present interpreter? Of
course, Adorno would never endorse such a Cartesian account and one is
left to wonder how he would respond to this question. But left also to
consider, and gratefully, the many examples found in Adorno’s work.
Consider just two, which involve musical arrangements so specific that the
“relation” with the social context is as sharply drawn as one could ask:

A leitmotif or idée fixe in Wagner’s operas is said to promote repetition over

development. Does that musical gesture itself mean that it was somehow—
at any psychic or social level, intended or not—denying the possibility of
social change? By contrast, in Adorno’s early assessments of Schoenberg, he
found in the structure of his compositions an “image of a liberated music”
that evoked a utopian “association of free men” because in the twelve tone
row “each note had an equally significant yet unique role in the musical
totality.” By further contrast, reaching back before Wagner to the “hierar-
chies” of classical music, with its dominant and minor keys: in what sense do
those musical hierarchies reflect or express the hierarchies of the society in
which the music was composed? (Buck-Morss 1979, 130)

In each of these cases, the truth content of the artwork was uncovered
in its relation to a social context. Both terms were essential. Dialectical
conceptuality “negated” the reified, unquestioned object (the music
taken-for-granted) and, released now from habituality, allowed thinking to
be “determined” by actual material elements of the music or the context
(the relations between notes, the position of a king on a throne). A con-
nection was made, the truth content of the art object in its context
134   T. DE ZENGOTITA

revealed. The principle of mimesis—the principle of all art going back to

tribal shamans dancing in the guise of hunted animals in man’s earliest
(and never-ending) attempts to dominate nature—ultimately guaranteed
the analogies that negative dialectics brought to light. Of course, the days
of the shaman were long gone and art no longer expressed the artist’s
(shaman’s) intentions or even his experiences—on this point, also, Adorno
was at one with bourgeois “new criticism.” So there can be no intentional
mimesis at work to guarantee the analogy. For Adorno art was “objective
expression” and the role of the artist was simply to “release the expres-
sion” (Adorno 2004, 137; compare T.S. Eliot, Chap. 3 above). Somehow,
art objects reflect context in this way, that’s what they do.
Expressive objectivity in relation to historical context also accounts for
the way in which the truth content of an artwork could change over
time—and that explains why Adorno’s assessment of Schoenberg shifted
the way it did. What had once been a rigorously abstract experiment
designed to transform the very idea of “music” could—and did, with
time—congeal into a formulaic straightjacket.

Adorno believed that the philosophy of modern music was basically nothing
but “the attempt … to explicate the dialectics of the particular and the gen-
eral in concrete terms.” … This applied with particular force to his central
thesis that the twelve-tone method begins with a rational technique which
then transformed into an irrational system that stifles the constructive
impulses of the composer. (Muller-Doohm 2005, 275)

That placement of the art object—severance from subjectivity without

sacrificing expressivity—constituted for Adorno a kind of ontological dis-
placement to a realm where objects and situations reflected each other,
expressed each other, directly—with human agency reduced to something
like a medium of communication between objects and situations.6 He
needed something like that, in any case, in order to secure his negative
dialectics as a process with a claim to genuine materiality and objectivity.
He couldn’t allow the “truth content” disclosed in the relation between
the art objects and historical contexts to be simply an analogy some his-
torical interpreter happens to notice. In the last analysis, if critical theory

6
 Once again, phenomenology’s proximity looms. People who begin to study it in a serious
way often describe an experience of relinquishing agency to things and situations. See, for
example, Merleau-Ponty’s famous account of our three dimensional perception as dependent
on the “eyes” (perspectives) of objects in the environment (in Kelly 2004).
   CRITICAL THEORY    135

is to distinguish itself from phenomenology in the name of something like

“real history” and “real politics” it has to posit “a materiality to the world
that exceeds human language and understanding” in order to “displace
the humanist mythology that regards human activity as the sole generator
of the world” (Aronowitz 2015, 47; see also Thompson 2015, 1–10).
But the fact of the matter is that Adorno’s procedure seemed always to
lead to unmasking some fairly standard ideological function.7 Were the
specific analogies, like the one between musical and political hierarchies,
discoveries of real and material relations between art works and social con-
text or was the process more like noticing the shapes of animals in a stack
of cumulus clouds? An extended study of actual examples is needed here,
because it seems likely that judgments of plausibility will have to be made
on a case-by-case basis. Some instances will be more convincing than oth-
ers. But this line of questioning is fundamental for a just evaluation of
critical theory as an account-that-would-be-true of how history and cul-
ture actually work—as opposed to a powerful provocation for political
opposition to oppressive political systems of all kinds, in which capacity it
has proved its worth many times over.

utopia is to be found essentially in the determinate negation … of what is,

since, by demonstrating that what is takes concrete form as something false,
it always at the same time points to what should exist. (Adorno in Muller-­
Doohm 2005, 421)

References
Adorno, Theodor W. (1951) 2006. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged
Life. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. New York: Verso.
———. (1964) 2003. The Jargon of Authenticity. London: Routledge.
———. 2004. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. New  York:
Continuum.
Aronowitz, Stanley. 2015. Against Orthodoxy: Social Theory and Its Discontents.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

7
 The reader can tell when a work is to be found guilty of commodity fetishism long before
the gavel comes down. For the partisan, of course, that frequency simply reflects the ubiqui-
tous influence of the commodity function. But it is troubling how repetitive (algorithmic?)
the gesture can seem—especially given Adorno’s heartfelt opposition to any theory that
substitutes itself for thought.
136   T. DE ZENGOTITA

Bernstein, J.M. 2006. Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning
of Painting. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Buck-Morss, Susan. 1979. The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno,
Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute. New York: The Free Press.
Derrida, Jacques. (1972) 1981. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W.  Adorno. (1944) 2002. Dialectic of
Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Lukács, Georg. 1971. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the
Forms of Epic Literature. London: Merlin Press.
Macey, David. 1995. The Lives of Michel Foucault. New York: Vintage.
Muller-Doohm, Stefan. 2005. Adorno: A Biography. Trans. R.  Livingstone.
Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Thompson, Michael. 2015. Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive
Politics: The Betrayal of Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
 PART IV

Postmodern Undoings

Introduction
The conceptual understanding of empirical reality is equivalent to a murder.
(Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (in Borch-Jacobsen
1991, 192))

Apart from the shock value of Kojeve’s phrasing, the view of concepts he
was propounding in the 1930s reflected what would become conven-
tional wisdom among creators of French theory—a legacy of Heidegger’s
teaching for which they would eventually credit (justifiably) Nietzsche, a
more welcome ancestry for thinkers determined to rid themselves of all
things phenomenological. That transfer of credit for so essential a claim
encapsulates the most proximate intellectual-historical move that shaped
the postmodern moment in France. But really understanding the signifi-
cance of that move means understanding the historical context that
prompted Nietzsche to pursue his deconstructive mission in the first
place. Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 described that context. Chapter 7, deal-
ing with essentials of critical theory by way of Adorno, bears directly on
how postmodernism was received in the anglophone academy, but
French theory, in spite of striking convergences, apparently developed
without Frankfurt School influence. We can hope that this is more evi-
dence of an underlying logic at work—some logic that might be brought
to light and evaluated so that we can do a bit better than blunder and
grope toward whatever comes next.
138   Postmodern Undoings

So Part IV, the heart of this book, has been historically situated. It
will succeed in proportion to the validity of these claims: French theo-
ry’s seminal texts are so difficult because (1) they strive for an appear-
ance of continuity with Marx when radical moves in very different
directions were actually being made, and/or (2) they reject the abstrac-
tions of Structuralism and return to temporality, to performance, and to
history—but without the subject, without allowing significant reference
to the intentions and feelings of actual human beings. That profoundly
counterintuitive constraint forced the framers of theory into elaborate
syntactic and lexical contortions in their effort to return to the func-
tioning of language without resorting to subject talk.1 The transcen-
dental ego of Husserl’s phenomenology, like the brain-code grammar
(langue) in Saussure and Levi-Strauss, could never be mistaken for the
living, speaking person. Modernist self-splitting in creator/authors
reflected that fact (see above, Chap. 3). So when those abstractions
were rejected in the name of temporality—history, events—the place of
the subject had to be taken by something equal to the explanatory task
those abstractions had performed. That something would be described
in terms like “field of the mark” (Derrida), “process of signification”
(Kristeva), “event of utterance” (Deleuze), and so on. The result, as we
shall see, was a strange Hegelian knock-off that, in effect, put language
(or, in Deleuze’s case, “expression”) in place of Absolute Mind. But
before that could happen the mind of Man—the existential-phenome-
nological mind—would stake a claim to the position once held by
Hegel’s Absolute, a claim that was bound to be rejected.
Among the Parisian luminaries who attended Alexandre Kojeve’s
groundbreaking lectures on Hegel at the École Pratique des Hautes Études
in the 1930s were Louis Althusser, Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, André Breton, Jacques Lacan, Raymond Aron,
and, according to some reports, Jean-Paul Sartre himself. Those lectures
consolidated a turn to Hegel in France before WWII and inspired the
Marxist-existential phenomenology that would dominate the scene until
the rise of Structuralism and the revival of Nietzsche in the late 1950s and
1960s. In Vincent Descombes’ opinion, only the Russian Revolution can

1
 Derrida gave the game away when he casually remarked that he used the phrase “func-
tioning of the mark” rather than “understanding the written utterance” merely to accom-
modate the possibility of misunderstanding (1988: 61).
   Postmodern Undoings 
   139

compare with Kojeve’s lectures as an influence on French social thought

in the twentieth century (1980, 9–10).2
When Kojeve indicted “conceptual understanding” for murder he was
thinking of moments in the dialectical development of consciousness in
which an abstract concept negates the reality it purports to define. But
that same dialectic was bound in turn to negate the abstract negation and,
in a determinate way, fulfill itself eventually as realized concept,3 embodied
in the world at the end of history. For Hegel, that moment would come
when Absolute Mind recognized itself in and as (the forms of) that world.
Kojeve, deeply influenced by Heidegger, was having none of that. The
Hegelian Absolute was replaced by Man and History—and the end of
History would come when “negating” actions of labor and political strug-
gle achieved their aims and fulfilled the designs of Man (compare Chap. 2,
above, and Chap. 11, below).
Kojeve’s existential-phenomenological dialectic—this Marxist human-
ism, this new version of the “philosophy of the subject”—was the most
comprehensive of the “master narratives” Jean-Francois Lyotard would
one day repudiate in the name of postmodernism ([1979] 1984). It would
be accused of crimes far more serious than murder by concept. The dialec-
tical resolution uniting identity and difference on a new plane—the “return
of the same”4—was a more radical violation of empirical reality than a mere
moment of abstraction. Concepts constituting this dialectic would be
exposed as falsifications of a reality that was truly “other”—uncontainable,
inconceivable, unrepresentable (vorstellung), a Nietzschean reality. Practices
employing such concepts were impositions of power, violations, violence.
Heidegger and Sartre, like Hegel before them, thought they were
moving beyond the Cartesian/Kantian subject in daring to think The
Nothing. But they would look like collaborators compared to Lacan in

2
 Gary Gutting (2013) shows that Kojeve’s influence has actually been exaggerated in
hindsight at the expense of the influence of Jean Hyppolite and Jean Wahl. But it is the
founding myth that concerns us here. See also Alan Schrift in Bourg 2004 for an American
tendency to overlook the influence of philosophy of science during this period.
3
 The overarching example, from Hegel’s Logic: think pure “Being” (not the being of any
particular) and you will find you are thinking “Nothing.” Negate the negating relation, but
preserve both terms, and a synthesis emerges: “Becoming.”
4
 Said Hegel: “For Spirit, there is nothing whatever that is entirely other” (in Macdonald
and Ziarek (eds), Adorno and Heidegger (2008, 88)).
140   Postmodern Undoings

pursuit of objet petit a or Deleuze and Guattari cavorting across their

Thousand Plateaus or Kristeva writing on the “margin” between her body
and the symbolic order. For among the concepts charged with false clarity
one stood out as central: the modern subject, the cogito in its various
forms, the protagonist of this story. That subject was at the very top of
postmodernism’s hit list and existential phenomenology was its latest ava-
tar. Partisans of Structuralism had also turned away from that subject—as
posited by Sartre especially—but they did so as modernists, abstracting
semiotic structures from lived experience. Structuralism excluded the
subject for essentially methodological reasons (see Saussure’s langue/
parole distinction for the prototype, above Chap. 5; compare Chomsky
on competence/performance). It was to be a science of signification, not
a hermeneutical humanistic discipline. But “poststructuralists” saw
Structuralism’s formal codes as the creation of abstract modern subjects
and detected as well a parallel relation in totalizing political regimes, capi-
talist or communist. Formal theories became a political issue5 and “the-
ory” became poststructural as it undermined not only those imperial
codes but also the agent responsible for the formalisms that turned living
reality into a timeless realm of “signs.” Levi-Strauss renounced the uni-
versal subject of phenomenology in his anthropology, but Levi-Strauss the
author presided over his abstract works as serenely removed from history
as they were. The cadence of his majestic prose, the scope and depth of
his all-­encompassing charts and diagrams—his style, in the Nietzschean
sense—gave unmistakable evidence of an imperial subjectivity at work
behind the curtain.
The upshot: in excluding the subject for methodological reasons,
Structuralism had actually been sheltering it incognito, disguising its
humanism in an abstract science de l’homme that protected it from hetero-
geneous historical forces no theory could contain. When “poststructural-
ists” rejected the abstractions of Structuralism and returned to temporality
and performance, they doubled down on the issue of the subject. They
were not content with simply excluding it. They wanted the modern sub-
ject, the soul of traditional humanism, to actually unravel in “writing” and

5
 Yet another, apparently historically unrelated, convergence between poststructuralist and
Frankfurt School critique. For discussion of this theme in France in the wake of the 1968, see
Peter Starr The Logics of Failed Revolt (1995).
   Postmodern Undoings 
   141

actually disperse across the reaches of a multifarious never-to-be-fulfilled

desire. They wanted theory to be action.
Postmodern texts deserve their reputation for obscurity. Many Anglo-­
American intellectuals with broadly positivist notions of what serious
thought looks like recoiled from what they sampled and were left suspect-
ing the authors of posturing and obfuscation. But a fair reading depends
upon accepting the fact that these writers intended to test the limits of
conceptuality in service of that unraveling and dispersal (see especially,
Gary Gutting’s Thinking the Impossible (2013)). And they didn’t just
wake up one morning and decide it might be fun to think the impossi-
ble—they inherited that intention from a pantheon of avant-garde artists
that self-­respecting French intellectuals (defining themselves, as they were
required to do, in opposition to all things bourgeois) learned to idolize in
their earliest years of rebellion. It was Nietzsche, after all, who urged phi-
losophers to look to the arts rather than science and math for inspira-
tion—and Lawrence Cahoone was surely right to call him the “godfather
of postmodernism.” And it was Andre Breton who first set out, program-
matically, to release the word from “its duty to signify” ([1924] 1996,
101). The influence of surrealism on French theory was not incidental; it
was formative.
Introducing the role surrealism played in Lacan’s development, in par-
ticular, Sherry Turkle reports that psychoanalysis in France was always
understood as a kind of “action-surrealism,” which was why “French phy-
sicians were as reticent towards psychoanalysis as French poets had been
enthusiastic” (1981, 100–102). Foucault’s first publications dealt with
avant-garde writers Raymond Roussel and George Bataille. Derrida and
Barthes were engaged with radical literary figures throughout their careers.
Deleuze published studies of Proust, Kafka, Sacher-Masoch, Beckett, and
Jarry, and spent most of the 1980s writing about the visual arts, all the
while insisting he was doing philosophy. Kristeva summed it up when she
described her early work on Mallarme, Lautremont, Joyce, and Artaud as
representative of the whole Tel Quel enterprise, inspired as it had been by
those writers (Kristeva 2002, 7–12).
Perhaps more than any other single factor, this affiliation accounts for
how theory was perceived and misperceived in the anglophone academy,
where a convergence between the humanistic disciplines and radical exper-
iments in the arts was barely on the agenda.
142   Postmodern Undoings

Of course, one can always conclude that trying to think the impossible
was a wrongheaded way to spend time, whatever (or because of) the
motives. But first the works deserve consideration on their own terms. So,
in keeping with the spirit of the enterprise, this formula—meant to evoke
Lacan’s mysterious algebras:

( ( PH + STR × N / F ) − M = PoMo )
Which says that phenomenology plus Structuralism times a mash-up of
Nietzsche and Freud minus Marx equals Postmodernism.
Where “–Marx” suggests the presence of his absence, of course.
The chapters in this part will discuss some of the most representative
postmodern thinkers and some of their most influential texts. But in order
to clarify what the texts were doing the ban on subject talk (see above) will
frequently be violated so as to bring out what they would have been saying
had that ban not existed in the first place. Chapter 8 begins with a brief
account of Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser, elders presiding over the
nativity scene—encouraging, scolding, anointing. It then attempts to
evoke something of atmosphere, the mood of the moment when French
theory was born—a moment-of-multiple-moments captured and released
in real time through the pages of the journal Tel Quel and in the deeds and
words of the power couple who were its guiding spirits, Philipe Sollers and
Julia Kristeva. A principal aim of this chapter is to show how closely con-
ditioned the whole process was by politics, especially by the “events” of
1968.6 Chapter 9 focuses on individual thinkers and shows that, in spite of
passionate and sometimes painful differences, they were all pursuing basic
aims they took for granted even as they competed ferociously to produce
the most effective strategies. Chapter 10 will turn to the reception of
French theory in anglophone contexts, and Chap. 11 will offer a post-­
postmodern theory of “theory” that expands on the narrative outlined in
Chap. 2 and brings the story to the present moment. Chapter 12 will

 “Event” was the term of choice. Labels like “revolution,” “rebellion,” and “revolt,” so
6

embedded in French historical experience, looked almost quaint when applied to what trans-
pired in May of 1968. Whatever this outpouring was—it was something else. It is no coinci-
dence that the idea of “event” carried such heft in subsequent theorizing, especially in the
work of Deleuze, Lyotard, and Baidou (who taught together at the radical experimental
university at Vincennes in 1969).
   Postmodern Undoings 
   143

argue in conclusion that, in this moment, a new humanism that aspires to

genuine universality is becoming possible and, with it, a new kind of unity
for progressive theory and political action appears on the horizon.
An excerpt from an early essay by Nietzsche, which anticipates Kojeve’s
indictment of concepts for murder by 50 years, stands as a reference point
for all that follows:

a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless

more or less similar cases—which means, purely and simply, cases which are
never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the
equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally
the same as another, so it is certain that the concept “leaf ” is formed by
arbitrarily discarding these individual differences. … This awakens the idea
that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the “leaf ”: the original
model. (“On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense” 1873)

For the French thinkers whom anglophone practitioners of theory

came to think of as “poststructuralists,” the conceptual apparatus built
into ordinary language and traditional disciplinary vocabularies was a veil
of misrepresentation because it took for granted that the chief business of
language was precisely to represent—to represent reality and so enable
orderly communication between psychologically independent speakers
lodged in various social roles, conducting the system’s business (see
Saussure’s diagram). Plenty of room, of course, for poetry and play—
everyone enjoyed the antics of Lewis Carroll and, though not to every-
one’s taste, if you fancied yourself “modern” in the new ­anti-­Victorian,
anti-Bourgeois sense of the word, you could find value in the word-play of
Mallarme, the later Joyce, the Surrealists, and so on. But it was precisely
the representational and communicative function of language that made
such play possible—because, at the most basic level, it was obvious: literal
language made figures of speech possible.
But Nietzsche, in that 1873 essay, went on to say: “What then is truth?
A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms …
illusions which we have forgotten are illusions—they are metaphors that
have become worn out and drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost
their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.”
Which was to level against ordinary representational and communicative
144   Postmodern Undoings

language, literal language, a profoundly disruptive charge once expressed

by Gayatri Spivak, in a moment of frustration with critics of postmodern
jargon, in a clear (hence paradoxical) way: “clear language is a lie.” That
conviction, in a nutshell, was what creators of French theory held respon-
sible for “the problem of language,” for a naïve commonsensical conviction
that shaped Western philosophy until Nietzsche’s seismic intervention—
the conviction that language (like thought) was, as it were, naturally
adapted to represent reality. Even unrepresentable Kantian noumena served
to delineate, by contrast, a realm of phenomena that language was equipped
to represent linguistically just as the a priori categories were equipped to
constitute the phenomena in the first place. No, it was Nietzsche (followed
by a generation of radical artists) who brought his hammer down on the
illusion of representational adequacy. And what emerged over subsequent
decades was a linguistic self-consciousness that knew no bounds, that called
into question the validity of every question and left answers to fend for
themselves in accordance with pragmatic criteria improvised on the fly in an
undefinable field of contending discourses.7

the problem of language has never been simply one problem among others.
But never as much as at present has it invaded, as such, the global horizon
of the most diverse researches. … This inflation of the sign “language” is the
inflation of the sign itself, absolute inflation … language itself is menaced in
its very life, helpless, adrift in the threat of limitlessness. (Jacques Derrida
[1967] 1974, 92)

References
Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. 1991. Lacan: The Absolute Master. Trans. Douglas Brick.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bourg, Julian. 2004. After the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and
Cultural History of Postwar France. Lanham: Lexington Books.

7
 The American pragmatists—John Dewey in particular—shared Nietzsche’s view of lan-
guage’s representational inadequacy but, being American (hopeful, practical), they did not
locate the fault in language itself but in the philosophies that made the mistake of thinking
language was representationally adequate in the first place. Like everything else in Darwinian
nature, language was its best self when it worked, however the face of reality might appear to
God’s eyes.
   Postmodern Undoings 
   145

Breton, André. (1924) 1996. The Lost Steps. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. (1967) 2004. How Do We Recognize Structuralism? In Desert
Islands and Other Texts: 1953–1974. Trans. Mike Taormina. Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e).
Derrida, Jacques. 1988. Limited Inc. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Gutting, Gary. 2013. Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Kristeva, Julia. 2002. Intimate Revolt: And, the Future of Revolt. Trans. Janine
Herman. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. (1979) 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Macdonald, Iain, and Krzysztof Ziarek, eds. 2008. Adorno and Heidegger:
Philosophical Questions. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Starr, Peter. 1995. The Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May 68’.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Turkle, Sherry. 1981. Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud’s French Revolution. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
 CHAPTER 8

The Mood of the Moment

the peculiar modern French branch of the great western tradition of philo-
sophical thinking … seek[s] immediate translation of all positions of debate
in terms of very contemporary politics. (Alan Montefiore, Foreword to
Modern French Philosophy 1980)

Montefiore, as we shall see, was not exaggerating—but he might have

added that, in recent decades, the same reflexive emphasis on politics came
to characterize intellectual production in anglophone contexts as well,
not only among those who welcomed French theory but among those
who opposed it as well. That politicization effect was perhaps the most
comprehensive consequence of French intellectual influence since the
1960s. The initial challenge for the fair-minded reader who wants, first of
all, simply to understand the rise of postmodernism is to get a textured
sense of how variably, and at the same time necessarily, the intellectual and
the political were fused in the thought of its leading French creators.

8.1   The Elders: Louis Althusser (1918–1990)

and Jacques Lacan (1901–1981)

They belonged to Sartre’s generation and were modernists in spirit, in their

commitment to truth and to system building in spite of the ever-­present
risk of reification. But awareness of that risk, coupled with a materialist

© The Author(s) 2019 147

T. de Zengotita, Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics,
Political Philosophy and Public Purpose,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90689-8_8
148   T. DE ZENGOTITA

ontology and a radical antipathy toward the modern subject, conditioned

their work in discernibly postmodern ways. True, they appealed to Classical
Structuralism as they re-described their master thinkers in terms borrowed
from linguistics, and those terms enabled 1968ers to invoke Marx and
Freud, with all the subversive authority those names still bore. But, with
the exception of Lacan’s largely unintelligible theoretical ventures at the
end of his life, their “structures” (like Foucault’s) were not formalized and
so could be integrated into emerging modes of thought and practice that
were actually inspired—it cannot be overemphasized—by Nietzsche.
Both Althusser and Lacan were victims of the kind of bourgeois Catholic
upbringing that nurtured so many French radicals and provided deeply per-
sonal reference points for their various oppositional projects.1 Though they
came eventually to differ over theoretical issues, they were in open alliance
in the 1960s and had a decisive impact on the events of that decade. Lacan
was not explicitly political in his work but Althusser used his dominant posi-
tion at the Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS) to allow Lacan to promulgate
his ideas in seminar and put Lacanian Structuralism to work politically
through his ENS students, a formidable cohort that included Michel
Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Regis Debray, Etienne Balibar, Jacques Ranciere,
Pierre Machery, Jacques-Alain Miller, and Alain Badiou. He also saw Lacan
as “an objective ally” because the way “Lacan challenged the International
Psychoanalytic Association, the official Freudian group” seemed to echo
Althusser’s own “opposition to the centralized PCF [French Communist
Party] bureaucracy” (Dosse 1997, 184; see also Rapaport 2001, 79–80).
Under the slogan “return to Marx,” Althusser uncovered, through his
psychoanalytically inspired method of “symptomatic reading,” the “real
Marx,” a truly scientific Marx, a Marx of whom Marx himself (prey to a
residual Hegelian humanism) was not fully aware. This scientific Marx
paradoxically made it possible to rethink the “ideological field,” to refuse
its orthodox placement as mere superstructure and identify within it
­relatively independent, materially realized “ideological state apparatuses”
(artistic, religious and educational institutions, journalism, etc.). Althusser

1
 For young Americans in revolt in the 1960s, and for decades thereafter, the 1950s played
an analogous role—captured in images of ticky-tacky suburban uniformity, housewives in
high heels cooing over gleaming washing machines, commuter husbands in gray flannel suits.
The poolside party Dustin Hoffman’s parents held for their son (The Graduate (1967)),
featured this iconic scene: an overbearing business man, intending to do his good deed for
the day, drapes a possessive arm over young Dustin’s shoulder and confides: “One word for
you, young man, just one—plastics.”
   THE MOOD OF THE MOMENT    149

assigned an important role to these “ISAs, one which kept him on the cut-
ting edge of theory’s development for years to come.”2 They were princi-
pally responsible for reproducing “relations of production” by imposing
identities defined by a “social unconscious” on society’s members. For a
generation of young radicals, especially party members, as anxious as their
predecessors to identify with revolution against the bourgeois order and,
at the same time, as anxious to keep up with the latest trends in avant-­
garde thought, Althusser offered a perfect solution. One could participate
in the cultural turn, the linguistic turn—one could succumb to the lure of
Structuralism and even try to move beyond it—and still claim allegiance to
Marx and historical materialism. Taken-for-granted categories, norms, and
activities invited a new form of “ideology critique.” Thanks to Structural­
ism, an aspect of the personal unconscious could now be treated “scientifi-
cally,” as cultural code, as what Lacan had called “the Symbolic” or “the
big Other” in his account of subject formation.
Althusser’s project also converged with the Tel Quel program for cultural
politics, especially in the late 1960s when Philippe Sollers was leading that
collective into open alliance with the French Communist Party (PCF). He
was stressing more and more strongly the materiality of texts, thus main-
taining his anti-idealist bona fides, while, at the same time, providing intel-
lectual ammunition for Party intellectuals committed to de-­Stalinization. So
an insistence on a certain autonomy for the arts—for culture generally—was
the message from both these prestigious intellectual sources, the most
potent possible message to send to intellectual opponents of Stalinist ortho-
doxy—appealing, as it did, to their need to feel that the work they did best
and cared about most could also c­ ontribute directly to the revolutionary
cause by dismantling bourgeois conventions and, by extension, the institu-
tions that sustained them (Marx-Scouras 1996, 146–149).

2
 Francois Dosse stresses the importance of a convergence between Althusser and an ascen-
dant Foucault: “After 1968 Althusserians left their ivory towers, where they had limited
themselves to simple exegeses of Marx’s ideas, in order to meet the real world. It was from
this perspective in 1970 that Althusser defined a vast research program with his famous
article on the SIAs: State Ideology and Ideological Apparatuses … his positions were closer
to those of Michel Foucault in 1969, when he argued that the discursive order needed to be
complemented by the study of non-discursive practices. … For both Althusser and Foucault,
ideology had a material existence incarnated by institutional practices. … Althusser’s under-
taking was the most ambitious and totalizing in the gamut of speculative structuralism. …
[It] prepared the way for a historicized structuralism, incarnated by Michel Foucault, among
others” (1977, 167–168, 188).
150   T. DE ZENGOTITA

As for Lacan, under the slogan “return to Freud,” he had uncovered

the “real Freud,” a truly scientific Freud, a Freud that Freud himself (prey
to nineteenth-century hydraulic models of the psyche) had not fully real-
ized. This distinctively “French Freud” offered psychoanalysis a way to
recover its original radical project, with all its tragic glamor, and so avoid
the superficial hygienic applications of the “ego psychology” Americans
had created when they used Freudian theory to help suffering individuals
adapt to a corrupt social order. On Lacan’s account, that return to Freud
was made possible with the realization that “the unconscious is structured
like a language,” an insight that Freud himself had shared but, without
Saussure’s scientific linguistics at hand, could not fully develop.
The overall upshot? Both Marx and Freud got a linguistic makeover
and the generation of 1968 got a new “scientific” platform upon which
those two masters of suspicion retained their place, even as Nietzsche’s
influence began to undermine the very idea of systematic explanation. The
unfolding consequences of that convergence led to the developments
anglophone postmodern thinkers would call “post-structuralism” and
eventually know simply as “theory.”
What proved most enduring in their legacy, what the thinkers of 1968
would amplify, was the way they transformed the subject from an existen-
tial Cartesian/Kantian/bourgeois agent into an abjectly overdetermined
object of “interpellation,” a falsely unified imago embodied in the conven-
tional symbolic order, a Marxist/Freudian version of Heidegger’s “they-­
self,” fallen and fleeing, the subject subjected—theory’s revenge upon
modernity.
But Althusser stands apart from his heirs in this way: he was inclined, as if
by temperament, to a certain orthodoxy. He remained a faithful Catholic,
however conflicted, into adulthood. In his early 20s he seriously considered
becoming a priest and, during the five years of his imprisonment by the
Germans, he converted to communism without decisively renouncing his
faith. He had differences over the years with the PCF and with the Soviet
model but he remained loyal to the communist ideal until his last days.
Elisabeth Roudinesco, stressing continuities between these commitments,
recalled how “Louis Althusser, like Jacques Lacan before him, had made
many attempts to speak with the pope—clearly an attempt to unite, in a
fusional act, the two tutelary figures of his history: Catholicism and commu-
nism” (Roudinescu 2010: 114; see also Roland Boer’s “Althusser’s Catholic
Marxism” 2007). Like Comte before them (see above, Chap. 2), Althusser
(and Lacan) entertained the very French hope that, somehow, the Church
   THE MOOD OF THE MOMENT    151

could be brought into institutional alliance with a modernizing movement

of thought. The lure of “system” (like the lure of “method”) was deeply
rooted in French intellectual culture; it retained its sway over these heralds
of postmodernism, even as they helped to fashion conceptual and rhetori-
cal weapons that would be turned against all systemic manifestations.
Hence, the importance of the fact that the foundation of Althusser’s
theorizing was intended to be just that—a foundation—and that intention
situates him in the generation to which he really belongs. The “real Marx”
that symptomatic reading had revealed to Althusser was to be the source
of a genuine science. It was to be an enhanced historical materialism that
would “ground” other disciplines—and this at a moment when the idea of
“grounding” was beginning to suggest “embalming” for radical thinkers
of the day. Like the Structuralism he incorporated into his ideology cri-
tique, Althusser’s was a modernist program at its core.
He began to waver in his last work, the posthumously published, partly
autobiographical, partly fantastical The Future Lasts a Long Time (1993).
He wrote that book after being released from an asylum where he was con-
fined for ten years after strangling his wife in 1980 (He was judged not
legally responsible in consideration of a history of severe depression marked
by occasional psychotic breaks). In that book, he decided to confront “the
murder scene,” to give an account of the deed that could only be adequate
if it was also an account of the life that led up to it. It became, for that rea-
son, an account that surrendered itself completely to personal psychology,
sometimes cast in psychoanalytic terms, sometimes in the register of com-
mon sense recollections of motives and misunderstandings. So determined
was Althusser to present himself to posterity that he cited with approval
Rousseau’s famous promise of absolute candor in his Confessions (Ferretter
2006, 117). With that example in mind, Althusser went so far as to trace his
commitment to Marxism to the reverence he felt as a child for his mother’s
purity and to his desire to fulfill her desire for that purity in his own life, in his
political thought (yet another debt to Lacan) (Ferretter 2006, 113–114).
Some of Althusser’s followers were more upset by their master’s lapse
into subject talk to explain the murder than they were by the murder,
almost certainly because the same psychological account was offered to
explain his commitment to his version of Marxism—which was famous,
above all, for its rejection of the existential/humanist reading of Marx
associated with Kojeve, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty as well as the “personalism”
of Emmanuel Mounier and various radical Catholic worker movements.
So the most articulate Marxist critic of subjectivity, the creator of widely
152   T. DE ZENGOTITA

used concepts that diminished not only its importance but questioned its
very existence in the conventional sense—that critic had returned with his
last words to the sanctity of the confessional in order to “represent” and
“express” his personal experience as if that were, at the end of the day,
what mattered most to him after all. No wonder so many of Althusser’s
students and allies resisted his legal heir’s decision to publish The Future
Lasts a Long Time. Pierre Machery spoke for many of them when he called
it “a tissue of lies and half-truths” (in Fetterer 2006, 113).
Not coincidentally, it seemed, it was also in that last book that Althusser
renounced his hopes for the realization of communism in history. At the
same time, he loosened the explanatory parameters to which he had always
submitted in the name of science and proposed instead an “aleatory mate-
rialism” more in keeping with the Nietzschean conjuncture of the day. But
by that time no one was listening.
Jacques Lacan was a more slippery character—though tormented in his
own way as well, at least in the end. He often spoke “in the Name (pun-
ning ‘nom’ and ‘non’) of the Father”—of the Law, of the Symbolic Order,
and of the Oedipal scene. But that was only because he thought that
unconscious subjection to society and culture was as unavoidable as falling
into inauthentic everydayness had been for Heidegger’s Dasein.3 The con-
stituents of the ego as imago (real desires having been condemned to
reach perpetually for impossible fulfillment) were drawn entirely from the
social symbolic, especially language. There was no other way for a person
to exist. Hence, Lacan’s famous “subject of the signifier.” In accepting this
tragic “lack” at the heart of desire, Lacan was retracing the itinerary Freud
had sketched out in broad strokes in Civilization and its Discontents
(1930) and taking a similar satisfaction in confronting humanity with its
ultimate futility. That tragic posture appealed to many modernist c­ reators—
and one of the theory’s strategies for overcoming the modern took aim at
this perverse negativity in the name of proliferating jouissance and affirma-
tive desire (see especially Deleuze, Chap. 9).
But if Lacan seemed to enjoy confronting his audiences (and his analy-
sands) with the tragic necessity of prohibition in the economy of the
3
 Gary Gutting thinks Heidegger’s main legacy for French philosophy in the 1960s was the
conviction that, whatever the way forward, Classical metaphysics was exhausted (2013, 60).
But Heidegger’s focus on the “average everydayness” of Dasein, thrown into a social and
linguistic setting, seems to me ancestral also—not only to Lacan’s “symbolic” and Althusser’s
“ideological apparatus,” but to Barthes’ “doxa,” Derrida’s “general text,” Foucault’s “dis-
cursive practices,” and Bourdieu’s “habitus.”
   THE MOOD OF THE MOMENT    153

psyche—his followers understood that his heart lay with hopeless desire,
without object, without end, the truth of a nameless subject lost in “the
real” beyond words, beyond the reach of the social symbolic.4 That is why
Lacan’s influence extended beyond the Structuralism he espoused and
played an important role in shaping various manifestations of post-­
structuralism’s efforts to think the impossible (see, especially, Kristeva sec-
tion in this chapter and Deleuze and Guattari, Chap. 9). Lacan’s account
of “castration,” for example, made it a perfect “symbol for the loss of an
ideal wholeness analogous to traditional notions of presence and truth”
(Gutting 2013, 105; see Derrida section, Chap. 9). And that was typical of
the way Freud was put to use by theory; he served as a storehouse of imag-
ery that turned out to implicate much more than individual psychology.
Lacan made his modernist allegiance to the real more and more evident
as the 1970s unfolded and he began to devote his time to lecture/perfor-
mances. He turned away from the pedestrian task of therapeutic practice
and committed himself fully to theory, now expressed by his totemic
“mathemes” and Borromean knots by means of which he seriously pro-
posed what he had once consigned to impossibility—namely, penetrating
to the real after all. Or was this a surrealist parody of traditional  “para-
noid” theorizing? Or was it both? Did it start as a parody and become
serious? Opinions differ. It is hard to tell. In this instance, as in so many
others, we must accept that obscurity inevitably attends efforts to think
the inconceivable, regardless of how sincere or insincere particular think-
ers may have been in this or that context.
An anecdote to dramatize the perhaps unbridgeable gulf between an
oh-so-French intellectual personality like Jacques Lacan and the solid citi-
zens who set the tone in the anglophone academy: in Psychoanalytic
Politics (1981), Sherry Turkle invites us to a presentation by Jacques (“I
came to speak”) Lacan before an audience of American mathematicians,
linguists, and philosophers at MIT. It is hard to imagine a more illuminat-
ing encounter, at least in hindsight. This hilarious scene was topped off
during Q&A with this response to an earnest American’s inquiry about
the exterior/interior distinction in human studies. Lacan was elaborately
dubious—“he was not at all certain that man even had an interior”:

4
 But his language, and the categorical tone—“necessity,” “the real”—no matter how
obscure the referents, suggest that he retained the aspiration of an older generation: he
wanted truth.
154   T. DE ZENGOTITA

The only thing that seems to testify to it is that which we produce as excre-
ment. The characteristic of a human being—and this is very much in con-
trast with other animals—he doesn’t know what to do with his shit. He is
encumbered by his shit. … Of course it is true that we are always coming
across cat shit, but a cat counts as a civilized animal. But if you take ele-
phants, it is striking how little space their leavings take up in nature, whereas
when you think of it, elephant turds could be enormous. The discretion of
the elephant is a curious thing. Civilization means shit, cloaca maximus. (In
Turkle 1981, 238)

On this occasion, perhaps you didn’t have to be there?

Turkle tells this story to buttress her insistence that surrealism (and the
avant-garde in general) was an essential influence on Lacan (as indeed it
was for French theory in general). The basic point is always, almost monot-
onously, the same. Language simply can’t express or represent dimensions
of the psyche it cannot designate or conceive (Turkle 1981, 146). The
sympathy Turkle felt for Lacan at MIT (his performance of Freudian-
linguistic processes went unrecognized) clashed with her frustration over
his self-indulgent and intentionally provocative attitudinizing—a compel-
ling ambivalence, even anguish, informs her account. She was the perfect
witness, an American who had done her homework in France.
Lacan was as true to desire in his politics (such as they were) as he was
in analysis and public performances, and in much the same manner.
Another oft-cited moment to illustrate: assuming the position of the “one
supposed to know,” the target of transference in Lacanian analysis, he
stood before a riotous assembly at the experimental University at Vincennes
in December of 1969. He joined them, but then he castigated them for
supposing they could live free of order, as if that were not an imperative in
itself, and bound to become a burdensome one. “What you aspire to as
revolutionaries is a Master,” Lacan told the outraged students, alluding to
the fate of Bolshevism, “You shall have one!”
Outraged they may have been at the moment. But as time went by,
and De Gaulle returned to power with more popular support than ever
(including the Communist Party and some labor unions), many saw in
Lacan’s political “pessimism” the beginning of an explanation. For the
historical record was grim; why had revolution always ended in recupera-
tion for reactionary forces or in a “mirroring” of past oppression once
triumphant revolutionary forces were established. Was Stalin a necessary
   THE MOOD OF THE MOMENT    155

development? Did human beings need subjection after all? Perhaps he

was right, and if so, what next?5
And besides, could the rumor be true—had old Lacan really smuggled
Danny the Red across the border in the trunk of his Jaguar?

8.2   Tel Quel (1960–1982) and the Spirit of 1968

“It is Forbidden to Forbid”

This section’s lead quote is taken from a graffiti slogan that went viral
on the walls of Paris in the spring of 1968. Coined by “sexo-leftists” deter-
mined to outrage bourgeois morality, its application can be expanded to
capture the spirit of theory’s paradoxical undertakings more generally.6 An
overview of their unfolding, as experienced month to month by Parisian
intellectuals caught up in the birth of what would become “theory,” is
best provided from the vantage point of the journal/collective Tel Quel. In
a 1996 review of books about that enterprise, Frederic Jameson recalled
that Tel Quel had once “seemed to offer the most prestigious theoretical
synthesis of the age, so that the fate, not just of theory itself—now pro-
nounced dead by some—is at stake here but also some of its components:
Marxism, psychoanalysis, linguistics” (“Apres le Avant Garde,” London
Review of Books 1996). And the first thing anglophone readers need to
understand about the intellectual provenance of those events is this: “If
there was a May ’68 mindset, it was not to be found among the propo-
nents of Structuralism, but rather among its adversaries. … May 1968
exhumed what Structuralism had repressed. History once again became a
subject for discussion, even among linguists” (Dosse 1997, 115–117). No
doubt the word “seemed” in Jameson’s assessment should be stressed—
but, to the extent that we can take his praise at face value, it is because, as
a Marxist, he welcomed any effort to return to history after all that time
spent languishing in The Prison House of Language (Jameson 1972). And
this was the essential postmodern gesture, this rejection of abstraction,
formalism, compartmentalization—and, even though the most vital source
of French theory was certainly Nietzsche, not Marx, enough common

5
 See Peter Starr, The Logics of Failed Revolt (1995).
6
 Every boundary, every category, was suspected of owing its existence to some prohibi-
tion, some violent exclusion.
156   T. DE ZENGOTITA

ground was indicated by that gesture to keep various forms of Marxism in

play as well, as we shall see.
Tel Quel was to its generation what Les Temps Modernes was to the
existential-­phenomenological Marxists of the postwar years.7 Its rise and
decline reflected the joint career of French theory and politics in the 1960s
and early 1970s, and understanding that career means imagining an intel-
lectual and political riot of competing and converging initiatives in thought
and action. The mood (in Heidegger’s sense) of the moment was integral
to the formation of French theory and the particular intensity of its aims
and claims derives directly from it. It helps if you lived through the late
1960s in New York or San Francisco or London, but no other center of
that global “counter-cultural” movement could match the historical reso-
nance and demographic intimacy that Paris provided.
Tel Quel (“As Is”) was established to oppose Sartrean “engagement,”
which saw the arts as political instruments, for good or ill. Inspired above
all by the example of surrealism (Kauppi 1996, 109), its original mission
was to “take art seriously again,” which meant a revival of the modernist
turn to form (see Chap. 3, above).8 And “revival” is the word because the
rise of modernism, for which France could rightly claim substantial respon-
sibility, was brutally interrupted in that country by WWII and its excruci-
ating aftermath. “As Is” referenced Nietzsche in an amor fati frame of
mind and, for Tel Quel, that meant no ideological commitments, art alone
had value—and if, in its modernist iteration, it also had socially subversive
potential (compare Adorno, Chap. 7), so much the worse for “Ideology.”
Tel Quel, though apolitical, was not taking an “art for art’s sake” stance—
it was the use of art by politics that it condemned. Like the Surrealists they
consciously emulated, the founders of Tel Quel were only too happy to

7
 Les Temps Modernes was in turn conceived in reaction to the fate of the premiere intel-
lectual journal of the first half of the twentieth century, La Nouvelle Revue Française. Its
apolitical commitment to literature and art made the NRF an easy mark for sophisticated
Nazi occupiers and it succumbed with barely a murmur. “Engagement” became a byword at
Les Temps Modernes for good reason (Marx-Scouras 1996, 11–17).
8
 For French intellectuals, the “postmodern” begins with the radical artistic and literary
innovators of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “Modern,” unless qualified
in some way, suggests the Third Republic, bourgeois convention, and so on. In his interview
with Clare Parnet (see “C is for Culture”), Gilles Deleuze waxes nostalgic in very revealing
ways about the Liberation, and the rich years after, discovering and especially rediscovering
things from before the war in philosophy and the arts.
   THE MOOD OF THE MOMENT    157

celebrate the promise of a more profound subversion of bourgeois society

by radical innovations in the arts.9
The journal’s founding coincided with the rise of Structuralism, itself a
formal program. Inevitably there was a merger. Reviving modernism after
the war, France came late to its linguistic turn, and the exigencies of politics
in the 1960s and 1970s drove it in unpredictable directions with astonish-
ing speed. And Tel Quel led the way—or rather, oh-so-many different ways.
A simple itinerary, to convey a sense of the atmosphere in which theory
developed: when it was founded in 1960, Tel Quel renounced politics
entirely, as just noted. In 1963 Tel Quel published Foucault’s “Language
to Infinity” and affiliated itself with the enormous success of History of
Madness (1961), which Philippe Sollers, the guiding and eventually com-
manding figure on the Tel Quel scene, “considered the main event of the
1960s” (Marx-Scouras 1996, 69). That book marked Foucault’s turn
toward Structuralism (at least in the public mind), but it also gave Stru­
cturalism an historical and political edge that would provide lapsing
Marxists with a much needed cover as they made the cultural turn, with
Tel Quel urging them on. In 1964 and 1965, Barthes and Derrida appeared
in its pages and Tel Quel was committing to what Francoise Dosse, in his
invaluable History of Structuralism (1997), calls the “ultra-structuralist”
program—meaning a concerted effort to bring historical dynamism and
political relevance to static forms of Classical Structuralism associated with
Saussure and Levi-Strauss.
With the French context in mind, Dosse prefers the term “ultra-­
structuralism” to the Anglo-American “post-structuralism” and “post-
modernism” (1997, VII, chap. 2; and 131). He argues that the creators of
what would be called French theory saw the structuralist assault on the
traditional humanities, represented especially by Sartre, as their mission as
well. So “ultra-structuralism” is apt because they saw their repudiation of
Structuralism’s abstractions (grammars, charts, codes) as an intensification
of a basic aim they inherited from Structuralism. Temporality promised
real dissolution for the modern subject, not mere methodological evasion.

9
 By the end of the 1960s, however, when Tel Quel was insisting on the materiality of the
text and consequently on writing as political action, Sollers turned against the original sur-
realists—especially Breton. They were indicted for an “idealist,” even “spiritualist,” effort to
preserve the autonomy of art and artists and for the popularity of their works with bourgeois
audiences. Tel Quel affiliated itself instead with Bataille and Artaud, “dissident surrealists”
who insisted on the materiality of a subject identified with the body and whose works held
no appeal for bourgeois sensibilities (Marx-Scouras 1996, 159–164).
158   T. DE ZENGOTITA

And it promised these culture warriors that they could be good Marxists
still as they returned to history in this new guise.
That promise was to be justified in theory by an emphasis on the mate-
rial aspects of language—on “writing” and “textuality.” In 1967,
Kristeva’s first paper on textuality was published in Tel Quel, Derrida’s
Writing and Difference appeared under its aegis, and Sollers himself
announced a “Program” which explicitly, as a matter now of doctrine,
linked “a theory of textuality to a critique of society and culture of Marxist
dimensions” (Marx-Scouras 1996, 12). Soon enough, it would be
decided that everything was writing but, at the beginning of the process
of linguistic materialization, special honors went to the so-called limit
texts produced by the likes of de Sade, Lautreamont, Mallarme, and
Artaud and celebrated, with particular effect, by Georges Bataille who
welcomed the forces limit texts released and disseminated. “Writing,” in
other words, aimed above all to distinguish itself from language under-
stood as representation, depiction—which implicates the image of lan-
guage as communication between Cartesian subjects conveying ideas
between minds across divides of physical space and the bodies that popu-
lated it like so many marbles in a jar (see the Saussure diagram, above;
compare Walter Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator”). That was not
enough for ultra-structuralists bent on intervening as Marxists in history
by way of art. The materiality of writing, on the other hand, promised
efficacy on the plane of actual events, and all the more so when compared
(as Derrida did so compellingly) with ephemera of speech, voice, con-
cept. Hence, an emergent article of faith for creators of French theory—
even Deleuze, the metaphysical outlier, was committed to it: language,
now understood as “writing,” was production, not representation. In
perhaps its most influential issue, the Division of the Assembly (Theorie
d’ensemble October, 1968), Tel Quel hailed the advent of that long-­sought
alliance between art and action. In all caps, it admonished: “WRITING
IN ITS PRODUCTIVE FUNCTION IS NOT REPRESENTATION”
(in The Tel Quel Reader 1998, 22). Years later, looking back, Sollers iden-
tified “the fundamental aesthetic error—the political economic error” as
“believing that language is a simple i­ nstrument of representation (Writing
and the Experience of Limits Columbia 1983, 71).”
As these theoretical commitments were being established, Sollers led
the journal’s collective into an ongoing and, for a while at least, mutually
advantageous dialogue with the PCF. Tel Quel got to burnish its creden-
tials as a partisan of the working classes, an increasingly important qualifi-
   THE MOOD OF THE MOMENT    159

cation at a moment when the distance between workers and radical

intellectuals was becoming practically unbridgeable. At the same time,
intellectuals in the PCF—especially younger members, anxious to be up-­
to-­date—got permission to join Althusser in the fashionable precincts of
thought opened up by Structuralism/ultra-structuralism.
To be sure, there was a price to be paid for this union and by 1968, Tel
Quel found itself hewing the party line, ignoring the Prague Spring, and
keeping a distance from the events of 1968—even as it endorsed PCF
critiques of “infantile” student rebellion in the streets of Paris. These were
positions Sollers would regret when he finally gave up on politics alto-
gether. But at the time the maneuvers seemed necessary. After all, unlike
“engaged” intellectuals of previous generations, the Tel Quelians did not
suffer from a guilty conscience about their writing, as Sartre did when he
continued to devote so much valuable time to his study of Flaubert in
spite of the emergencies of politics. To compensate, Sartre was out in the
streets during the days of May, distributing copies of Liberation and rally-
ing the demonstrators with his megaphone. But for members of Tel Quel,
writing had already been theorized as action and the PCF’s acceptance of
that position provided cover enough (Marx-Scouras 1996, 152–153).
Then, in the early 1970s, Tel Quel jumped ahead of yet another band-
wagon, breaking with the PCF and declaring itself militantly Maoist.
Sollers was at first inspired by Maria-Antonietta’s book on Antonio
Gramsci—perhaps the most influential of all the neo-Marxist partisans of
Cultural Revolution. But he was even more moved, this time by outrage,
when the PCF refused to feature her book on China at their festival in
1971. Another violent course correction followed—set out, as usual, by
the little helmsman of Paris who had by this time acquired the nickname
“Sollerspierre” in mocking recognition of his authority among fashionable
intellectuals. Without further ado, he plunged the Tel Quel caravan into
the turbulent wake of a “cultural revolution” that loomed far larger on the
historical scene than any other, the one inspired by Mao Tse-tung, the
“Great Helmsman” of a China that had by this time actually been a
Communist state for 20  years. Once they had assimilated that gigantic
event to their own ideas of cultural revolution, the Tel Quelians became
intoxicated with a sense of enhanced destiny—all the more so when they
were recognized at the very source, officially invited to lead a delegation
of French intellectuals to China to witness Mao’s great experiment.10 This
10
 “In September 1968, Tel Quel was still publishing articles on contemporary semiology
in the USSR (issue 35), introduced by Julia Kristeva, but by the beginning of 1969, it turned
160   T. DE ZENGOTITA

was truly History! Almost overnight Tel Quel’s offices were transformed,
festooned with revolutionary Chinese graphics. Mao was quoted in an
epigraph to the next issue of the journal (“A mortal combat has been
declared between the new culture and reactionary cultures”). Statements
like this were issued:

Down with the corrupt Bourgeoisie! Down with filthy revisionism! Down
with the binarism of the super-powers! Long live de la Chine! Long Live
revolutionary China! Long live the thought of Mao Tse-Tung! (In Marx-­
Scouras 1996, 169)

With a 1981 Sollers essay called “Why I was Chinese” in focus, Marx-­
Scouras goes on to sum up the rationale behind the fateful turn toward
Maoism. She notes an underlying irony—namely, that the Tel Quel pro-
gram for a cultural politics had actually had more in common with the
partisans of May 1968 than with PCF critics of that uprising, whose views
Tel Quel had endorsed:

In choosing the Chinese cultural revolution over PCF revisionism in June

1971, Tel Quel was actually recognizing the legacy of May as a cultural one.
Although they claim to be breaking with the PCF for theoretico-political
reasons, in effect, Mao’s brand of Marxism was more appealing in that it was
more cultural. Mao accorded tremendous importance to the cultural revolu-
tion, which Tel Quel equated with its own textual revolution, its work in the
signifier. The Chinese cultural revolution recognized the importance of
theoretical work. … Mao appeared to emphasize ideology over politics,
thereby giving TQ the impression that, in China, writers and artists had a
leading role to play. (1996, 172)

The trip to China proved embarrassing enough to persuade the jour-

nal’s leaders that they were playing the role of “useful idiot” for yet another
communist experiment gone horribly wrong.11 So Tel Quel turned away

to the Red East to the ‘Great Helmsman,’ to a Stalinist Marxism-Leninism purified by

President Mao. … When the ‘Movement of June ’71’ was created at Tel Quel, no compro-
mise was possible. Bridges had been definitively burned with ‘revisionists’ and ‘new czars.’
Tel Quel became the expression of intellectuals’ fascination with China and their interest was
reciprocated when a team from the editorial board including Marcelin Pleynet, Philippe
Sollers, Julia Kristeva, and Roland Barthes was invited to China” (Dosse 1997, 157–158).
11
 The phrase “useful idiot,” widely attributed to Lenin, was used by Bolsheviks to refer to
naïve fellow travelers from Western democracies who lent their support to the Russian
Revolution and the Communist Party.
   THE MOOD OF THE MOMENT    161

from politics entirely—again! Shortly thereafter Kristeva announced that

she was done with all things political, including feminism. In 1979, Sollers
(still her husband, that never changed) converted to Catholicism and
announced to an indifferent Paris that he was finished with “anything that
says ‘we’” (Champagne 1996, 13).
That sequence of conversions is a challenge to the moral imagina-
tion, especially given the tone of absolute conviction that attended
each shift. The interpretive key lies in what I can only call the “conven-
tions” of avant-garde performance art, which was basically what the-
ory-driven politics became in Paris during those years. Kandinsky
didn’t have to justify turning from Fauvism to abstract expressionism.
If theory as praxis was the politicized offspring of surrealism, under-
mining the social order by transgressing the limits of conventional con-
ceivability—then why not a “stylistics of thought” for theory’s creators?
(Julian Bourg’s phrase, personal communication) Even Mark Lilla,
implacable critic of the influence of French theory in the American
academy, understood from first-hand experience that “In France phi-
losophy is understood to be a kind of imaginative literature or poetic
performance” (New York Review of Books 2015, 50). That assessment—
that fact about French intellectual life in this period—shapes my analy-
sis here. The career of Tel Quel, taken in at a glance, evokes the mood
of the moment and the ethos as a whole. Fair-­minded readers, no mat-
ter how alien from their own idea of philosophy this artistic version of
the enterprise may be, must at least experiment with it in reflection—if
they want to understand.
In any case, as we shall see, what motivated critics of French theory on
the Anglo-American Left was the conviction that progressive theory and
action should not jettison conceptual clarity and factual truth in the name
of some anarchic aesthetic inherited from Dada and a fanciful jargon that
refigured all language as “writing” and “writing” as a mode of material
production like the factory and its products as more or less arbitrary con-
structions that happen to work in a particular context but can never, by
their nature, reveal anything like “the way things really are.” Sollers
­committed his journal/collective to precisely that vision because he was
convinced it was the only way to bring off the long-sought merger between
avant-garde art and revolutionary politics. That was his abiding priority
and it conditioned every important political decision he made. Julian
Bourg was surely right to say, of the most notable such decisions, that
162   T. DE ZENGOTITA

“Merely repeating the axiom that intertextuality was a materialism did not
make it so” but this “longing to anchor their symbolic revolution in in
materiality” is what “led the Telquelians, after a brief flirtation with the
Communist Party, into an equally flighty dalliance with Maoism” (2011,
2). Cecilia Sjoholm sums it up this way:

in the manifesto of the TQ group from 1968, Marxism and Grammatology

are pronounced to be the same thing, whereas capitalism and logocentrism
are made equivalent. … The revolution is made into a question of text, not
political maneuvers, and the goal of the volume is as advocated in the pref-
ace: “to articulate a politics logically linked to a nonrepresentative dynamic
of writing.” (Kristeva and the Political 2005, 7)

Finally, Francois Dosse offers this take on Tel Quel’s political

motivation:

Philippe Sollers, a friend of Derrida, addressed structuralism’s different faces

in order to sketch out what he called a “program” … which Elisabeth
Roudinesco later characterized as a “flamboyant manifesto of intellectual
terrorism.” … Tel Quel presented itself as the avant-garde of the proletarian
revolution to come and, in a Leninist fashion, was to have a “scientific”
program. … “We think that what has been called ‘literature’ belongs to a
period that is now over, having given way to a nascent science of writing.”
(“Ecriture et revolution,” (in Tel Quel: Theorie d’ensemble, October 1968,
72) cited in Dosse 1997, 156)

To stimulate a full appreciation of just how flamboyant Sollers’ pro-

gram was, Dosse goes on to emphasize that its scientific aspirations were,
at the same time and immediately, joined by Tel Quel’s claim to be the
“Red Front in Art.” The merger of his dreams could only now be realized,
Sollers believed, because there was at last a “scientific” understanding of
the implications of freeing the signifier from the signified—a liberation
theoretically accomplished in Derrida’s Of Grammatology and practically
accomplished by the radical writers that Tel Quel had cherished from the
beginning (Dosse 1997, 157; See Breton on freeing the word from its
“duty to signify”).12

12
 Sollers once went so far as to call Tel Quel a theoretical organ of Derridean deconstruc-
tion. He singled out Of Grammatology and admonished his readers that no “thinking can
henceforth avoid situating itself with respect to this event.” (“Le reflexe de reduction,” in Tel
   THE MOOD OF THE MOMENT    163

So determined was Sollers to effect this union that he insisted that the
“production and circulation of meaning” in material texts showed that “the
man who is nothing [the ‘dead’ author, see Barthes below, Chap. 9] and the
one who has nothing [the worker] are thus profoundly joined” (1983, 84).
It was a stretch, even then.
Even in 1968, with the soundtrack from Godard’s La Chinoise pounded
out invocations of “Mao! Mao!” through apartment windows thrown
open to the May morning and echoing down the streets of Paris, sum-
moning the faithful to the barricades; even then, it was a stretch; for the
coming alliance of de Gaulle’s government and the Communist labor
unions was already taking shape.

8.2.1  A Note on Philippe Sollers (1936–)

Born Philippe Joyaux into the family of a successful industrialist, Philippe
Sollers eventually renounced his father’s name (though not, like
Wittgenstein, the wealth). With that gesture, he joined a crowded field of
radical French intellectuals and artists, going back to the nineteenth cen-
tury, who came from bourgeois families they despised—and who made no
secret of it. Anointed by Francois Mauriac, who saw himself in young
Philippe, and promoted as enthusiastically by Louis Aragon and Francis
Ponge, who similarly identified with him,13 Sollers was the golden boy of
French literature in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This was the heyday of
nouveau roman and the development of “new wave” cinema (Hiroshima,
Mon Amour; Last Year at Marienbad) and Sollers was completely at home
in that milieu from the beginning. Along with his soon-to-be discarded
friends, Jean-Rene Huguenin and Jean-Edern Hallier, he founded Tel Quel
in 1960 under the aegis of the Seuil publishing house—and his choice was
prescient. Seuil was already, and aggressively, promoting the Structuralism-
inspired “human sciences” on the one hand, and “new left” politics on the
other. The original collective (no one over 25) was at loggerheads but

Quel: Theorie d’ensemble, 1968 p. 303). Jacques Derrida’s disingenuously articulated materi-
alism served him as well at Tel Quel as it did at ENS, under Althusser.
13
 Francois Mauriac was a renowned Nobel Prize-winning author, one of a cohort of
Catholic intellectuals actively opposed to Fascism. Louis Aragon was a surrealist poet and
journalist, actively affiliated with the PCF, who became something of a gatekeeper for aspir-
ing writers on the Left. Francis Ponge was a poet and an essayist, influenced by surrealism,
active in the resistance, and a PCF member until the end of WWII.  It would be hard to
imagine a core of supporters more suited to help Sollers in his ascent to the summit.
164   T. DE ZENGOTITA

Sollers managed the infighting skillfully and, by 1962, with the well-timed
publication of his own “new novel” (Le Parc), he was emerging as a leader
without rival. Robbe-Grillet himself was happy to claim the honor of being
the “father of Philippe Sollers” and Louis Pinto, in 1978, would remember
him in those days as an emerging “intellectual emperor.”
From that position, entirely independent of the university system,
Sollers was able to penetrate the academy and engage “humanities stu-
dents in their continuing search for master thinkers to legitimize symbolic
ruptures” and to decide whom, beside himself, might qualify for that posi-
tion. And certain professors within those institutions (Barthes, Foucault,
Derrida) found it advantageous to appear in the pages of Tel Quel in quest
of precisely that status. Its cachet contributed to their accumulating “social
capital” and, of course, Tel Quel could claim a certain academic credibility
in return. Together, then, the intellectual emperor and the rebellious aca-
demics promoted a “symbolic revolution as a way to integrate avant-­
gardism, structuralist linguistics, and radical politics” (Bourg 2011, 2).
The arrangement was typical of the real genius of Philippe Sollers; his
contributions to theory may not stand out in hindsight, especially com-
pared to those of Julia Kristeva (they were married in 1968), but as a cul-
tural entrepreneur in that historical moment he was without peer.
So, with 1968 on the horizon and his track record as an oracle of the
avant-garde established, Sollers found an “echo chamber” within the
institutions he at the same time scorned. His “strategy involved progres-
sive moves announced suddenly; provocations, made largely as a function
of changes in the political climate; games of contradiction; and, most of
all, criticism of all institutions. … For fear of being labeled as a follower,
Sollers constantly rejuvenated himself.” His mission was to deposit a series
of the so-called power-ideas into that echo chamber, ideas that resonated
across “texts, ideas, persons, collectivities, institutions, materiality and his-
tory” (Kauppi 1994, 37). Danielle Marx-Scouras chose well when she
called her book The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel (1996), and if, as I will
argue in conclusion, postmodern politics is distinguished above all by the
energy it devotes to expression, getting voices heard, raising awareness, col-
lecting likes and followers, going viral, creating memes—in short, to get-
ting attention—then that tendency was discernible long before Facebook
and Twitter came along. Now, most of our politics is cultural and so-called
identity politics, with all its intersectional complexity—including recent
   THE MOOD OF THE MOMENT    165

manifestations of “autocratic populism”—is exhibit number one (de

Zengotita 2006).14
The evolution of Tel Quel was largely determined by that attention-­
getting, conversation-dominating mission, enhanced at every turn by
Sollers’ insistence on identifying himself with “the collective” of the jour-
nal’s contributors and, indeed, with its whole audience (Kauppi 1994,
37–39, 60).

8.3   Julia Kristeva (1941–)

Conceptions of subjectivity that once were thought to apply universally—
the Cartesian cogito, the Kantian autonomous subject, the Husserlian tran-
scendental ego, have been challenged as gender specific conceptions of man.
Feminists have rejected ahistorical notions of subjectivity, which privilege
characteristics historically associated with men and masculinity.15 (Kelly
Oliver, introducing Kristeva 2002, xix)

A central figure at Tel Quel, and a much more substantial intellectual

innovator than her husband, Julia Kristeva was as committed as he to tex-
tual materialism. But the way she positioned “writing” as a vehicle of
escape from the Cartesian/Kantian subject that Kelly Oliver rightly identi-
fies as the principal target of so much Feminist theory was much more
widely and lastingly influential than any of his formulations. That subject
as it was understood in the phenomenological tradition and, however well
disguised, as it supervened in structuralist enterprises as well would exer-
cise a definitive influence on Kristeva’s work in the crucial years leading up
to the events of 1968. “Writing reads another writing,” she wrote, with
that air of mystery that accompanied her most oracular pronouncements,
and then “reads itself and constructs itself through a process of destructive
genesis” (Kristeva 1980, 77). But it is only the ban on subject talk that
makes for mystery here. Violate, for a moment, that ban and her remark
14
 As we shall see in Chap. 12, the rise of academic postmodernism is only one, relatively
insignificant, effect of the manifold of conditions that brought it about. But the possibility of
a new humanism is lodged in the same configuration and might, if properly understood and
pursued, turn out to be very significant indeed. And that is a task for serious intellectuals—a
new opportunity for thought.
15
 This view of Cartesian dualism as inherently “masculine” and, therefore, imperial was
more or less taken for granted by many feminist theorists. Compare, for example, Sandra
Harding (1986) “From Feminist Empiricism to Feminist Standpoint Epistemologies” and
Susan Bordo (1987) “The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought.”
166   T. DE ZENGOTITA

refers immediately to an experience familiar to any writer: namely, the way

words occur to your mind/hand/pen as you write about a text you are
reading and then, again, as you rewrite while you reread what you have
written. But Kristeva decided to call this workaday process of self-editing
“destructive genesis.” What was to be gained by that locution? Was it a
mere affectation, a fancy way to state the obvious with an oblique allusion
to Nietzsche?
Well, it depends on what you get out of it (as this nascent form of
reader-response theory was already claiming). If you are Alan Sokol or
Noam Chomsky, you get banality or nonsense. But if you were part of the
movement of materialized thought the Tel Quelians believed themselves
to be producing (not representing!) through writing—well, that phrase
sparked a vision, a vast and virtual description that lifted you right out of
your personal workaday experience and prompted you to imagine an
ongoing material process on a mass scale, a scale so intricate and extensive
in both time and space that individual writers and readers were effaced by
it, a vision of all writing about writing and all rewriting just as it actually
goes on, eventfully, temporally, materially—all the physical gestures and
marks, millions of them, morphing perpetually: type, ink, pencil, shopping
lists, letters, newspapers, magazines, books, notebooks, marginal notes in
other books that were part of the process of writing this book, sentences,
paragraphs and pages that end up in waste baskets, graffiti, street signs,
and so forth.
Infinite writing—that would become the slogan, thanks especially to
Barthes, who was deeply influenced by Kristeva, starting with her first
presentations in his seminar (Dosse 1997, 54). It is impossible to compre-
hend that vision, of course, impossible to actually perceive what it refers
to, impossible to think it in a conventional “true and false statements veri-
fiably corresponding, or not, to states of affairs” kind of way. But that was
precisely the point of the language game of theory, like it or not. And
many did. It promised freedom from conventions of language. And it
seemed to promise freedom from other, more obviously materialized con-
ventions: the institutions of an exploitative society, from its infrastructure
to the routine behaviors channeled by that infrastructure, irrevocably
entwined as they are with customary uses of language—a relation Foucault
would synthesize with the expression “discursive practices.” The material-
ization of language as writing, as text, seemed to reinforce the intended
collapse of all aspects of significant human situations into materiality—and
hence back into time, into history, back to politics. And that was what was
   THE MOOD OF THE MOMENT    167

wanted, for if violations of linguistic convention were to be a threat to

actual institutions, they had somehow to subsist on the same ontological
plane. That was why variations on the theme “everything is writing”
became thematic for the ultra-structuralists.
No surprise, then, to find that they believed in the epochal significance
of the linguistic turn as they conceived it. Echoing Foucault, Kristeva
noted that the “cult of Man” had substituted itself during the Renaissance
for the medieval “cult of God” and then claimed that “our era is bringing
about a revolution of no less importance by effacing all cults, since it is
replacing the last cult, that of man, with language, a system amenable to
scientific analysis” (in Marx-Scouras 1996, 31).
But writing was not the only path to materiality for Kristeva. Like many
French feminists, Kristeva emphasized the body and the differences it
makes. As a budding psychoanalyst, she was particularly aware of its
drives—its “pulsions” generally—and, in her quest for a theory of every-
thing, she was determined to connect the materiality of desire (the
umbrella term) with the materiality of writing. This was the task she
assigned herself in her major work, Revolution in Poetic Language (1984a),
which introduced the basic concepts she would apply and refine for the
rest of her career. As a budding psychoanalyst, she was also obliged to
come to terms with subjectivity somehow and, like so many ultra-­
structuralists, she began with Lacan’s account of subject formation. If her
major contribution to theory came in a critique of that account, it was
nevertheless staged on Lacanian terrain. Kristeva’s famous “subject-in-­
process” or “subject-on-trial” was, like Lacan’s “subject of the signifier”,
essentially subjected. Subjected to the big Other, first of all, to “the
Symbolic order” as Lacan had described it—but also to forces of all kinds,
from gravity to muscle spasms and, above all, to forces of desire.
So Kristeva’s theoretical work was a synthesis of the discursive strategies
of the textualistes and the desirants. Those appelations applied to the prin-
cipal wings, as it were, of the ultra-structuralist movement and that put
Kristeva in an especially effective rhetorical position to reunite temporality
and language without appealing to conventional ideas of subjectivity, whether
philosophical or commonsensical. “Especially effective,” first of all, because
her would-be science (“semanalysis”) was underwritten more obviously than
Lacan’s or Derrida’s by our everyday experience of the gap between desire
and its object. Ultra-structuralists and poststructuralists would theorize
that gap in elaborately various ways—but what ultimately sanctified it all
was a subjective experience of a perfectly ordinary kind. It was, to be sure,
168   T. DE ZENGOTITA

an experience that the ban on subject talk would not allow theory to repre-
sent (that forbidden function), but it was readily accessible anyway to people
playing the language game of theory. The dominating analogy from the lin-
guistic side saw the signifier pursuing (impossible) “fulfillment” in the
­signified—where “fulfillment” meant union, completion (Derrida’s “pres-
ence”). Kristeva herself was an enthusiastic contributor to this ubiquitous
trope of the wandering signifier.16 But in her work the oft-obscured source
of the power of this image of the untethered signifier—namely, the ordi-
nary subjective experience of desire—was more transparently proposed: the
experience we have of desire as never quite getting there, and certainly not
staying there. We all know what that feels like.
As with Lacan and Derrida and all the rest of them, so with Kristeva:
she too was out to dismantle what Deleuze would call Saussure’s “des-
potic sign.” Despotic because, in the synchronic realm of the code, sheer
stipulation was sufficient to command the complete presence of signified
to signifier. And it was that formal (invisible, offstage) stipulation that was
disrupted by the return to temporality and performance simply because of
what desire is, what we all know it to be from first-hand experience.
Structured by analogy with desire, the moment of the signifier meaning
something (intending, pointing, naming) precedes the moment of that
which is meant (thing, concept) and the next moment of meaning some-
thing is upon us before we have grasped that which was meant completely.
Where desire propels signification, all encounters between signifier and
signified are glancing. Time was back with a vengeance.
And so we have another example of how violating the ban on subject
talk can help to clarify theory.17 The question in the end will be—how
much of what theory was doing gets lost when the ban gets broken?
Kristeva’s use of the term “semiotic” in her “semanalysis” was idiosyn-
cratic. She used it in opposition to Lacan’s “Symbolic”—to mean the
body and its inarticulate surges and rhythms (tones, gestures) and she
made that body the driving force in signification, as just described. Indeed,
she shared with Deleuze and other Lacan-inspired ultra-structuralists a
16
 The proximate source of this notion of fulfillment is Husserl’s distinction between an
intentional relation with some entity that is “fulfilled” because it is actually perceived as
opposed to one that is merely indicated or supposed in thought or speech. Once again we
can’t help but notice the remarkable influence of phenomenology on the thinking of its fierc-
est critics.
17
 Again, I am not saying “why did they indulge in obscurity, why didn’t they just come out
and say it thusly if that’s what it comes down to?” In fact, they believed they were transgress-
ing conventional conceivability and were committed to that project.
   THE MOOD OF THE MOMENT    169

conviction rooted in immediate experience, a conviction that the sheer

force of multifarious desire was sufficient to undermine the unity of the
modern subject. Kristeva envisioned her embodied semiotic as a mother-­
womb sensational embrace from all sides outside and from every source
within, a buzzing, throbbing, cooing, pre-thetic, pre-mirror, pre-phallic
Chora18 (McAfee 2004, 32–50, 71; compare Deleuze on the pre-­subjective
transcendental field of experience as delirium, below, Chap. 9)
Now we can understand why Kristeva’s notion of “writing,” her version
of the shift to a materialized form of language specifically targeted the
synchronic abstractions of Structuralism and in such ferocious terms. She
felt as if she had to almost literally break into the timeless realm of the
code, to force an entry that would admit desire and create a space for the
consequences of that incursion to play out. So she denounced the “necro-
philiac” stasis of Structuralism’s elements and rules and showed herself
willing to figuratively behead those “imperial thinkers” who believe “that
by codifying” the “remains of a process” we “can possess them” (in
Kristeva 2002, 27–31). “Imperial thinkers” being Kristeva’s way of indict-
ing structuralists who sanctified their own subjectivities as anonymous cre-
ator/gods behind an impersonal façade of abstract codes and
methodological prohibitions (compare the account of Levi-Strauss, espe-
cially the implicit link between Structuralism and totalitarianism in the
minds of his critics. See above, Chap. 5). Her “semiotic”—the body’s
tones and rhythms and the forces that incited them—was positioned as an
ongoing threat to Lacan’s Symbolic Order because it could not be
repressed or excluded from language entirely (she began with poetry, for
obvious reasons). Working together and in opposition, the semiotic and
the symbolic constituted a perpetual dialectic that eluded synthesis, that
escaped closure (Kritzman 2006, 559) Yet again: Hegel confounded by
Nietzschean forces—and the result, in Kristeva’s terms, was the subject as
a “signifying process” located at the margin of the semiotic and the social
symbolic, always in motion, simultaneously intelligible and unintelligible.
So this, once again, was Kristeva’s particular solution to the most vexing
question for French theory, so basic and vexing that it was rarely formu-
lated explicitly, thanks to the ban on subject talk: how to recover history—
events, temporality, performance—without allowing the subject to return
to center stage? The overall solution, of which Kristeva’s is a notably
18
 See Plato’s Timaeus for this term and for his description of the cosmos as “receptacle,”
as seething matter without form, without stable characteristics.
170   T. DE ZENGOTITA

successful instance, was to find ways to demote (decenter, destabilize, inter-

pellate) that subject, to reduce it to the status of an effect—and the radical
psychoanalysts came up with especially ingenious ways to do that.

8.3.1  Kristeva’s Gadget
But perhaps the most ingenious—and certainly the most influential—of
Kristeva’s innovations reflected her earlier investment in the discourse of
writing and textuality, not psychoanalysis. At the age of 24, having just
arrived in Paris from Communist Bulgaria, she introduced a new line of
thought inspired by the Russian formalists to an influential seminar chaired
by Roland Barthes at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) early
in 1966 (for the importance of this seminar, see Kauppi 1996, 118–119).19
The controlling notion was a construct she fashioned on the fly and frankly
called a “gadget.”20 Francois Dosse makes clear how the pressures of intel-
lectual fashion among the textualistes with whom she was working at Tel
Quel and EPHE had as much to do with its creation as did the logic of her
developing theory. He describes the origins “intertextuality” this way:

Kristeva had immediately understood structuralism’s historical limitations and

intended to palliate these shortcomings with Bakhtin, and lend “dynamism to
structuralism.” The dialogue between texts that she considered fundamental
could serve to address the subject, the second element that structuralism had
repressed, and reintroduce it as part of the theme of intersubjectivity, much in
the manner of Benveniste. But in 1966, things had not yet evolved that far and
Kristeva avoided the issue of the subject, preferring to use a new notion that was
immediately successful: intertextuality. “It was at that point that I created the
gadget called intertextuality, she later recalled.” (Dosse 1997, 56; italics mine)21

19
 Kristeva herself recalls her arrival on the scene this way: “Having come to France under
the auspice of the Gaullist dream of a ‘Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals,’ I felt I had
found in this territory that stretched from the publishing house of Le Seoul to the … EPHE
… a cosmopolitanism that transcended the socialist and European domains and that consti-
tuted a continent of thought, speculation, and writing corresponding to the high points of
the universalistic legend of Paris” (2002, 6).
20
 The term carry the connotation of “gimmick,” to be sure—but it is important to remem-
ber that Deleuze and Foucault especially were responding to deconstruction’s assault on con-
cepts (including the concept of “concept”) by insisting that they were best dealt with as
“tools,” that meaning lay in their use. And this, apparently, without any input from Wittgenstein.
21
 Compare, again, Derrida coining the term “field of the mark” so that the possibility of
misunderstanding a bit of “writing” enjoyed the same status as understanding it and the state
of mind of the subject would be rendered moot.
   THE MOOD OF THE MOMENT    171

In this crucial case, we have it from the horse’s mouth: what I intended
metaphorically when I first coined the phrase “ban on subject talk” in
reference to Alan Schrift’s revealing explanation of some Deleuzean jar-
gon was experienced as a literal ban by this brilliant young woman from
Europe’s provinces absorbing the rhetorical customs of her prestigious
hosts in Europe’s intellectual capital. Perhaps only Derrida, catering to
Althusser’s materialism as his assistant at ENS while he wrote Of
Grammatology, was as conscious of creating conceptual “gadgets” to
disguise the subject’s role in the functioning of language (see below, Chap.
9). In any case, he and Barthes were only the most prominent of the
ultra-­structuralists to realize the possibilities inherent in Kristeva’s
improvised formulation. Thanks to her contribution, it became much
more plausible to claim, and perhaps even to believe, that ideas, mean-
ings, values—all things cultural, aesthetic, ethical, mental—were actually
material processes operating independently of their ephemeral and
wholly derivative subjective effects. Derrida’s famous paper, “Structure,
Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” often credited
for launching ­anglophone post-structuralism, was presented at Johns
Hopkins in Baltimore in October of 1966 (after Kristeva presented at
EPHE). Derrida was clearly wielding Kristeva’s gadget in that seminal
paper and many of the subject-avoidance techniques he deployed from
then on owed much to it as well. By the time the Tel Quelians were
meeting with Communist party intellectuals at a climactic conference in
April 1968 to realize the paradoxical dream of a “structuralist Marxism,”
Kristeva’s influence was generally recognized. Francois Dosse reports:
“This colloquium at Cluny was extraordinary: Kristeva was the diva, and
others were on bended knee before her. It was even pathetic intellectu-
ally to see the relationship” (1997, 90).
To be able to account for the functioning of language at the level of
material events without referring to the mentalities of individual subjects
was manna from heaven for Marxists in particular and materialists in
general. And, moving away from the 1960s context in France, Kristeva’s
creation found widespread acceptance among anglophone poststructur-
alists because of a striking, apparently accidental, convergence with the
Hypertext craze of the late 1980s and 1990s. There was no denying the
experience of making and using links between online texts: it just was
“intertextuality,” concretely realized, not just conceptually—but the
172   T. DE ZENGOTITA

concept ended up looking prophetic, thanks to that actualized digital

gadget on the computer. (See George Landow’s (1991) series for a com-
pelling and influential overview of this convergence.) Almost as signifi-
cant was the influence of Kristeva’s innovation on a dominating trope
among anglophone poststructuralists: namely, the subject conceived as a
“site” for contending discourses and forces of all sorts (See Orr’s
Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts (2003) for an extended effort to
give Kristeva her due in this regard).
What does it mean to be a “site” for forces and discourses? It means
that, if you attend to how things actually go on “in your mind,” you will
realize that you don’t direct your thoughts the way you purposefully pre-
pare dinner or brush your teeth. Your thoughts—in fragments of images,
bits of language, a constant murmur of sensations and impulses—occur to
you. Sometimes the thoughts are welcome (“a job well done”), sometimes
unwelcome (“why didn’t I say something?”), sometimes familiar (“home
again”), sometimes strange (what’s that smell?), conflicting, confusing, or,
sometimes—clarity; but wait; what’s next? It is also possible to identify
types of thoughts that occur to you, depending on the circumstances: now
I’m thinking “like a father.” Here I go again, “playing the victim.” I can
“talk soccer” (or philosophy or horse breeding) with this guy. The term
“discourses” is more applicable to such categories than to random indi-
vidual thought, but the leverage of agency, or its absence, is the same.
Notice when you forget someone’s name and “try” to remember it,
what do you actually do? Not much. You just wait. You consider every
little half-formed syllable that comes along, hoping it’s going to lead to
the right word. Sometimes the right one comes. Sometimes it doesn’t.
You have no control over this. You are the patient, not the agent, of an
unstoppable process of mental events—for example, this next one that
hasn’t occurred to you yet. But will. Did.
Once again, the question arises: if the basic meaning of expressions like
“site of forces and discourses” is really as accessible as I’ve just described
it, why didn’t practitioners of theory typically explain them as I just have?
There are some ignoble possibilities, of course—pretense, professional
mystique, and all that. But, once again, it must be stressed: the people
who were shaping this movement, and not just trying to keep up with it,
really believed in trying to express the inexpressible, to think the impos-
sible. And the obvious place to begin, especially if you were defining your
enterprise in conscious opposition to phenomenology in philosophy and
common sense more generally, was to find a way of writing as if the human
   THE MOOD OF THE MOMENT    173

subject was not central to processes of signification, on individual or his-

torical levels—as illustrated by the prosaic examples just given. That was
the experiment they were committed to.

8.3.2  Kristeva’s Politics
One of the problems with Kristeva’s account of the revolutionary subject is
that it slides over the question of revolutionary agency … her emphasis on
the semiotic as an unconscious force precludes any analysis of the conscious
decision-making processes that must be part of any collective revolutionary
project. The stress on negativity and disruption, rather than on questions of
organization and solidarity, leads Kristeva in effect to an anarchist and sub-
jectivist political position. … Allon White also accuses Kristeva of political
ineffectiveness, claiming that her politics “remain purified anarchism in this
perpetual state of self dispersal.” And Nancy Fraser said that “neither half of
Kristeva’s split subject can be a feminist political agent” issue. (Toril Moi
1985, 170)

Toril Moi’s cogent characterizations of reactions to Kristeva in the

anglophone academy, especially among political activists, shed a lot of
light on how theory was read in its original context compared to the uses
to which it was put in anglophone settings. Recall the contempt that
Lacan and other partisans of the “French Freud” felt for the hygienic
applications of Freudian theory to American “ego psychology”? The
­parallels are striking. The dark vision of the author of Civilization and its
Discontents ([1930] 1961) descried a destiny for humanity as ineluctable
as ancient fate in the unfolding of Greek tragedy. But our unhappiness,
inevitable by the very nature of our conflicted being, was occluded by the
oh-so-American determination to “fix” things: if not cure, at least ame-
liorate—help, adjust—you can be happier, if not happy. So puerile, all
that, especially if one of your heroes is Antonin Artaud—and who among
the creators of French theory did not sing his praises? In his agonized
staccato rants the purest poetry, the chora itself, erupted from the depths
below and shredded the façade of the symbolic as it shattered the subject
into schizophrenic delirium (See Julia Kristeva “The Subject in Process”
in Antonin Artaud: a Critical Reader 2004 (1972). Compare Deleuze
on Artaud below, Chap. 9). As Lacanian analysis offered no “cure,” so
radical art provided no spiritual uplift and, if radical French politics was
open to hope, it often seemed to be so only to deepen the disappoint-
ment when it came.
174   T. DE ZENGOTITA

Kristeva’s political “pessimism” repelled the likes of Nancy Fraser and

Allon White not only because it threatened the agency political activism
requires, but also because it seemed to entail the naturalistic “essential-
ism” they held responsible for discursive practices that enforced traditional
gender roles. Essentialism was of course anathema to all who wanted gen-
der differences to be purely social constructions and therefore pliant grist
for the mill of politics—fixable, in other words, with no resistance from
“nature” that couldn’t be managed. In fact, the essentialism rightly dis-
cerned in the work of Kristeva and other French feminists was not quite
the “reductive” gesture in its original context that it seemed to be to many
of her American critics. The focus of French feminists was not so much on
automatic determinations of character and personality by biological func-
tion or genetic program—which is how many American critics, educated
as they had been along broadly positivist lines, thought of essentialism in
relation to “nature” and its effects. The focus for Kristeva and the others
was always on experiences of embodiment, the phenomenology of embodi-
ment, and tendencies in those experiences that unfolded in ways suggested,
as it were, by bodily differences. So, for example, in “The Laugh of
the Medusa” (1976), with the hot topic of “writing” in the table, Helene
Cixous suggested that women were better suited to author an open-ended
kind of writing that speaks in multiple voices and defies closure because of
their diffuse sexuality (“her libido is cosmic; just as her unconscious is
worldwide”). Luce Irigaray made similar claims at about the same time.
The point is, once again, that phenomenology was taken for granted by
the creators of theory, no matter how intent they were on overcoming it.
It just was philosophy—and its influence, so deeply ingrained over years of
intense training, could not be neutralized at will. Phenomenology—espe-
cially in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty—had always understood signifi-
cance and subjectivity as embodied in arrangements of things and sexual
organs were undeniably among the things that embodied subjects most
significantly.
(Thanks to her background, Judith Butler was in a better position to
critique Kristeva than most anglophone academics, but even her reading
was eventually distorted by her political agenda. See below, Chap. 10).
At the same time, Kristeva was a political disappointment to her
­anglophone admirers on a more comprehensive level. After that infamous
trip to China (see above, 139–140), she would retreat, not just from femi-
nism as a political movement, but from politics more generally—from the
dream of a socialism immune to Stalinism, to put it in a nutshell. In the
   THE MOOD OF THE MOMENT    175

French context, she was only one of many ’68ers who felt the impact of
Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (published in France in 1973) and took
part in a “turn to ethics” as the “new philosophers” appeared on the
Parisian scene in the early 1970s. That was a definite moment for what we
have been calling “ultra-structuralism” in France, the moment of its
abrupt decline and imminent demise, leaving its orphan “theory” to sol-
dier on for decades in foreign lands. Of the French thinkers considered in
Part IV, only Deleuze stuck to his guns in that moment, expressing no
regrets and attacking others in his cohort (including his friend, Foucault)
for backsliding. But, as we shall see, Deleuze had always been the outlier
and his politics was as idiosyncratic as his work.
Many years later, looking back on the China trip in My Memory’s
Hyperbole ([1984b] 2002), Kristeva saw the seed of her eventual disillu-
sionment with politics in an earlier alliance of convenience she had once
embraced.22 It seemed, in hindsight, to expose an irreducible problem
with politics as such. Of the actions Tel Quel took in 1968–1969 in alliance
with the PCF, she said:

What were we looking for in the PCF? My hypothesis, I think, far from
exempting us, casts a less violent but more cruel light on the cynicism that
binds the individual to politics, on the perversion that lies at the heart of the
political institution, regardless of its nature …. PCF was the best mouth-
piece for experimental literary or theoretical work. To make this work public
in order to continue it, seemed to us imperative in an era of mass media …
on the whole the idea was to use the Communist Party, not be used by it.
(2002, 16)

By the same token, and on the other hand, in Danielle Marx-Scouras’

opinion (citing Jean-Louis Houdebine), “Central Committee politicians
certainly could not fathom what an avant-garde collective like Tel Quel
could contribute to Communism. However, if having Telquelians as fel-
low travellers meant influencing French youth and getting their vote, then
the party was in favor” (1996, 147).
A harmless enough arrangement, as politics goes, surely—but for
Kristeva, whose ultimate commitment was to literature and to psychoanalytic

22
 See Joy, O’Grady, and Poxon eds. French Feminists on Religion: A Reader (2002, 86–88)
for a succinct account of how Kristeva’s experience in Communist Bulgaria, compounded by
the embarrassments of 1968 and 1974, explain why she “spurns the group identification
necessary in both social and radical feminisms.”
176   T. DE ZENGOTITA

experience (“the only one in which the wildness of speaking being, and of
language, can be heard” (2002, 19)), such maneuvers would eventually
become intolerable. But, back in the day, her new surroundings had given
her hope: even though “[It] seemed to me completely unrealistic from the
point of view of the socialism I had experienced [in Bulgaria]. I knew to
what extent a regime born of a Marxist social mutation rejected not merely
all aesthetic formalism … but also all individual stylistic experience that
could question or explore the common code and its stereotypes in which
ideology must seek shelter in order to dominate” (1984, 270). In spite of
that lesson learned, the Parisian scene in general and Tel Quel in particular
had inspired her, allowing her to believe that “in France, it would be differ-
ent.” Her blood was up, the game was on—and she was, all of a sudden, a
rising star: no wonder she thought, during those heady days, that radical art
and revolutionary politics might yet coincide and what Sollers once called
the “great wager” of the twentieth-century avant-­garde might still be won.
In Kristeva’s particular case, the retreat from politics was especially
painful for her anglophone admirers because it was more repudiation than
retreat. Its terms were characteristically categorical, adamant. Unlike
Derrida and Foucault, Kristeva left no wiggle room, no rhetorical cover,
no way to say—“well, yes, of course my politics has evolved but I am still
committed to the basic aim of _______.” Fill in the blank.
That refusal to waffle was almost certainly rooted in the added impetus
the trip to China had given her. Perhaps only Barthes had been as dis-
mayed as she at the spectacle of that profanation—yet another dream of
justice realized being sacrificed before their eyes to the gods of power and
the whims of bureaucracy.23 But, in Kristeva’s case, it also reflected the inher-
ently personal orientation of psychoanalysis, to which she now committed
herself professionally, and to her long-standing love of literature, to which
she was devoted as a critic and a novelist—to literature understood as “free
creation,” with no apologies if a bourgeois value seemed to echo in that
phrase. Indeed, her turn took her so far off the course upon which she had
originally  embarked, that she ended up expressing a certain affirmation
that would prove more offensive to many than any repudiation, no matter
how complete:
23
 “I myself was alarmed by the profound unflagging presence of the Soviet model, the
only sign of the 20th century in this land of peasants, and all the more evident because it was
violently resisted.... I saw nothing that might possibly prevent the cultural revolution from
becoming a national and socialist variation. … It marked my farewell to politics, including
feminism” (From “My Memory’s Hyperbole” in The Portable Kristeva ([1984b] 2002, 19)).
   THE MOOD OF THE MOMENT    177

an unavoidable stage of our journey was our discovery of America. … The

Alexandrian, cosmopolitan, decadent climate of New York City always gives
me the impression of a latter-day Rome; I find nothing more stimulating to
my work then those sojourns across the Atlantic … it seems to me that the
western individual … simultaneously enjoys, in the United States, a barbaric
youth and an exquisite exhaustion. … I feel closer to truth and liberty when
I work within the space of this challenged giant which may, in fact, be on the
point of becoming a David before the growing Goliath of the [Marxist]
Third World. … I dream that our children will prefer to join this David, with
his errors and impasses, armed with our erring and circling about the Idea,
the Logos, the Form: in short, the old Judeo-Christian Europe. If it is only
an illusion, I like to think it may have a future. (From “My Memory’s
Hyperbole” in The Portable Kristeva [1984b] 2002, 21)

Once a provocateur, always a provocateur.

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Harding, Sandra. 1986. From Feminist Empiricism to Feminist Standpoint

Epistemologies. In The Science Question in Feminism, 146–162. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Jameson, Fredric. 1972. The Prison House of Language: A Critical Account of
Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 1996. Apres the Avant Garde. London Review of Books 18 (24): 5–7.
Joy, M., K. O’Grady, and J.L. Poxon. 2002. French Feminists on Religion: A
Reader. London: Routledge.
Kauppi, Niilo. 1994. The Making of an Avant-Garde: Tel Quel. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
———. 1996. French Intellectual Nobility: Institutional and Symbolic
Transformations in the Post-Sartrian Era. Albany: State University of New York
Press.
Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and
Art. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 1984a. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York:
Columbia Press.
———. (1984b) 2002. My Memory’s Hyperbole In The Portable Kristeva. Kelly
Oliver, 3–22. New York: Columbia Press.
———. 2002. Intimate Revolt: And, the Future of Revolt. Trans. Janine Herman.
New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 2004. The Subject in Process. In Antonin Artaud: A Critical Reader, ed.
Edward Scheer, 116–124. London: Routledge.
Kritzman, Lawrence D., ed. 2006. The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century
French Thought. New York: Columbia University Press.
Landow, George P. 1991. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical
Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Lilla, Mark. 2015. The Strangely Conservative French. Review of How the French
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New York Review of Books 62, 16.
Marx-Scouras, Danielle. 1996. The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel: Literature and the
Left in the Wake of Engagement. University Park: University of Pennsylvania
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McAfee, Noelle. 2004. Julia Kristeva. New York: Routledge.
Moi, Toril. 1985. Sexual Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London:
Methuen.
Montefiore, Alan. 1980. Foreword. In Modern French Philosophy, ed. Vincent
Descombes. Trans. L. Scott-Fox, and J.M. Harding, vii–viii. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Orr, Mary. 2003. Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Rapaport, Herman. 2001. The Theory Mess: Deconstruction in Eclipse. New York:
Columbia University Press.
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Roudinescu, Elisabeth. 2010. Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre,

Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sjoholm, Cecilia. 2005. Kristeva and the Political. London: Routledge.
Sollers, Philippe. 1983. Writing and the Experience of Limits, ed. David Hayman,
and Trans. Philip Barnard with David Hayman. New York: Columbia University
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 CHAPTER 9

Texts and Bodies

The written text, it is not to be understood. – Jacques Lacan

Now, I-woman am going to blow up the law… let it be done right now, in
language. – Helene Cixous
Deconstruction is the experience of the impossible. – Jacques Derrida
Power is never represented. It is not even interpreted or evaluated. It is “the
one” that interprets. – Gilles Deleuze 1962
One’s responsibility before thought consists … in detecting differends and
in finding the (impossible) idiom for phrasing them. – Jean Francois Lyotard
The abandonment of dualism and the constitution of a non-Cartesian sub-
ject demands more: eliminating the subject, but keeping thoughts. – Jules
Vuillemin, sponsoring Foucault at the College de France in 19691

A more or less random list of names is here appended to a more or less

random list of remarks bearing on what, for many critics, has been the
overriding issue raised by postmodern discourses: their obscurity. Some of
these figures (Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida) will be considered in some detail
in this chapter; others (Vuillemin, Cixous, Lyotard) hardly at all; here the

1
 The chair that Foucault assumed that day had long been supposed to go to the already
venerable Paul Ricoeur. A sign of the times.

© The Author(s) 2019 181

T. de Zengotita, Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics,
Political Philosophy and Public Purpose,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90689-8_9
182   T. DE ZENGOTITA

only point is—it bears repeating—to remind us that they all intended and
approved a way of writing that was necessarily obscure because it purpose-
fully violated conventions of language and thought. At the end of the day,
it will be appropriate to pass judgment on the value of this radical experi-
ment. But it will not be, and never was, appropriate to attack the obscurity
of these discourses (as originally practiced by their creators) without
acknowledging their experimental nature.
This chapter will deal in some detail with the French theorists who had
the most impact in anglophone settings and, at the same time, were most
often held responsible for the obscurity of these discourses—Jacques
Derrida and Gilles Deleuze in particular. But a brief account of other
important figures will show how pervasive were the basic aims of the
whole enterprise. Perhaps the most important thing to bear in mind is this:
these people knew each other, often intimately, and they were completely
immersed in a competitive game they had been playing since their school
days, often in the same school—the Lycee Louis-le-Grand, perhaps, or the
Lycee Henri-IV in preparation for the École Normale Supérieure (where
they were paid as civil servants), and from there, hopefully, on to fame as
a master thinker with a following in the popular press and a chair at the
Collège de France.2 I read at least one biography of each of these thinkers
by a French author and was struck by how they focused, with an almost
parental pride, on their subject’s academic performance going back to
grammar school (see, e.g., Didier Eribon’s biography of Foucault (1992,
chap. 1). The significance of the French educational system—the curricu-
lar uniformity, the ruthless rankings—was taken for granted by almost
everyone involved, no matter how programmatically opposed to conven-
tions and institutions they might have been. Members of the Académie
Française (established in 1635, by Cardinal Richelieu), known as “the
forty immortals,” adorn the summit of a system that invests like no other
in “symbolic capital” (Bourdieu [1979] 1984)). Prestige, above all.
So, a comprehensive insight to be stressed at the outset: the intensity and
ingenuity these thinkers brought to this intellectual contest in the 1960s
verged on the manic. Niilo Kauppi aptly called it an “arms race” of “theo-
retical radicalization” (2010, 8). Stylistic pyrotechnics were inevitable.

2
 Alan Schrift’s Twentieth Century French Philosophy (2006) is an invaluable resource here
(see especially Appendix 1). He describes the educational institutions and their roles in some
detail. He emphasizes in particular how narrow is the path to the top and how grueling the
competition.
   TEXTS AND BODIES    183

9.1   Roland Barthes (1915–1980)

We can speak about intertextuality with respect to literature, but not of
intersubjectivity. (Roland Barthes in Dosse 1997, 57)

Once again, the essential reminder—this time with respect to “intertex-

tuality,” one of the most potent of the innovations of La pensée 68, promul-
gated here in the register of a decree, by Roland Barthes, one of the most
potent of the Parisian arbiters of intellectual fashion in the late 1960s. And
it couldn’t be clearer, couldn’t be more candidly stated: here, as so often,
the main point of the theoretical innovation was to avoid subject talk.
Francois Dosse and Niilo Kauppi both insist upon the influence of
Roland Barthes on the Parisian intellectual scene after he assumed the
directorship of the Sixth Section at the EPHE in 1962 (Kauppi 1994,
118–119; Dosse 1997, 56–59). This legendary setting had  hosted
Alexandre Kojeve’s groundbreaking lectures on Hegel in the 1930s (see
above, Introduction to Part IV), and, in that position, Barthes was able to
play a role within the academy that complemented the role Philippe Sollers
played at the Tel Quel collective. Not only did Barthes author influential
papers of his own during that period (some published in Tel Quel), but he
acted as a promoter of certain personalities and a synthesizer of certain
ideas, all of them tending to displace Classical Structuralism by what we
have been calling ultra-structuralism. He often addressed his audience
during those years from the position of “We,” as in the line cited above.
There, he is sanctioning in the name of some “we” the replacement of the
subject in critical discourse by Kristeva’s intertextual gadget, the one she
had just introduced at his EPHE seminar. His papers during this period
are liberally sprinkled with expressions like “Today, we no longer speak of
X but rather question Y” and, after a while, one realizes that this is not so
much the royal we it seemed at first to be but more like a report on latest
trends delivered by the doyen of an exclusive in-group for the edification
of an admiring throng determined to be part of the conversation.
His own theoretical commitments were as provisional as they were
intensive, so it fell to him, in that position, to preside over the conventional
wisdom of the radicals from moment to moment during a decade in which
one moment succeeded another before it had been completely expressed.
Barthes was perfectly suited to this task. Except for occasional political
outbursts that seem to me to ring hollow on account of their uncharacter-
istic vehemence, Barthes was as well-mannered in writing as he was in
184   T. DE ZENGOTITA

person. His innate courtesy helped make him one of the great readers of his
time—and he knew it and took pride in it. So he was more inclined to use
his perch at EPHE to assemble points of agreement among those he dis-
cussed or addressed than he was to admonish them for committing some
theoretical faux pas. This accounts for why he was so open to the influence
of others, particularly to Kristeva and Derrida (Dosse 1997, 56–59). He
liked to accompany wilder spirits on their theoretical flights and then chan-
nel them down to earth, down to cases, down to particular texts or genres.
This may explain why his popularity in the United States extended well
beyond the circle of postmodernism’s true believers to include more inde-
pendent thinkers like Susan Sontag and Philip Roth.
Whatever the case may be in terms of character, one of the sources of
Barthes’ critical flexibility is a simple matter of personal history. For
decades, he had to make a living as a writer and adjusting to trends was for
him a professional necessity. To be sure, there were core convictions to
which he held fast throughout his career—but that career took him from
a Classical modernist stance as a critic, through a structuralist phase and
then a poststructuralist phase, and, finally, to a phase in which he renounced
all systems, theoretical and political, in favor of simple “pleasures of the
text” he had once judged inferior to the “bliss” of a radically unconven-
tional work that forces the reader to become the writer in order to follow
it at all. The career of Roland Barthes tracks the development of dominant
paradigms in French thought from the early 1950s to the late 1970s. Not
coincidently, perhaps, he became acutely aware of the way such trends
worked—experientially aware of their effects in his own mind and life and
work. For these reasons, Chap. 9 begins with an overview of Roland
Barthes’ career. It will not only identify some of his substantive contribu-
tions to the formation of French theory but also serve as ground and
context for a more intensive focus on the works of some of his peers, to be
discussed in the rest of the chapter.

9.1.1  Barthes 1.0: Structuralism and the “Anguish

of the Schema”
(“Anguish,” from the Latin: “angustus,” (narrow) “angustia” (tight))

The development of publicity, a national press, radio, illustrated news, not

to speak of the survival of myriad rites of communication which rule social
appearances makes the development of a semiological science more urgent
   TEXTS AND BODIES    185

than ever. In a single day, how many really non-signifying fields do we cross?
Very few, sometimes none. Here I am, before the sea; it is true that it bears no
message. But on the beach, what material for semiology! Flags, slogans, sig-
nals, signboards, clothes. (“Myth Today” in Mythologies [1957] 1972, 112;
italics mine)

In 1957, as a modernist attending to form, Barthes experimented

with Structuralism in one of his most famous essays, “Myth Today.” He
took it for granted that the sea, in its givenness, is just there—prior to
all “messages,” prior to culture and language (compare Levi-Strauss on
the biological givens of kinship). For a reader with a sense of what lies
in store, that casual assumption is remarkable—a perfect illustration of
how doxa passes for natural, the focus of this very essay.3 But at this
stage of the game, Barthes’ notion of doxa had not yet expanded to
include natural things; it aims at culture, especially ideology.4 Of which,
more anon.
First, a note on Barthes’ first book: Writing Degree Zero (1953) was also
essentially modernist—but conservatively so, one might say—no Structur­
alism yet, no “science” of language and culture. Of course, it promoted
form over content, this time in a critique of Sartre for his nineteenth-
century ideas of “representational” literature wedded, in his case, to an
ideological imperative—obliged, that is, to expose capitalist machinations
and inspire resistance by confronting the reader with his [sic] freedom and
forcing him to choose how to live in this world. For Sartre, that overriding
aim determined the answer to the question his book had asked: What is
Literature? ([1948] 2001). He was concerned with prose only—not poetry
or painting or music. Because it dealt with ideas, prose literature was
essentially communication, which meant that it represented the world and
necessarily conveyed a message about it along with the depiction. That left
the writer with a special responsibility. To qualify as worthy in Sartre’s
eyes, literature had to be committed to social and political ideals. Traditional
bourgeois literature, though communicative and representational,

3
 “Doxa” is Greek for “appear” or “seem”—it refers to commonsense beliefs and percep-
tions, implying that they are mistaken. Critique of Doxa was a constant in Barthes’ work,
through all the phases ([1975b] 1977, 44, 59, 85, 130).
4
 Years later, looking back on his career, he recalled a subsequent stage: “the Doxa crushes
origin and truth together, in order to make them into a single proof. … In order to thwart
origin, he [meaning Barthes himself] first acculturates nature thoroughly: nothing natural any-
where, nothing but the historical” ([1975b] 1977, 139; italics mine).
186   T. DE ZENGOTITA

obviously fell short. But so did the modernist avant-garde, which was will-
fully refusing to represent the world in favor of attending to form, to writing
itself, an utterly futile gesture of mere rebellion in Sartre’s view.5 An appar-
ently intractable problem for the writers of his time was the consequence of
this stand-off. Though he remained personally committed, no matter what,
Sartre painted a bleak picture of the overall situation. “We have fallen out-
side of history,” he said of writers in general, and we are “speaking in the
desert” ([1948] 2001, 205).
But it was at precisely this juncture that Barthes discerned an alternative.
“Writing,” understood as a form, became an artifact unmoored from con-
vention, something an author could make creative decisions about. It opened
up a path of maximum resistance to Literature with a capital “L” and, by
extension, to conventionality itself. At that time, Barthes believed, the form
of writing that best exemplified that resistance was to be found in the work
of Albert Camus (The Stranger 1942) and, later, in Robbe-­Grillet (Jealousy
1957) and other practitioners of the “nouveau roman.” The hallmark?
Impersonal description of objects and actions that eschewed conventions of
character and plot and reached for utter neutrality, a total absence of style and
value, transparent, colorless; in other words, Writing Degree Zero (see Allen
2003, 14–31). A blanket rejection of subjectivity—understood as the per-
sonal, the expressive—was the aim, a rejection that implicated both char-
acters and authors. T.S. Eliot would have approved.
So already, in 1953, “écriture” was a term of art for Barthes and would
remain so, under permutation, throughout his career. And Barthes stressed
another perennial theme in his first book as well. No innovation of form
in the arts could expect its subversive effects to last long, including writing
degree zero ([1953] 1984, 65–75). Inevitably it would congeal into a
convention of its own, into commodified doxa—such was the power of the
system to appropriate novelty. So Barthes’ political vision, like that of
many in his cohort, was darker than Sartre’s, reminiscent in its way of
Adorno’s pessimism (see above,  Chap. 6)—and certainly too harsh for
many anglophone practitioners of theory who adopted its tropes and ges-
tures in a more optimistic register (see below, sections on Judith Butler
and Cultural Studies in Chap. 9).
5
 “For the engaged writer, language is essentially instrumental. … They are transparent
signs quickly passed over in favor of the represented object or transmitted idea. Style must
pass unnoticed: ‘since words are transparent and since the gaze looks through them, it would
be absurd to slip in among them some panes of rough glass’ (Sartre’s words). In reducing
language to an instrument and discarding style as excess, committed writer fails to take lan-
guage seriously” (Marx-Scouras 1996, 26).
   TEXTS AND BODIES    187

In substance, Barthes was anticipating Tel Quel’s “new wave” program

of 1960 as well as certain later developments of it, developments in which
he played a substantial part. So his relatively tame position in 1953 quali-
fied as avant-garde in that context, which goes to reinforce our sense that
prewar modernism was, in effect, being rediscovered in France in the
1950s, after the excruciating strains of postwar self-assessment eased (Who
resisted? Who collaborated? How much?) (see Judt 2011)).
In “Myth Today”, the essay that assumed that the sea itself “bears no
message”, Barthes offered a justly famous analysis of a photograph on the
cover of Paris Match showing a black African soldier in French uniform
respectfully saluting the tricolor. That essay in particular shows that the
transition to Structuralism as a prospective “science of signs” was seamless
for him, precisely because of his original commitment to form. He man-
aged, prophetically, to put his charts and formulas to work in service of
orthodox Marxist commitments (de rigueur at the time), even as he took
an anthropological turn, shifting his focus from canonical works to the
productions of popular culture. The analysis itself is quite brilliant, but a
question arises, especially in hindsight: is his appropriation of Saussurean
formalism responsible for the brilliance?
That question raises a fundamental issue that must be addressed if the
origins of French theory are to be understood. As the French structuralists
turned from linguistics to semiology, they began to expand the original
concept of the sign. On Barthes’ account, as we shall see, one could call
Diderot’s Encyclopedie a “sign” of the Enlightenment and be implicating,
not just the concept of the Enlightenment, but its historical reality as well.
This dizzying “inflation of the sign”, as Derrida called it, conditioned the
emergence of “poststructuralist” French theory because it undermined
the essential distinction between langue (the grammar, the abstract syn-
chronic code) and parole (speech behavior, in all its psychological and
historical complexity).6 In effect, the erosion of that distinction allowed
partisans of the “new science” of Structuralism to refuse or otherwise
elude the formal constraints, the abstract structures that had justified their
claim to scientific status in the first place. That was the essence of ultra-­
structuralism. But, as politically committed French intellectuals, they had
little choice in the long run; they had to take on events in the material
world eventually; it was the only way home.

6
 See above for Kristeva, inspired by Emile Benveniste and Mikhail Bakhtin, making that
expansion programmatic at Barthes seminar at EPHE (spelling?) in 1966 (date?).
188   T. DE ZENGOTITA

In 1975, looking back on his work as a structuralist in the late 1950s

and early 1960s in his autobiography RB by RB, Barthes had a bit of fun
at his own expense thinking about his new-found freedom from all such
constraints this way:

Temptation of the alphabet: to adopt the succession of letters in order to

link fragments is to fall back on what constitutes the glory of language (and
Saussure’s despair): an unmotivated order… The alphabet is euphoric: no
more anguish of “schema,” no more rhetoric of “development,” no more
twisted logic, no more dissertations! An Idea per fragment, a fragment per
idea, and as for the succession of these atoms, nothing but the age-old and
irrational order of French letters. ([1975b] 1977, 147; italics mine)7

Barthes’ analysis of the Paris Match cover exemplifies the “anguish”

he would come to associate with impositions of rational schemas on the
flux of historical contingency to which he finally, gratefully, surrendered.
As so often with Barthes, the word “anguish” (Latin for “narrow” and
“tight”) was purposefully chosen. But, prior to the anguish, the analysis
itself simply described how this particular piece of photographic mythol-
ogy worked, how the actuality of what the picture pictured got sucked up
into a “myth” of “French Imperiality.” It seems that the “long story” of
“the Negro” [sic], one which entails “a whole system of values: a history,
a geography, a morality” and “postulates a kind of knowledge, a past, a
memory, a comparative order of facts, ideas, decisions,” was subjected to
a process that “puts all this richness at a distance” in order to “free the
picture, and prepare it to receive” its mythical signified (“The French
Empire? It’s just a fact: look at this good Negro who salutes like one of our own
boys”). Pictures in which “a nun hands a cup of tea to a bed-ridden Arab”
or “a white schoolmaster teaches attentive piccaninnies” send the same
myth-message and all depend on keeping the actually pictured reality in
view and at a distance—at the same time. That is what “buttonholes” the
average citizen, relaxing in his barber’s chair, leafing through a magazine,
that is what makes him believe—no, not even that—makes him see that this
is real ([1957] 1972, 117–118, 127).

7
 Barthes was not simply rhapsodizing here. He adds: “I can remember, as a child of ten or
so, during a winter of solitude in a strange town, becoming obsessed with the Encyclopedia
Britannica. And not least among the pleasures of that text were the surprises that attended
the order (anti-order, parody of order, Dada order) the alphabet imposed. The marvelous
semantic shifts” ([1975b] 1977, 147).
   TEXTS AND BODIES    189

Completely convincing, most would agree. Barthes was being sarcastic,

of course, debunking a pernicious ideological “myth.” But a neo-liberal
French patriot who believed that France was actually becoming, after
struggles and setbacks, the cradle of universal humanism it had aspired to
be since the Revolution might take Barthes’ gloss at face value. Such an
interpreter, that is, could agree with him at the conceptual level and refuse
the evaluative tone. A neat piece of work, then, with a claim to a kind of
objectivity and, once grasped, a fruitful paradigm with no end to possible
applications for ideology analysis. But, in 1957, in service of the science of
Structuralism, Barthes had to do more. He had to create something like a
formal theory of modern mythology.
Even in this early period, however, Barthes was, perhaps only half-­
consciously, resisting the imperative to schematize to which he nonethe-
less submitted. He resorted to what looks like a bit of chicanery, some
terminological sleight of hand, in order to exceed the formalism he had
erected while, at the same time, identifying himself as one of the fashion-
able gang of structuralists.8 He had begun the essay by hailing Saussure’s
vision of a general science of signs, a semiology that would include but go
way beyond linguistics proper, and then he summarized Saussure’s semi-
nal definition of linguistic signs that would make it all possible (see
above, Chap. 4.2). Barthes accurately describes that definition as distin-
guishing, on “the plane of analysis,” between a signifier, which is the
(sound) image, and a signified, which is the concept—and “the relation
between the concept and image” as the sign per se, a “concrete entity,” an
“associative total” (113). Then, on page 114, he again refers to the “the
associative total of the concept and the image” as constitutive of the sign.
But never again in the essay do we encounter the concept as the signified of
first order signs, that is of signs prior to their transformation into second-­
order mythic signs. And even on these introductory pages, his example of
a first-order sign—a bunch of roses “to signify my passion”—masks a cru-
cial bit of slippage as it manages to sneak out of the purely linguistic realm.
This sign constitutes, on the “plane of experience,” a concrete entity he
dubs “passionified roses.” Only on the plane of analysis do the elements of
that sign “allow themselves to be decomposed” into “a signifier and a
signified, the roses and my passion” (113).

8
 Compare Derrida’s soon abandoned scientific pretensions in Of Grammatology, or the
shameless way Deleuze absconded with the “Structuralism” label. Perhaps even Foucault was
only pretending to believe in the reality of the synchronic code he called an “episteme”?.
190   T. DE ZENGOTITA

Not the concept of his passion, but the passion itself.

It is as if Barthes is so deeply disinclined to confer upon the plane of
analysis (langue, grammar, code, schema) the privilege it actually holds in
Saussurean linguistics that the example he offers of a Saussurean sign,
inscribed now in general semiology, cannot resist the experience of passion
as it takes the place of the concept of passion in the cultural code.
In the supposedly more complex case of the photograph as an instance
of his general theory of modern myth, Barthes more or less simulated
(how consciously, it’s hard to tell, but see his recollections below, Chap.
9.1.3) an elaborate technical terminology. He was supposedly specifying
relations between boxes in the chart he created that would allow a first-­
order sign to be “stolen and restored” by a second-order sign, a mytho-
logical sign—but restored so that it “is no longer quite that which was
stolen.” We are told that myth accomplishes this “brief act of larceny,”
thanks to the “duplicity of its signifier, which is at once meaning and
form” ([1957] 1972, 124–125).
“Meaning” and “form” label the same box in the chart, the box of the
first-order sign as a whole. Considered in itself the first-order sign is called
“meaning.” But considered as the victim of myth, the first-order sign, the
photograph itself, is called “form”—registering its transformation into the
second-order sign, what myth makes of the photograph. The first-order sign
as a whole is glossed at the beginning of Barthes’ account as “a young Negro
in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a
fold of the tricolor. All this is the meaning of the picture” (116; italics his).
No mention of concepts. “Form” refers to that same sign now functioning
as the signifier for the second-order sign, the mythic sign, and making pres-
ent its signified—which is called a “concept”—in this case “a purposeful
mixture of Frenchness and militariness” (116). The myth has thus absconded
with the first-order sign in the manner just described, by imposing the
mythical concept on the unwary consumer, sitting in his barber chair, leaf-
ing through a magazine. But not before Barthes has performed an even
more radical makeover of the notion of “meaning” as defined at the begin-
ning of the analysis, when it was beginning to lose the status of concept.
We have already encountered the result of that makeover: “meaning”
becomes a “long story” of “the Negro” [sic], which entails “a whole sys-
tem of values: a history, a geography, a morality” and which “postulates a
kind of knowledge, a past, a memory, a comparative order of facts, ideas,
decisions” (118). In effect, meaning becomes anything and everything in
nature and history that conditions the situation of the saluting subject of the
   TEXTS AND BODIES    191

photograph—and that is what myth is displacing. We see immediately how

this “structuralist” ideology critique, at any rate, could be made to serve
the Marxist project after all.
But Barthes proceeded to this happy outcome by degrees. Over the
course of four pages or so, he entertained tangential possibilities and oddly
chosen examples—as if to clutter up the chasm of difference between his
Structuralism and Saussure’s with a series of incremental steps. Right after
he presents the master diagram, before he gets the Paris Match cover, he
pretends to clarify his account with an example that pretends to be sim-
pler. It involves a sentence from a Latin grammar book, borrowed from
some classic fable: “because my name is lion” (115). The sentence is being
used in the grammar book to show subject/predicate agreement—that is
its “mythical” function, as it were, and with just that much said it can seem
clarifying. But Barthes goes on to describe the first-order “meaning” as
the “simple meaning” (again, not the concepts) of the words “because my
name is lion.” Then, because it is being used as a “grammatical example,”
we are told that “I am even forced to realize that the sentence is in no way
signifies its meaning to me, that it tries very little to tell me something
about the lion” (116). Then we learn that the “something” the sentence
isn’t concerned with is that the lion “lives in a certain country” (in the
fable?) and has “just been hunting” and won’t share its prey (that is in the
fable). Which suggests, Barthes tells us, that “a zoology” is involved (in
the fable?) and “a literature” which, as part of a “total of linguistic signs”
(the whole fable? Fables in general? The whole language in which the fable
is told?) would or could be the “meaning” of the sentence if the sentence
(as a “form”) weren’t being used as a grammatical example (117).
Imprecise language at this crucial juncture cannot be accidental. It has the
effect of blurring the distinction between what is in the fable or fables or
the language of the fable or fables and what is in reality, in nature and his-
tory. The supposedly simpler example of the fable in a grammar book has
been used to provide cover for Barthes as he slips away from the formal
code of concepts and returns to the indefinable complexity of actuality—
the very complexity Saussure was abstracting himself out of in the first
place by creating the distinction between langue and parole).
The assessment I am offering of “Myth Today” only enhances the
admiration I feel for Roland Barthes when he came, in the end, to account
for himself in the language of honest recollection and simple testimony.
192   T. DE ZENGOTITA

Here is one example (there will be others)—but this one bears directly on
his experiments with Structuralism—of the candor he would bring to that
task in his 1975 autobiography RB by RB (see below, 9.1.3):

He has never worked out real algorithms; there was a moment when he fell
back on less arduous formulations … simple equations, schemas, tables …
such figures, in fact, are of no use whatever; they are simple toys. … One
plays at science, one puts it in the picture—like a piece in a collage. ([1975b]
1977, 99–100)

But Barthes’ work in his structuralist period—however disingenuous,

however playful—can be usefully viewed as a whole and, from that point
of view, it stands as a pretty complement to Levi-Strauss’ project—a pro-
totype, in fact, of binary opposition in the totalizing manner of high
Structuralism: Levi-Strauss fashioned a structuralist anthropology offer-
ing an affirmative, virtually Romantic, view of tribal myth and ritual as a
radical and omnivorous mental exercise that, in effect, “culturalized
nature.” The Savage Mind (1966), portrayed in Levi-Strauss’ formulas
and schemas, was fulfilling itself through, and in a codification of plants,
animals, minerals, weather, the firmament above and human settlements
below, a codification that made of the cosmos one coherent field of
meaning, a living assembly of mutually signifying signs that deserved the
appellation “Science of the Concrete” (1966). Barthes, on the other
hand, offered a devastating critique of modern myth as “naturalized cul-
ture,” a commodified field of ideologically saturated signs that made
historically constructed social arrangements seem natural—thus anchor-
ing the doxa of modern subjects. Barthes was much taken with Levi-
Strauss’ work and between them (along with Lacan and Althusser) they
launched the structuralist program, the new “human sciences”—those
developments of Saussure’s semiology that were supposed to overcome
humanism and bring about the “end of Man” at last. It would be hard
to overstate the rhetorical power in the 1960s of the sheer idea of these
“human sciences,” an idea the materialist ultra-structuralists—the theo-
rists of writing and texts, of bodies and temporality—continued to
promote.
But during his structuralist phase there was another kind of schema to
which Barthes felt obliged to submit, obliged again by the prevailing cli-
mate of opinion to which he was even more susceptible than others in his
cohort. The Barthes who wrote “Myth Today” saw myth at work in every
domain of modern social and cultural activity—except one:
   TEXTS AND BODIES    193

There is therefore one language which is not mythical, it is the language of

man as a producer … revolutionary language proper cannot be mythical …
its language, all of it, is functionally absorbed in this making. It is because it
generates speech which is fully, that is to say initially and finally, political, and
not, like myth, speech which is initially political and finally natural, that
Revolution excludes myth. ([1957] 1972, 146)

Barthes goes on for pages, justifying this exception in terms so uncon-

vincing—especially for anyone who has spent time with working people,
not to mention revolutionaries—that the wonder is that he seems to have
convinced himself, at least for a while. But, once again, in recollection, he
became aware of the anguish involved. In RB by RB Barthes will celebrate
his liberation from all systems—Marxism, no less than Structuralism. His
case especially calls for some serious consideration of the recurring appeal
of such systems. As this book reaches its conclusion and begins to imagine
what an authentic humanism might look like, it will have to reckon with
the apparently inexhaustible strength of that appeal. It seems obvious, just
for starters, that if something like a “religious impulse” is built into the
human condition, secular intellectuals are as inclined to indulge it as any-
body else.
Barthes’ focus in later years, as he affiliated with the Tel Quel textualists
and moved on to ultra-structuralism, would remain on the original oppo-
nent—the modern subject and its false clear concepts, instruments of
domination and exclusion. That continuity, and its overriding importance
for creators of French theory, explains why Structuralism and post-­
structuralism were not as sharply distinguished in France as they were in
the USA. The shift away from formal schemas to writing and textuality
loomed larger in the anglophone academy because, in that setting, intel-
lectually credible Marxists had been inspired by the Frankfurt School; the
phenomenological-existentialist/humanist Marxism of Kojeve and Sartre
was barely on the radar.

9.1.2  Roland Barthes 2.0: Textuality, Intertextuality

To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text … a final significa-
tion, to close the writing. This conception perfectly suits criticism, which
can then take as its major task the discovery of the author (or his hypostases:
society, history, the psyche, freedom) … The critic has conquered. … [But]
… the space of writing is to be traversed not penetrated: writing ceaselessly
posits meaning but always in order to evaporate it. … Thus literature (it
would be better henceforth to say writing) … liberates an activity which we
194   T. DE ZENGOTITA

might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest

meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.
(Roland Barthes “The Death of the Author” [1968] 1977, 147)

Here is Barthes, as usual, riding high upon the next new thing and, as
so often happened, framing it in terms that everyone who was anyone
would soon adopt. “Death of the Author” was a doubly compelling phrase
because it played upon the enduring aim of all the French thinkers who
took the linguistic turn while introducing the up and coming notion of
“writing.” Barthes read everything and tolerated almost as much and that
allowed him to internalize interesting ideas, methods, and vocabularies
with astonishing facility. And, as we have seen, he was happy to experiment
with them for as long as that seemed desirable. Like Dosse, I see certain
character traits at work here, but Barthes himself, going back to his earliest
work in Writing Degree Zero, understood his own willingness to drop a
style and adopt a new one in a more substantive way: it was rooted in a
conviction that, no matter how radical a provocation a cultural innovation
might provide for a moment, it would inevitably congeal into a c­ onventional
gesture—that being the nature of what Adorno called the “culture indus-
try,” operating now, in Barthes’ view, at the level of high culture.9
There can be no doubt that Barthes’ commitment to the discourse of
writing and intertextuality was primarily due to the influence of Kristeva
and the gadget she presented at his seminar at EPHE in the winter of
1965–1966. Along with Derrida’s account of writing as opposed to
speech, the idea of intertextuality as a functional substitute for references
to subjectivity eroded what remained of Barthes’ commitment to
Structuralism in particular and the objectifying modernist stance in
general:

with Kristeva’s presentation, a bell tolled for the scientistic ambitions so

carefully laid out in Elements of Semiology (1964) and in Criticism and Truth
(1966). This was a major turning point. … Not only did he consider this
structuralist ambition overblown, but he also considered Structuralism to be
tainted with a questionable perspective because … [it] … led to the negation
of differences between texts … the new concern [was] to make difference
the goal rather than the means of the analysis as it was being used in phono-
logical binarism. (Dosse 1997, 57)

9
 Compare Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the
Rise of Hip Consumerism (1997).
   TEXTS AND BODIES    195

As will become clear in subsequent discussions of Deleuze and Derrida,

making “difference the goal rather than the means” was yet another way
of conceiving the temporalization of static structures (grammars, codes)
without referring to subjects—precisely the task performed by “intertex-
tuality.” Indeed, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that learning to see
how that task is being performed by various theoretical vocabularies just is
learning to understand the seminal texts of postmodernism. That subject
was the main target, always. Thinking back on his career in 1975, Barthes
himself identified the underlying constant in all his work—going back to
his modernist defense of the nouveau roman: “He wants to side with any
writing whose principle is that the subject is merely an effect of language”
(1977; italics in the original). No surprise then, to find him organizing his
work during his intertextual phase around a theme he would use as the
title for his most influential piece of writing in that period—“The Death
of the Author.” And no surprise to find him assessing the difference
between his view of “Mythology Today” as an ultra-structuralist in 1971
from his assessment of it as a structuralist back in 1957: “Initially we
sought the destruction of the (ideological) signified; now we seek the
destruction of the sign” (in The Rustle of Language 1971, 67).
Barthes staged the drama of returning language to temporality as a
critic, concerned with authors and readers and the whole process that
went (mostly undetected) under the conventional name of “Literature.”
The key word being, of course, “process” and the substitutions Barthes
recommended—of “writing” for “literature,” of “scriptor” for “author”—
were meant to highlight the open-ended mobility of that process:

the text he wrote announcing the “death of the author,” which was the liter-
ary equivalent of Foucault’s “death of man” in philosophy, made a consider-
able impact. An author would be nothing more than a recent notion born at
the end of the Middle Ages thanks to capitalist ideology … this mythical
figure was on the verge of dissolving. … Surrealism had begun to jolt the
myth … but linguistics would finish it off. … In its place came the ‘scriptor,’
a sort of being outside of time and space, set within the infinity of the signi-
fier’s unfolding. … Barthes joyfully celebrated the birth of the reader on the
ashes of the still smoldering body of the Author. (Dosse 1997, 85)

When Dosse mentions the role “capitalist ideology” played in creating

this mythical Author, he is stressing the importance of the “counter-­
theological” and “properly revolutionary” intentions that motivated Barthes’
196   T. DE ZENGOTITA

attack. For Barthes was refusing, not just the Author of books or the Author
of nature (God), but Law and Science as well. Revolution indeed—and we are
reminded that this essay was written a year before the events of ’68, a period
when Barthes was intensely involved with Tel Quel and determined to show
himself as ready as the next fellow for the destruction revolution would bring.
The image Dosse provides of Barthes celebrating the birth of the reader on
the “ashes of the still smoldering body of the Author” is aptly chosen. It cap-
tures the mood of the moment and it is all too easy to forget the underlying
rage that drove the creators of theory to their conceptual extremes. When
Roland Barthes sided with all writing that shows that “the subject is merely an
effect of language” (1975a, 79), he was not just arguing philosophy in the
mode of, say, Hume or Wittgenstein or even Nietzsche. Barthes saw his cri-
tique of the Author as fulfilling “the intellectual’s (or the writer’s) historical
function today,” which was “to maintain and to emphasize the decomposition
of bourgeois consciousness.” And Barthes characterizes the intellectual’s
function by means of this comparison: “decomposition is here contrary to
destruction: in order to destroy bourgeois consciousness we should have to
absent ourselves from it … and such exteriority is possible only in a revolu-
tionary situation: in China, today, class consciousness is in the process of
destruction, not decomposition” (1975a, 79, 63; italics in the original).
Once again, the same obsession, the same mission. Barthes even man-
aged, in this passage, to sound a bit wistful—as if he were longing to be in
such a situation, actually destroying people. I am inclined to suspect him
of affecting a ferocity he didn’t really feel in order to be part of what was
happening, but, either way, it serves to make the point at hand.10 Because
he and his colleagues at Tel Quel were abandoning Marxist orthodoxy to
practice “cultural politics,” they had not only to convince themselves, by
way of “writing” and “textuality,” that they were still materialists, but they
had to convince themselves that their revolutionary fervor burned as
brightly as the Bolsheviks’ in the fall of 1917.
Barthes’ “death of the author,” which he wrote as he was abandoning
Structuralism in favor of more postmodern positions, can be revealingly

10
 On the other hand, I think we can take expressions of alienation cast in less political
terms at face value: “Like many of us, I profoundly reject my civilization, to the point of
nausea. This book [Empire of Signs, about his experience of Japan] expresses my absolute
demand for a total alterity, which is becoming a necessity for me” (Roland Barthes in Dosse
1997, 61).
   TEXTS AND BODIES    197

compared with the “intentional fallacy,” the principle of modernist “new

criticism” that excluded by fiat the author’s personal feelings and aims
from interpretive consideration of a work (see Chap.  3). In his essay,
Barthes was not just saying—as Wimsatt and Beardsley had—that the
author’s intentions were irrelevant to the self-sufficient significance of a
text. As Dosse suggests with his reference to the “birth of the reader,”
Barthes’ claim was much more radical than that: his claim was that the
reader was, in a very real sense, actually the author, that “the true locus of
writing is reading” ([1968] 1977, 6).

In this way is revealed the whole being of writing: a text consists of multiple
writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each
other … there is one place where this multiplicity is collected, united, and
this place is not the author … but the reader: the reader is the very space in
which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists
of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination; but this desti-
nation can no longer be personal: the reader is a man without history, without
biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds gathered
into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted. ([1968]
1977, 6; italics mine)

With that, Barthes promoted a view of textuality, of writing, that con-

verged with Derrida’s notions of dissemination, iterability, and differAnce.
This impersonal reader without biography upon whom no citation is lost
corresponds to Derrida’s “all possible referents” (see below, Chap. 9.2.4).
Barthes’ particular formulation, perhaps because it was so accessible com-
pared to Derrida’s, was a principal source for reader response theory in the
anglophone academy—and a specific influence on various other develop-
ments of post-structuralism as well. But the immediate consequence among
French intellectuals was that it lent momentum to the notion that “infinite
writing,” with its various ways of dissolving the “work,” the “book,” would
also precipitate the dissolution of the subject—a far more radical (and
implausible) aim. To see how that could even seem possible, Barthes’ view
of the newly empowered “reader”11 has to be set beside his view of what
has become of the dead author, now newly designated as “scriptor”:

11
 And the displacement underway is given political significance, reminiscent of the early
days of the Internet and Blogging when citizen opinion and reporting were cheered on as
the established media platforms lost control of the public conversation.
198   T. DE ZENGOTITA

The Author, when we believe in him, is always conceived as the past of his
own book … he maintains with his work the same relation of antecedents a
father maintains with his child … the modern writer (scriptor) is born simul-
taneously with his text … every text is eternally written here and now. This
is because to write can no longer designate an operation of recording, of
observing, of representing. … The modern writer … can therefore no lon-
ger believe … that his hand is too slow for his thought … for him, on the
contrary, his hand, detached from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of
inscription (and not of expression) traces a field without origin or at least has
no other origin then language itself … we know the text … a tissue of cita-
tions, resulting from the thousand sources of culture. … The writer’s …
only power is to combine the different kinds of writing. ([1968] 1977, 145)

Barthes’ “scriptor” enjoyed the same impersonal anonymity as the

modernist creator (see above Chap. 3), but, as so often happened in tran-
sition to postmodernism, the original gesture has been intensified. In the
case of the reader, the distinction between the personal/historical ego and
the transcendental ego has been pushed to the limit of conceivability—and
beyond. When T.S. Eliot identified the creator/poet with the whole of his
language and culture, or Kandinsky claimed to be accessing supra-personal
feelings, one could at least imagine, in Eliot’s case, that it was all somehow
stored in the poet’s brain or, in Kandinsky’s case, that a simple if mystical
belief in another plane of being was at work. And we can imagine Barthes’
writer along similar lines. The fact that “he” (or his “hand”) can combine
the “different kinds of writing” implies that he (or his hand, presumably
via his unconscious, as in Surrealism’s automatic writing) has some kind of
access to what is being combined. But the impersonal existence of Barthes’
reader (or co-author) refuses to be imagined in that way—or in any way,
on Barthes’ account. What do we make of “the reader is the very space in
which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing con-
sists of” coupled with the claim that the reader has no history or psychol-
ogy or biography?
There is, I think, a way to understand this, but it involves reconceiving
of the whole process in Derridean terms and it seems best to postpone the
discussion until they have been introduced. Suffice to say, for now, that
Barthes was at the time of this writing very much under Derrida’s influ-
ence. He attended the landmark Johns Hopkins conference with him the
same year he wrote The Death of the Author and, as already noted, that
essay converges in striking ways with Derrida’s more elaborately devel-
oped ideas. He even accepts, in passing, the crucial Derridean decision to
   TEXTS AND BODIES    199

think of the whole historical and natural world as “text” and that will
prove to be an essential first step toward understanding how the creators
of theory could ever have imagined that their “cultural politics” might
actually effect a transformation of modern subjectivity.12
As for Barthes, it remains to be stressed how, in “The Death of the
Author” and other works of this period, he insisted on the act of writing
as a bodily act. Besides the rote rejection of “representation” and “expres-
sion” in literature, there is a particular emphasis on “the hand” of the
scriptor as agent—it does the inscribing, out of nowhere, in the eternal
now. There is an allusion here to the automatic writing of the Surrealists,
but, more immediately, it reflects Barthes’ general determination to treat
subjects as effects, not as agents. The commitment of the Tel Quel team to
materialize everything cultural was also being satisfied by talk of “the body
that writes” (compare Kristeva’s semiotic).

9.1.3  Barthes 3.0: Bourgeois Charms

He had always, up to now, worked under the aegis of a great system (Marx,
Sartre, Brecht, semiology, the Text). Today, it seems to him that he writes
more openly, more unprotectedly. … He says this … in order to account to
himself for the feeling of insecurity which possesses him today and, still
more perhaps, the vague torment of a recession toward the minor thing. (in
Roland Barthes 1977, 102)

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1977), a personal/intellectual remi-

niscence written late in Barthes’ career, offers a unique perspective on the
structuralist “dream” of a human science he once entertained—but also a
bridge to the ultra-structuralist Barthes, the Barthes of intertextuality, who
left that dream behind. It also provides an introduction to the Barthes of
this reminiscence who had abandoned all the protections “a great system”
once provided. If I had to recommend one book by a French author on
“French theory,” this would be it. Of the hard-core structuralists (Foucault

12
 “History itself is less and less conceived as a monolithic series of determinations; we
know, more and more, that it is, just as is language, a play of structures, whose respective
interdependence can be pushed far further then one had thought; history is also a writing. …
What is at stake is to increase the rupture of the symbolic system in which the modern West
has lived and will continue to live. … To decenter it, withdraw its thousand-year-old privi-
leges, such that a new writing (and not a new style) can appear, a practice founded in theory
is necessary” (Barthes in “The Division of the Assembly” in The Tel Quel Reader (1998, 22)).
200   T. DE ZENGOTITA

was entitled to count himself out, I believe), only Barthes turned defini-
tively to poststructuralist textualism—before abandoning even that13 in
order to “transgress the transgression” that theory was supposed to be by
indulging in pleasures of the text as an ordinary reader. Graham Allen
describes Barthes’ ultimate move this way:

In order to avoid the Doxa of radical left-wing discourse, Barthes allows into
his writing themes and tones (here, love and sentimentality) which are pre-
cisely barred by the orthodoxies of that discourse. Barthes’ desire, therefore,
is to protect writing (ecriture) from solidifying into Doxa … in his later work
[he] is … taking up apparently unfashionable positions as a writer, in par-
ticular the position of a personalized, individual, pleasure seeking subject.
(Allen 2003, 101).

An invaluable resource, then—unique in its accessibility among all the

works of the creators of theory. As an “autobiography,” it suggested
betrayal of theory’s whole enterprise right from the start—hence, my scare
quotes and his use of the third person. But, in effect, the book put quotes
around the scare quotes and dissolved them. Apparently exhausted, admit-
tedly ambivalent, a bit embarrassed, above all, relieved, Barthes turned to
descriptions of himself and others as everyday subjects, engaged in their
doings, moved by their feelings, responding to the events of the day.14 His
main concession to the strictures of theory was the format—a collection of
paragraphs, loosely organized around themes, skipping back and forth
over time, eschewing any narrative that reached beyond anecdote.
Otherwise, he was indulging himself in this book, doing what he coyly
admits he had always dreamt of doing for socialism: namely, “importing
certain charms (not values) of the bourgeois art of living” into precincts
from which they have been banished ([1975b] 1977, 60).
With its lack of structure and its traditional intent—to represent, to
communicate—RB by RB virtually invites us to sample. I am accepting
that invitation. Here, in no particular order, as Barthes would surely have
wished it, are some especially charming/insightful/revealing vignettes/
aphorisms/confessions:

13
 As time goes by, talk of text “tends to degenerate into prattle. Where to go next? That is
where I am now” (71).
14
 In fact—I suddenly realize—Barthes chose to “break the ban on subject talk,” just as I
have been doing in this study, but for more personal reasons.
   TEXTS AND BODIES    201

The first one fleshes out his notion of the “temptation of the alphabet”.
This little recollection was enough on its own to convince me that Barthes’
taste for a certain anti-order was not an intellectual affectation:

I can remember, as a child of ten or so, during a winter of solitude in a

strange town, becoming obsessed with the Encyclopedia Britannica. And
not least among the pleasures of that text were the surprises that attended
the order (anti-order, parody of order, Dada order) the alphabet imposed.
The marvelous semantic shifts. ([1975b] 1977, 147)

As it happens, as I child, I was prey to that very obsession for some

months and I remember precisely the pleasure of those semantic shifts. But
it wasn’t until I read that little snippet from Barthes that I understood
what it was teaching me about Dada.
Similarly, for this: I remember how weirdly intriguing this little game
was to me as a child, but when Barthes uses it to anchor the u
­ ltra-­structuralist
disdain for origins I find that I understand both the childhood game and
the ultra-structuralist disdain much better. Early on, Barthes recalls his
enjoyment of this game:

As in “prisoner’s base,” language upon infinity, to infinity … whence other

images: that of choosing up hand over hand (The third hand returns, it is no
longer the first one). … No last word. (5)

But later on, with more intellectual concerns on the table, in a little
section called “The Abandonment of Origins,” he offers this:

By an abusive interest, the Doxa crushes origin and truth together, in order
to make them into a single proof. … In order to thwart origin, he first accul-
turates nature thoroughly: nothing natural anywhere, nothing but the histori-
cal … then this culture is restored to the infinite movement of various
discourses, set up one against the other (and not engendered) as in hand-­
over-­hand choosing.

Derrida provided more elaborate reasons for abandoning origins to

diffArence, but it would be hard to imagine a more incisive defense of
that classic move upon which so much of deconstruction’s program
depends. The aphoristic language—coupled with the reference to the
child’s game, already fondly recalled—lends a charming air to a descrip-
tion of what was actually a fierce commitment. Actual people, Barthes
202   T. DE ZENGOTITA

himself, were determined to “thwart origins” because of the way conven-

tion “crushes” them together with truth in order to sanctify its reign. If
you let phrases like that set the tone, you realize that, yes, this was a real
contest, a battle for conceptual control, a war over language, a culture war.
And Foucault’s power/knowledge suddenly makes more sense—dare I
say, even common sense? Donald  Trump and his  supporters certainly
grasped the essence of it, in any case, when they appropriated a phrase like
“fake news” and deployed it so relentlessly, hand-over-hand, that nothing
was left of its original meaning and it became a sheer assertion of their
power to believe whatever they wanted to.
In a more confessional vein, Barthes tells little stories like these:

When I was a child, we lived in a neighborhood … full of houses being built

… huge holes had been dug. … One day when we were playing in one of
these all the children climbed out except me. I couldn’t make it. From the
brink up above, they teased me: Lost! Alone! Spied on! Excluded! (to be
excluded is not to be outside, it is to be alone in the hole, imprisoned under
the open sky: precluded). … Then I saw my mother running up; she pulled me
out of there and took me far away from the children—against them. (121–122)

Or, recalling a recent experience, so excruciatingly similar in essence,

though totally different in detail:

Walking through the church of Saint-Sulpice and happening to witness the

end of a wedding, he has a feeling of exclusion. Now, why this faltering,
produced under the effect of the silliest spectacles: ceremonial, religious,
conjugal, and petit bourgeois. … Chance had produced that rare moment in
which the whole symbolic accumulates and forces the body to yield. He had
received in a single gust all the divisions of which he was the object, as if,
suddenly, it was the very being of exclusion with which he had been blud-
geoned. (85–86)

The text provides, discreetly, some details concerning Barthes’ mar-

ginality but it was little stories like these that were, I have no doubt, mak-
ing straight white male readers “check their privileges” long before that
phrase was coined. Barthes’ language also illustrates how habitually he
had come to think of the symbolic as material, as having force (“gust,”
“bludgeoned”), thanks to his ultra-structuralist investment in all things
bodily. And we also appreciate more deeply why challenging the doxa and
the proud autonomous subjects to whom it catered was always Barthes’
aim, even as he moved away from radical politics and, with this very book,
   TEXTS AND BODIES    203

challenged a new doxa he had himself helped to create. But, clearly, he

was proud of his constancy in opposition as well as the nuances he brought
to it. As this passage I think makes clear, that constancy and the nuances
helped him cope with, and even rise above, a lot of suffering over the
years—and he never renounced the stance that made that quasi-immunity
possible:

The illusion of the natural is … the alibi paraded by a social majority: the
natural is a legality. … We might see the origin of such a critique in the
minority situation of RB himself … who does not feel how natural it is, in
France, to be Catholic, married, and properly accredited with the right
degrees? … against this natural, I can rebel in two ways: by arguing … or by
wrecking the majority’s law by a transgressive avant-garde action. But he
seems to remain strangely at the intersection of these two rejections … it is
possible to enjoy the codes even while nostalgically imagining that someday
they will be abolished: like an intermittent outsider, I can enter into or
emerge from the burdensome sociality, depending on my mood. (130–131)

Finally, a couple of revealing comments on a more purely intellectual

plane, though, once again—as throughout this book—there is no doubt
at all that Roland Barthes took the positions he took as critic and a creator
of French theory because of certain feelings he had about certain things.
In a section called “Limpness of important words,” he writes:

In what he writes there are two kinds of important words. Some are …
vague, insistent, they serve to take the place of several signifieds (“determin-
ism,” “history,” “nature”). I feel the limpness of these important words,
limp as Dali’s watches. The others (“writing,” “style”) are remodeled
according to a personal project. … He’s not very good at getting to the
heart of things. … A word, a figure … fastens upon him for several years, he
repeats it, uses it everywhere … but he makes no effort to reflect further as
to what he means … you cannot get to the heart of a refrain; you can only
substitute another one for it. And this, after all is what fashion does. In other
words, he has his internal, his personal fashions. (125–130)

The art of the humble-brag as practiced by Roland Barthes (as if there

were really a “heart of things”!) reminds me of Proust at Combray, pre-
tending to think that he didn’t have the stuff to be a great writer because
he wasn’t good at abstract thought; it seems that the poor fellow was so
sensitive to the ever-morphing array of sensations he was experiencing, so
overwhelmed by them, that he just couldn’t ascend to philosophical
204   T. DE ZENGOTITA

heights (Proust [1913] 1998, 252). Poor Roland was similarly afflicted
with respect to language: “I have a disease: I see language. What I should
simply hear, a strange pulsion—perverse in that in it desire mistakes its
object, reveals it to me as a vision (all allowances made) like the one Scipio
had in his dream of the musical spheres,” and so on.
A little vanity—so easy to forgive; in fact, Roland Barthes did have a
remarkable feel for language in so many various venues, high and low, and
a remarkable talent for evoking in others the experiences that guided his
writing. Of all the creators of French theory, he was the most comprehen-
sible precisely because he regarded the concepts he developed and the
language he used as “personal fashions”—and he never lost touch with the
real RB, the one who finally wrote Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.
The ultra-structuralist Barthes and his colleagues at Tel Quel, including
Jacques Derrida, represented the best efforts of the so-called textualistes to
undermine the modern subject and camouflage their abandonment of
Marx. But Derrida’s contributions to this end were, if anything, even less
convincingly materialist than Barthes’ and so very much more obscure
that it is possible to suspect Derrida of intentional deception flavored with
mockery. Where Barthes appears to have succumbed to peer pressure, as it
were, and fallen into innocent conformity with the trends of the day, we
suspect sometimes that Derrida might have been playing a more devious,
perhaps more enjoyable game.

9.2   Jacques Derrida (1930–2004)

I am profoundly convinced, against Wittgenstein … that, what we cannot
speak about we must (not) pass over in silence. (Derrida in Peeters 2013,
162)

For the anglophone reader familiar with the logical positivist rejection
of “nonsense,” watching Jacques Derrida position himself so explicitly in
opposition to Wittgenstein on this pivotal issue ought to be enough in
itself to adjust whatever conventional expectations he or she might bring
to the reading of a “philosophical” text. Michel Foucault undoubtedly
had more influence on actual research anglophone academics did under
the influence of the French theorists, but Derrida was as well known—and
the most controversial. John Searle famously said that he “gave bullshit a
bad name” and, in general, he was the center of attention for critics exco-
riating the jargon of theory. So more extended explicative attention will be
   TEXTS AND BODIES    205

given here to his work. Let it be an acid test. I am trying in general to

show that the ban on subject talk and a subliminal loyalty requirement to
the absent Marx—or at least, to materialism—conditioned the language
game of theory and pushed it, with intent to confound, to the limits of
intelligibility. If I can bring that insight to bear on some of Derrida’s key
texts and on his project in general—and bring clarity along for the ride,
my immediate aim will have been accomplished. And, hopefully, a path
forward for the humanities, built on understanding rather than repression
and recrimination, will be that much more accessible.
Rhetoric, staging, and biography (informed especially by Edward
Baring’s The Young Derrida and French Philosophy (2011) and Benoit
Peeters’ Derrida (2013)) will still play a substantial role in this discussion.
But a substantive analysis of the inaugural act of deconstruction in Speech
and Phenomena (1973 [1967]) and of papers associated with the dispute
between Derrida and John Searle over Austin’s speech act theory (Limited
Inc. 1988) will be undertaken as well. In the 1967 work, Derrida took on
Husserl’s version of the sign and dismantled Structuralism and the subject
together. This “double gesture” motivated theory in general, as we have
seen, but the point to be stressed with deconstruction in particular is that
Derrida was working within the phenomenological tradition.15 Just as the
signifier in silent monologue turned out to be indicating, not immediately
expressing, the signified, so subjectivity turned out to be other than itself
and both foundational forms of presence were undone at once.
Deconstruction’s applications were various, but it never wavered from
that path of undoing—facilitated by an understanding of the possibilities
inherent in language allowed by, say, Finnegans Wake (1939) rather than
by recursive rules in a synchronic grammar.16
When Structuralism reigned supreme in France, Derrida issued an inge-
nious challenge. He transformed “phenomenology” by replacing the sub-
ject of experience (Kant’s transcendental subject, Hegel’s Absolute Mind,

15
 This discussion relies especially on Peter Gordon’s “Hammer Without a Master” (2007)
and the “Afterword” to Limited Inc. (1988), in which Derrida, guided by carefully con-
structed questions from Gerald Graff, concentrates with unprecedented simplicity on
explaining himself to an anglophone audience.
16
 Of special significance, then: Derrida’s lifelong engagement with writers like Mallarme,
Artaud, and Joyce. Francois Dosse claims that Derrida was actually after for a new genre of
“creative writing” (1997, vol 2, 20–21), with Glas as his principal example. Derrida’s biog-
rapher describes a man who spent his whole working life poised, and torn, between philoso-
phy and literature (Peeters 2013, 27–34, 101, 134, 267–270, 309–312).
206   T. DE ZENGOTITA

Husserl’s transcendental ego, Heidegger’s Dasein) with “language.”

“Phenomenology” is in scare quotes because the very idea of phenome-
nology depends on a subject in or to whom phenomena appear.
“Language” is in scare quotes because, in appropriating the life-world of
phenomenology for his linguistic turn, Derrida reconceived, not just lan-
guage, but experience as “text” (textile). With counter-intuitive violence,
he treated speech in particular as a kind of “writing.”17 This vast text, of
which human subjects were effects, extended indefinitely into past and
future, consisting of all arrangements of significant things that ever existed
or ever will and all possible significant arrangements of them as well:

the concept of the text I propose is limited neither to the graphic, nor to the
book, nor even to discourse. … What I call “text” implies all the structures
called “real,” “economic,” “historical” socio-institutional, in short: all pos-
sible referents. (1988, 148)

Derrida has also used the term “general text” to convey the same
notion (1982, 125–126). The infamous “there is nothing outside the
text” belongs here—and the reading that takes “text” to mean written
texts in the ordinary sense will be treated in what follows as emblematic
of the gulf that separated Derrida’s actual argument from its anglophone
reception.18
What was to be gained from this sweeping re-description? In Derrida’s
milieu, as we have seen, returning the abstract (idealized) “sign” of Struc­
turalism (langue) to temporality and performance (parole) without read-
mitting the subject was the order of the day. Derrida’s various formulations
(differAnce, trace, iteration, dissemination, etc.) of “archewriting” gained
the most traction and propelled him to the forefront, at first in France and
later abroad. At ENS in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Derrida had been
close to Althusser when he was at his zenith—his merger of Structuralism
with Marxism was shaping every debate. Derrida felt compelled to mate-
rialize his account of language if he wanted to be heard at all (Peeters

17
 The vision: in spite of the evanescence of voice, units of speech (phonemes, words,
phrases, sentences) are cycled and recycled (iterated) through spoken discourse ad infinitum,
in and out of changing contexts in changing combinations, woven together, an ephemeral
textile composed of “chains of signification.”
18
 Derrida did not, however, step in as forcefully as he might have to correct them. Most of
his specific deconstructions dealt with literal texts and he had a valuable audience to cultivate,
especially among American literary critics—for whom literal “texts” had an obvious priority.
   TEXTS AND BODIES    207

2013, 150–156). So the metaphor of “writing” and “text” was a godsend

for him, but also for other thinkers—especially those associated with Tel
Quel. Like everyone else caught up in this moment, they were shifting
their attention to culture, to signification, and away from economic reali-
ties—but insisting at the same time on writing and texts to retain the
appearance of some kind of Marxism, thanks to the materiality of those
media. Derrida was then closely associated with Tel Quel but it is unlikely
that he ever subscribed wholeheartedly to its program; he used whatever
vocabulary allowed him to make his philosophical points and still be heard.
So, for example, his breakout book Of Grammatology (1968) appeared to
be proposing a new science, based on a new linguistic unit—the materialist
“gram,” which was helping Derrida conceive of speech as a kind of writing.
But after the storms of 1968 subsided, when true believers Jean-Louis
Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta pressed Derrida in an interview to commit
to “historical materialism,” he dodged every question—and concluded by
deconstructing materialism, in its ab-solute (unmixed) form, as an expres-
sion of idealism (since only ideas can be ab-solutely pure)! The skepticism
Tel Quel’s interviewers came in with was amply confirmed (see Positions
([1972] 1981)). Derrida and Tel Quel parted ways soon after.

9.2.1  The Linguification of Everything

There is nothing outside the text. (Jacques Derrida)19

Plucking a blanket pronouncement like this from the work of an impor-

tant thinker is usually a risky business, but justified in this case because, as
already noted, this one has served as a veritable slogan, a sound-bite rep-
resentation of the movement of thought associated with Derrida’s work—
and, taken literally, a sound-bite misrepresentation that was widely and
often maliciously used against him. Rightly understood, however, the
“textualization” of everything was to some currents of postmodernism
what the notion of “sense data” was to certain modernist epistemolo-
gies—a controlling metaphor, a “new way of seeing.”20 In this section,

19
 Of Grammatology ([1967] 1976, 163).
20
 Philosophical Investigations (1953, 400). Wittgenstein used this expression to evoke
Cartesian solipsism. It shows how everything can be transformed, even though nothing actu-
ally changes, at the margin of a language game.
208   T. DE ZENGOTITA

under the banner of this slogan, I will try to recreate deconstruction’s

inaugural moment—Derrida’s undoing of Structuralism’s foundational
concept in Speech and Phenomena (1973 [1967]). I hope, in this way, to
re-present the essence of the whole project and I will refer freely to subjec-
tive experience whenever it seems called for in service of that aim.
Glossed as “everything is text,” the slogan just means that every signifi-
cant thing means something else, that everything has to be “read.” There
are no pure “foundations,” no pure starting points of the kind modernists
were obsessed with discovering or defining, as emphasized in Chap. 3,
precisely in order to bring out this contrast at this juncture. Of course, one
can stipulate a starting point as an abstraction, but only by suppressing
whatever actual sequence of events led to the stipulation. Saying there are
no “transcendental signifieds,” as Derrida so often did, made the same
point whether, like Saussure, you meant concepts or, like Benveniste and
Bahktin, you meant concrete contexts and referential fields. The same
effect was served by saying there are no “origins”21—and no ends, no clo-
sure, no first word, no last word. Such expressions all aim at the same
outcome: to get us to stop looking for a basis for thought outside the
“play” of language—another characteristic expression which signals that
we are dealing now with post-structuralism, with discourse and parole, very
emphatically not Saussure’s langue or grammar or code. There is no “play”
of language in the frozen synchronic.

9.2.2  Presence
In his early work, Jacques Derrida took up a position in the phenomeno-
logical tradition. Most immediately, he was inspired by Heidegger, who
was out to undermine Western ontology since Plato, especially Cartesian
dualism, and to rescue “the question of Being” from a “forgetting”
brought about by philosophical systems and associated forms of life in the
western history. In Derrida’s view, Heidegger was still captive to the meta-
physics he sought to overcome because his teacher, Edmund Husserl, had
bequeathed to him a dream, the dream upon which phenomenology, like
all of traditional ontology, was based—the dream of presence.

21
 Why is no absolute origin conceivable? Consider a footprint in the sand. It is the trace of
a foot, which is its origin. But the foot only becomes an origin, thanks to the trace. Hence
the chain of signifiers, without beginning or end.
   TEXTS AND BODIES    209

Subsequent descriptions of his enterprise cannot disguise the fact

that  Derrida began his deconstructing work practicing phenomenology.
Deconstruction was originally better phenomenology.22 It wasn’t a wreck-
ing machine from nowhere, peddling incomprehensible neologisms to
fad-hungry Francophiles out to overturn the canon by any means neces-
sary. It appealed to evidence adduced from experience according to estab-
lished methods based on introspection or intuition. The disciplined
cultivation of that sort of evidence is phenomenology.23
The consequences of Derrida’s analysis of “presence” were complex, but
the basic insight was not. For those who felt its full impact, it was as if
Derrida had been lurking in the wings while we had been philosophizing,
waiting to intervene at the crucial moment—the moment when it all comes
down to something. For epistemology, it is the moment when one says “This
is what it means to know something.” For some epistemologists, that
moment comes in the form of a simple sensation, for others with grasping
a concept, for others in pointing to an object. But these paradigm moments
have this in common: that which is known is transparently and immediately
present to the knower. “Presence” thus stands for foundational moments
in all the traditions of Western philosophy (Idealism, Empiricism, etc.).24
When it all comes down to this, Derrida plucks at one’s philosophical
sleeve and says, “Hold on there, I know you’re full of metaphysical excite-
ment, but are you really, fully, in the anchoring presence of the concept
‘triangle,’ or ‘green patch here now,’ or a dog named ‘Fido’”? If you
introspect a bit on the moment, don’t you find that it is corrupted in vari-
ous ways? Isn’t it more like you are gesturing toward what it would be like
to experience presence? But have you ever actually experienced its abiding
specificity? Or are these moments as you actually live them more diffuse
and flickering than you pretend when you ground your systems on them?

22
 In Modern French Philosophy (1979), Vincent Descombes—a native of this world, though
not a partisan—states what to him is obvious: Derrida was engaged in “the radicalization of
phenomenology” (136).
23
 An advocate of more rigorous public standards for philosophical justification is entitled
to demur at this point, of course. But that demurral will apply as much to William James and
the later Wittgenstein as to early Derrida.
24
 Compare Wilfred Sellars’ “Myth of the Given” ([1956] 1997), “What might the Given
be? … Sellars observes, ‘Many things have been said to be ‘Given’: sense contents, material
objects, universals, propositions, real connections, first principles, even Givenness itself.’
Intuitively, it would be something that is self-evident or certain or indubitable” (Maher
2012, 52).
210   T. DE ZENGOTITA

This is not difficult. Anyone can test it. When you gaze at something or
think of something, how much attentional/intentional flickering goes on?
How much of what a thing or a word or a concept is to you actually
includes what it isn’t—it’s context and background, various associations
and contrasts, recollections and projections? Isn’t anything you attend to
constantly disturbed by traces of these absent “others?” Most fundamen-
tally, when you mean something, isn’t your experience of your intention
actually constituted by a reaching-toward and a leaving-behind of the
moment of “touching” what you mean, a moment that never quite occurs?
That is “differAnce,” with an “a,” an amalgam of the French words for
differ (as in Structuralism) and defer—which tells us that the sign has been
activated, that meaning is now an event).
Derrida’s notion of “writing” will develop this theme, offered in this
distilled form now just to give a sense of direction. And, once again, one
could ask—if this describes what Derrida basically means when he decon-
structs presence, why didn’t he just say so? And, once again, the answer is
that I resorted to ordinary subject talk (“you gaze” and “you attend”)
while he was committed to a way of writing that would evoke an anony-
mous process of signification upon which subjects, mere effects of that
process, impose their false clarities.

9.2.2.1 Talking to Yourself in Your Head

Derrida began his critique of presence by subjecting basic principles of
Structuralism to phenomenological analysis. As described in Chap.  5,
Structuralism was a paradigmatic modernist enterprise (abstract, self-­
contained, ahistorical), but it anticipated—even invited—post-­structuralism
insofar as it posited grammar as a system of differences. The very phrase sug-
gests an immanent tension.
What Derrida did was historicize the concept of the sign by engaging
with it, not as it was defined by Saussure—but as it was used in Husserl’s
Logical Investigations ([1913] 2000). In the context of phenomenology,
the question of how signs are actually experienced could not be ruled off
limits as it had been by the langue/parole distinction.
Technical issues multiply, but the basic point is once again quite simple.
Derrida jumped on the moment when Husserl blithely supposed that we
don’t “indicate” anything when we talk to ourselves, we just “express” it.
To Husserl, it seemed obvious that we already know what we mean when
we say something because, after all, we say it. There is no moment of inter-
pretation distinct from production. The union of the signifier and signified
   TEXTS AND BODIES    211

is absolute. Husserl assumed this because, in this respect, he was indeed

still Cartesian through and through. He assumed the unity of the cogito;
for each of us, there is one mental I, and I am “present” to I. The mother
of all “presence,” as it were—at least for modern thought.
That is why Derrida’s deconstruction of Husserl’s sign was also a
deconstruction of modern subjectivity.
For Husserl, as for Saussure, signifiers had conceptual meaning, apart
from reference. “Cat,” meant “domesticated feline” quite apart from any
actual cats at issue. Now, another person could interpret my utterance of
“cat” to mean something else: it might mean “feline” to them, for example,
and include lions and tigers. The signifier therefore indicates (or fails to) a
concept to another person, as well as expressing it (see the graphic introduc-
ing the Saussure discussion in Chap. 5). But when I talk to myself I don’t
“send out” at all. The meanings of my own expressions are what expressions
express. What is Present is an “ideal object,” a concept or definition, with no
physicality outside the expressed signifier. The ideal meaning inhabits the
expression, no matter how context might vary.25 Hence, expressions used in
“solitary mental life” instantiate Presence for Husserl, argued Derrida.

9.2.2.2 Phonologocentrism
Another reason internal expressions provided that instance for Husserl
involved the phenomenology of the voice as a form of “auto-affection.”
Auto-affection means sensing yourself, touching yourself, looking at your-
self, and so forth. Talking to yourself silently, “hearing” your own voice in
your mind, is auto-affection too, said Derrida, but it has special phenom-
enological characteristics.
Speaking to yourself “in your head” is an entirely internal form of
auto-affection. If you look at or touch yourself you have to go “through”
the outside of yourself to get to yourself. But not when you talk to your-
self—the proximity of stimulator to stimulated is absolute. And not only
that, voice is immaterial and invisible, the most non-physical of sensual
media. So it is the most akin, phenomenologically, to ideal entities—rea-
son, meanings, concepts, the logos. The voice is also transitory and vibrant
and ephemeral—alive, like soul or spirit. In sum, the voice is the medium

25
 For Derrida (and Deleuze), this “inhabiting” of a material sound (image) by an immate-
rial concept is immediately attributed to the persistence of Platonic metaphysics. The assimi-
lation of modern subjective idealism to Platonism, if too easily carried out, risks papering
over how radical in their own right the abstractions of modernity actually were.
212   T. DE ZENGOTITA

most suited to what Western metaphysics has been about; in modern

metaphysics—the purely mental cogito, present to itself.
Hence, according to Derrida, the privileged position of speech, as
opposed to writing, is in the annals of Western thought about language.
From Socrates to Rousseau to Saussure and Levi-Strauss—the primordial
status of speech has been stressed as against the secondary, even fallen,
nature of writing.26
For all these reasons, expressions used in talking to ourselves provided,
not just an example, but the archetype of Presence for Husserl. To
­appreciate the power of this interpretation, one must allow the several
aspects of the phenomenon to hang together. They constitute the pivotal
notion of “phono-logo-centrism.”
This could all be wrong, of course, but it is quite intelligible. And it
provided deconstruction with its principal foil. On this basis, Derrida
would destabilize the cogito and cast it back into the spatio-temporal and
material flow of events in a world constituted entirely by “signs,” now
understood in a radically new way—as “text,” as “writing.”

9.2.2.3 Do I Always Mean What I Say to Myself?

Most of us know how it can feel if one discovers ideas when writing—as
opposed to just transcribing ideas one already has. Derrida argued that
something like that holds for what we say to ourselves in solitary mental
life as well. This is pivotal. The strange concept of “archewriting” and the
derivative notions of trace and supplement and differance all depend on
this claim.
If it turned out that you do indicate meanings to yourself in something
like the way you indicate them to another, then the unity of the cogito
would obviously be threatened. Some “sending out” would be going on
when you talk to yourself. This is the heart of Derrida’s dispute with
Husserl—the point at which they just plain disagree about the phenome-
nology of talking to yourself “in your head.” The point is not that talking
to yourself is the same as talking to someone else—just that it is more like
talking to someone else than the cogito model of consciousness led Husserl
to believe. Just ask: when I get a new idea and I announce it to myself in
my own mind, does it take a bit of time to understand? I don’t know what

26
 On the face of it, this claim is hard to reconcile with the exalted status of literacy and the
veneration of literature in so much of the Western tradition. That problem, so far as I know,
was never satisfactorily addressed.
   TEXTS AND BODIES    213

the idea is before I announce it, surely? Otherwise why would I be sur-
prised or grateful, which I often am? Even more significantly—do I know
what the idea is as I make the announcement? That dawning feeling and
the few images that accompany the announcement aren’t actually the idea,
fully understood, not yet. Isn’t it a lot like when someone else explains a
good idea to me, and it begins to dawn on me, what the other person is
saying? Most compelling: don’t I sometimes get the dawning feeling as I
announce the idea to myself, and then it turns out not to be the idea I felt
it was—not the solution to the problem, not the way back to the hotel
after all. When that happens, this process is almost indistinguishable from
assessing a communication from someone else.
There are many examples that show that talking to yourself is not free
of indication. Wittgenstein has some lovely ones.27 In effect, they all sug-
gest that when you talk to yourself the sender and the receiver are some-
how separate, distinct, different. And that constitutes a fissure in the unity
of the cogito, a disturbance of self-presence, a step toward an exorcism of
the ghost from the machine.
The upshot so far is this: not only is the subject not self-present in the
way Descartes (and Husserl) supposed, it is not unified either—at a mini-
mum, the subject that speaks to itself and the subject that listens to itself
do not coincide. At the same time, the meaning of an expression is not
fixed by the intention of the speaker. Unlike the creator of a formal gram-
mar, a real speaker in real time cannot stipulate the meaning of her utter-
ances even if she is addressing herself in her head. Another meaning is always
possible and frequently occurs. You can, and often do, take what you said
to yourself in your head and interpret it in some way that differs from what
you originally intended. Therefore, there is a gap, a slippage—the pres-
ence of absent possibilities—between signifier and signified. Finally, no
signified can be discerned that is not also a signifier, no concept or object
that does not signify other concepts and objects in the actual play of lan-
guage (parole) as it actually unfolds. That was implicit in Derrida’s denial
of “transcendental signifieds”, and the “inflation of the sign” found its

27
 There is remarkable, apparently coincidental, overlap between the early Derrida and the
later Wittgenstein. See especially the critique of private sensations and private language in the
Philosophical Investigations (1953). The common aim was to neutralize the cogito before it
gets off the ground, but convergences of detail are striking. See Preface to Speech and
Phenomena (1973, xiii–xxii). See also H. Rapaport The Theory Mess (2001, 8, 9); N. Garver
and S. Lee Derrida and Wittgenstein (1994); H. Staten Wittgenstein and Derrida (1986).
Richard Rorty makes the same point in “Wittgenstein, Heidegger and the reification of lan-
guage” (1991).
214   T. DE ZENGOTITA

ultimate expression in deconstruction precisely because there were no

original or final (transcendental) signifieds.
With the essence of Derrida’s project as I see it serving as a platform, I
will next attempt a survey of some of the consequences—the refinements
and enhancements and the overall effect, the what-we-are-left-with.

9.2.3  Traces of Absolute Mind

One of the most revealing encounters that (all agree) didn’t really take
place between the analytic tradition and French theory famously didn’t
take place at great length, in fits of high dudgeon, between John Searle
and Jacques Derrida in the 1970s. Searle (author of Speech Acts: an Essay
in the Philosophy of Language, 1969) had been a student of J.L. Austin,
founder of the field. Austin’s pragmatics was perhaps the only topic in
Anglo-American philosophy that the French took any real interest in
(besides Chomsky, whose “generative grammar” they typically misunder-
stood, taking it to mean active production, “genesis,” rather than formal
descriptive adequacy) (see Dosse 1997, 48–50). But with Austin’s “ordi-
nary language philosophy,” analytic philosophers were at last addressing
something concrete, something more historical than their abstract codes.
So Austin’s speech act theory got a reading in France—including one from
Derrida, with results so disastrous they serve in hindsight as an object les-
son in how high a price we pay when academics, motivated by politics writ
large and small, jettison the principle of charity in conversation (see
Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1974)).

It would be a mistake, I think, to regard Derrida’s discussion of Austin as a

confrontation between two prominent philosophical traditions … he has mis-
understood and misstated Austin’s theory of language at several crucial points
… and thus the confrontation never quite takes place. (John Searle 1977)

The subsequent confrontation that never quite took place, between

Searle himself and Derrida, began with Searle’s “Reiterating the
Differences: a Reply to Derrida” (1977) in which he took on Derrida’s
“Signature Event Context” ([1972] 1977; republished in Limited Inc.
1988). “Signature Event Context” (hereafter, Sec) contained a critique of
Austin to which Searle strenuously objected. The whole brouhaha was
representative of the culture wars in the academy during that period and
   TEXTS AND BODIES    215

that—the politics behind those wars—is the underlying reason the

opportunity was missed, I believe. Certainly, the particular rage the par-
ties brought to this dispute makes that explanation plausible. But the
immediate reason for the missed opportunity can be found in specific
misunderstandings that occurred at the time—and I hope to show here
how easy (and anti-climactic) it is (and could have been) to bring clarity
to this confrontation that never quite took place.28 I also hope to show
that Derrida’s basic notions (with one crucial exception) correspond
quite closely to positions taken by leading anglophone philosophers,
most notably the later Wittgenstein, but also Wilfrid Sellars and the
Pittsburgh School, Quine, Davidson, and others. With those aims
achieved, the in-­principle possibility of—not reconciliation, exactly—
but  amicable coexistence and occasional correspondence between the
analytic and continental traditions becomes more plausible. In practice,
however—don’t bet the ranch.
Responsibility for the failure to engage in good faith seems to rest more
or less equally with both parties. If one applies the time-honored principle
for adjudicating disputes between children and asks “who hit whom first?”
then Searle must bear the onus. In Sec, a 24-page paper presented at a
conference on “Communication” hosted by the Congrès International des
Sociétés de Philosophie de Langue Française in Montreal in August of 1971,
Derrida relied most on the notion “iterability” as he questioned Austin’s
project (and so much more). Searle’s 10-page “Reply” assumed that “iter-
ability” just meant “repetition,” which made it obvious that he had not
read Derrida’s paper at all closely, let alone other relevant work. Derrida
was sometimes obscure, sometimes suspiciously so—but this was not one
of those times; what he meant by “iterability” was clear, and clearly meant
to undermine the idea of simple “repetition,” insisting, as it did, upon an
essential alteration in every instance. On the other hand, the near hysterical
pitch of mockery Derrida tried to sustain in his painfully labored attempt to

28
 Searle declined to engage after Derrida’s reply to his reply (Limited Inc. 1988). He
turned instead (six years later) to a withering review of a book on deconstruction by Jonathan
Culler, a Derrida defender (Searle 1983). His “Reply” to Derrida was not mentioned in that
review. Nor would Searle allow it to be included in Limited Inc. (1988), a book conceived as
a collection of all the documents relevant to the dispute, along with commentary in hind-
sight. Only Derrida would contribute.
216   T. DE ZENGOTITA

eviscerate Sarl’s “Reply”29 got Searle off the hook.30 He was able to take
advantage of Derrida’s outburst, refuse to participate further, and sidestep
the task of explaining his initial misreading. Before a d­ iscussion of what
might have been had common courtesy prevailed, some essential
background:

9.2.3.1 The Issue of Abstraction

This method, one of constructing idealized models, is analogous to the sort
of theory construction that goes on in most sciences. … Without abstrac-
tion and idealization there is no systemization. (Searle 1969 cited in Derrida
1988, 68)
what is at stake above all is the structural impossibility and illegitimacy of
such “idealization,” even one which is methodological and provisional.
(Derrida 1988, 67)

These two quotes, juxtaposed, present the basic issue in a nutshell, and
they do it so clearly that the only wonder is that those involved (not only
the principals) in this classic academic tempest in a teapot never managed
to sort out what was really at stake. Obviously, Derrida’s critique of Austin
was only incidentally about Austin. Not fully realizing that, Searle read
into the critique a shocking ignorance of basic rational procedures when
in fact it was those procedures that were its target. A profound difference
in attitude toward abstraction and systemization, entrenched in the tradi-
tions Searle and Derrida represented, shaped their taken-for-granted
assumptions about what it means to do philosophy and was ultimately
responsible for the specific ways they failed to engage.
In Chap. 3, I argued for an expanded concept of modernism, one that
would include founding figures in several academic disciplines as well the
usual suspects in the arts and literature. I tried to show that a certain gesture

29
 A footnote appended to the name “Derrida” in the title of Searle’s “Reply” thanked
H. Dreyfus and D. Searle for “discussion of these matters.” In his blistering 85-page response
to that ten-page paper (Limited Inc. 1988), Derrida pretended that a certain “Sarl” (French
acronym for “Society of Limited Responsibility”) was the author of Searle’s “Reply.”
30
 Years later, explaining the game he was playing in his reply to Searle’s “Reply,” Derrida
describes it as “dual writing,” an effort to show and say things about speech acts simultane-
ously. He was taunting Searle, saying “try to interpret this text too with your categories and
to you, as well as the reader, I say: enjoy!” For example, with the role of “speaker intentions”
at issue, Derrida’s first words are “I could have pretended to begin with a false beginning.”
   TEXTS AND BODIES    217

of “abstraction” was common to these innovators, a gesture motivated by

the conviction that—in effect—Nietzsche, and not Hegel (or Comte or
Spencer), had been right: history had no direction, nature had no plan, and
the only meaning to be found in this un-authored world would have to be
authored by human creators in human works. In analytic philosophy,
abstraction was to begin with and most typically realized in what Wittgenstein
would one day call the “purest crystal” of formal logic in various “ideal lan-
guage” projects like his own Tractatus Logico-­Philosophicus (1921) and the
work of the Vienna Circle. Synchronic systems of well-defined elements and
rules for their combination that applied to—governed, pictured, generated,
accounted for—some domain of facts just were explanations of those facts.
They were “theories” properly so called, expressions of Reason’s highest
purpose, exemplified most compellingly in modern physics. But long after
formal semantics was supplemented or superseded by “analytic” enterprises
dealing with more elusive matters, like mental states and intentional actions,
logical rigor kept watch at the gates of the philosophic enterprise in this
tradition and enjoined its practitioners to live up to its example insofar as the
subject matter at hand would permit.
So, when “ordinary language philosophy” got underway, and in spite
of an explicit renunciation of the “ideal language” program, that standard
remained in force. When he wanted to explain How To Do Things With
Words ([1962] 1971), J.L. Austin automatically conceived his project as
“speech act theory”—that is, as an effort to classify, to codify, in the most
explicit terms possible what kinds of speech acts (besides the assertion of
propositions) might be abstracted from the historical morass of actual
human behavior along with specifications of what conditions (if not truth
conditions) those acts would have to satisfy in order to count as being
such acts. And while his student, John Searle, developed ideas and projects
all his own, he never doubted that producing theories of that kind was
what genuine philosophers did.31 Broadly speaking, then, when analytic
philosophers turned away from formal semantics and took on temporality
and performance, they took the procedures of abstraction, of idealization
and systematization, with them. So this encounter/confrontation could
and should have been a discussion between a classic representative of high
modernist philosophizing (science as the model) and a postmodern critic

31
 If anything, Searle stepped back from the casual manner Austin adopted, as if to empha-
size the modesty of his program. Searle took a more aggressively formal approach, aiming to
contribute ultimately to a scientific psychology.
218   T. DE ZENGOTITA

of that kind of philosophy in favor of another enterprise (Nietzschean

“artwork” as the model).
In Sec, Derrida praised Austin for breaking with ideal language philoso-
phy and structural linguistics, but criticized him for naively expanding the
scope of formal abstraction to include performance instead of confronting
the fundamental philosophical problems idealization entails. According to
Derrida, Austin’s project was an attempt to codify speech acts in terms of
contexts “exhaustively determined, in theory or teleologically” (1988,
13–14, 19; italics mine, discussion to follow). At the very beginning of the
paper, Derrida asked, “are the conditions of a context ever absolutely
determinable?” and declared, “this is, fundamentally, the most general
question that I shall endeavor to elaborate.” And he announced immedi-
ately what that elaborated question would yield—namely, that “a context
is never absolutely determinable” and that its indeterminacy would “mark
the theoretical inadequacy of the current concept of context as it is
accepted in numerous domains of research,” implicating Austin but not
mentioning him yet. Then he added what was, on the face of it, a baffling
non  sequitur—namely, that this “theoretical inadequacy of the current
concept of context” would somehow “necessitate a certain generalization
and a certain displacement of the concept of writing” (1988, 2–3). With
that typically theatrical gesture, Derrida put the most controversial of his
many neologisms on the table and launched into a boilerplate exposition
of the basics of deconstruction that went on for 11 pages before he turned
to Austin’s work.
In that exposition, Derrida made clear that iterability was, for him,
caught up in the indeterminacy of context and it would emerge that
Austin’s project was impossible because, as context is indeterminable, so
iterability is open-ended, nothing is ever repeated purely, some alteration
necessarily occurs. When he introduced the term on page seven, he said,
“such iterability (iter again, probably comes from itara, other in Sanskrit,
and everything that follows can be read as working out the logic that ties
repetition to alterity).” “Alterity,” a ubiquitous term in French theory,
might elude an anglophone reader if it stood unexplained in a parentheti-
cal sentence, but, in addition to other passing mentions of the necessary
connection between repetition and change, Derrida made it categorical a
few pages later. After describing three traits of writing in the usual sense of
the term (subsistence over time, occurrence in various contexts, “spacing”
into units) in order to justify the claims he was about to make about “writ-
ing” as he would define it, he said:
   TEXTS AND BODIES    219

Are these three predicates, together with the entire system they entail, lim-
ited … to “written” communication in the narrow sense of this word? Are
they not to be found in all language, in spoken language for instance, and
ultimately in the totality of “experience” insofar as it is inseparable from this
field of the mark [meaning whatever has significance], which is to say, from
the network of effacement and of difference, of units of iterability, which are
separable from their internal and external context and also from themselves,
inasmuch as the very iterability which constituted their identity does not permit
them ever to be a unity that is identical to itself. (1988, 10; italics mine)

In his “Reply,” Searle cited a paragraph on the preceding page that

introduced the three traits. In that paragraph the range of application was
described as “all orders of signs and for all languages in general but, more-
over, beyond semio-linguistic communication, for the entire field of what
philosophy would call experience” (in Searle 1977, 199). Searle never
took on the claim about experience, because “Derrida’s argument to show
that all elements of language (much less experience) are really graphemes
is without any force” (1977, 201). That is, Searle was content to counter
the lesser of the two absurdities and may not have noticed (certainly did
not mention) the radical and all-encompassing claim—cited above from
p. 10 in Limited inc., but not appearing on p. 9—namely, that iterability
cannot constitute any “unity that is identical to itself.”
With that Derrida was saying that repetition, pure repetition, absolute
repetition of anything at all—including the appearance of this self-same
hand before my eyes at successive instants, including the first and second
time I write the word “very”—is, strictly speaking, in the flow of actual
events, impossible.32 And there, in the flow of actual events, lies the rub.
Having missed this point, Searle decided that Derrida was making a
foolish effort to erase the distinction between writing and speech because
he somehow couldn’t see the difference between “permanence” (writing
only) and “iterability-as-repetition” (speech too)—which is a measure, in
itself, of how low his estimation of Derrida already was, or quickly became.
What did Searle make of the claim about the impossibility of self-identity
over time on p. 10? Was he already so convinced that this was mostly non-
sense that he felt justified in skipping what he couldn’t immediately inter-
pret? It seems likely, in any case, that he wasn’t very interested in the

32
 Quite apart from the value of this claim, it is not hard to understand. It amounts to
conventional Platonism, the kind students encounter in oft-cited passages about why one
should not attribute “Being” to ever-changing sensible/material things.
220   T. DE ZENGOTITA

exposition that preceded the critique of Austin; he just had to extract

something from it, since it purported to be the basis for that critique. But,
as we shall see, when Searle imposed the standard dictionary definition of
“iterate” onto what was a term of art for Derrida, he blocked himself off
from any possibility of understanding what his interlocutor was saying
about Austin in particular and idealization and systematization in ­general.33
Derrida’s grand style and even grander goals aided and abetted the whole
fiasco, to be sure.
Major continental philosophers since Hegel, more profoundly influ-
enced by Romanticism than they knew, have insisted upon the historical
nature of truth. The abstract was constantly opposed in their thinking to
concrete actuality and the evaluation was always the same. At best, as with
Hegel, an abstract moment might serve, by way of its distance from the
truth, to make the return to the concrete more complete, more conscious
of itself as truth. At worst, as with Nietzsche, abstraction was an expression
of life-denying decadence or, as with Adorno, a positivist technique of
domination for a way of thought so in thrall to technology that it sought
to turn itself into an algorithm. In what follows, Derrida’s innovations—
the apparatus of “semi-concepts” he deployed in service of his “ontology”
of writing—will be shown to reflect the vocabularies of his time and place
as well as a more fundamental belief (also classic; compare Kant) that what
ultimately is cannot be represented to the mind (vorstellung) at all. But he
was serving a cause common to continental thinkers as otherwise opposed
as Hegel and Nietzsche or Sartre and Foucault. He sought what truth
could be had, not by way of abstract depictions lodged in theoretical enti-
ties and rules, but in the flux of events as they are, the only place truth can
really be. If we are to recover what was lost with this missed opportunity,
we must arrive at the specific difference in Searle and Derrida’s under-
standing of “iterability” by way of this overall difference in attitude toward
abstraction.

9.2.3.2 The Issue of the Subject

For the original modernists in the analytic tradition the subject’s mental
states and intentions were ruled out of bounds because they were, in addi-
tion to being elusive, irrelevant to logical inquiry. It doesn’t matter what
33
 “I should say at the outset that I did not find his [Derrida’s] arguments very clear and it
is possible that I may have misinterpreted him as profoundly as I believe he has misinter-
preted Austin” (Searle 1977, 198). This represents Searle’s best moment in the whole
exchange.
   TEXTS AND BODIES    221

happens to “go through your head” as you apprehend the necessity of “If
A > B and B > C then A > C.” During the same period, in another discipline,
the text of a poem on a page was taken to say what the language says regard-
less of what the poet happened to be thinking and feeling when he wrote it.
The term “intentional fallacy” excluded from the precincts of the New
Criticism benighted Romantics who still thought poems were “expressing”
poets as opposed to language. The term might apply as well to benighted
philosophers who lapsed into “psychologism,” the bête noir of all who saw
the light shining from within crystalline logic. In general, then, excluding
the subject from modernist formalism was a practical ­matter, part of the
cleansing gesture (a loaded term for Derrida) of abstraction.
But for French “theory,” successor to phenomenology, the issue of the
subject was central—and charged with political passion as well. French
theorists were determined to abandon abstraction and return to history
and performance but that had to happen, as we have seen, without return-
ing to the subject and its intentions, and not just for methodological rea-
sons. The subject had to be demolished—deconstructed, decentered,
destabilized—for a mix of philosophical and ideological reasons already dis-
cussed. Paradoxes of subjectivity that were (apparently) treated like little
puzzles by Wittgenstein (do you know what you are going to say before
you say it?) were, for the ultra-structuralists, concrete evidence of subjec-
tivity’s inherent otherness that heralded the longed-for end of the autono-
mous Cartesian agent as an actual historical development, as a dismantling
of “bourgeois consciousness” and its Stalinist reflection. To allow that
subject to return to its central place on the stage of meaning would have
been, in effect, to betray a political left already in crisis.
So when Austin, taking procedures of abstraction for granted, found
himself referring to subjective intentions as well as objective circumstantial
factors in his theory of speech acts, it was not anything like the metaphysi-
cal and ethico-political disaster for him that it was for Derrida. He would
have preferred not to do it, to limit himself to public contextual criteria,
but sometimes there seemed to be no other recourse if progress was to be
made at all. As Searle patiently explained, prioritizing “standard cases” of
speech acts like promising rather than “parasitical cases” like promising in
a play or under duress was a methodological decision for Austin.
Exasperated by Derrida’s moralistic attitude, Searle thought he was plead-
ing for the obvious when he said: “Such parasitism is a relation of logical
dependence; it does not imply any moral judgment and certainly not that
the parasite is somehow immorally sponging off the host (Does one really
have to point this out?)” (1977, 205).
222   T. DE ZENGOTITA

9.2.3.3 The Issue of Standard Cases

But for Jacques Derrida “standard cases,” with their standardized circum-
stances and intentions, were idealizations that immediately returned him
to Heidegger’s critique of “metaphysics” and its lethic influence on
Western thought going back to Plato and very much including the
­subjective idealism of Cartesian/Kantian philosophy.34 Flimsy assertions
by individual thinkers claiming that their intentions are methodological
could not possibly hold up against the semantic momentum of centuries
of thought and practice built into the language they could not help but
deploy. For Derrida, “standard cases” in speech act theory immediately
raised the issue of “standards” per se.35 His moral tone, so baffling to
Searle, was prompted by the fact that standards necessarily exclude and
marginalize, that being the whole point of normativity, the whole point of
convention—and that was, in Derrida’s view, the really important issue
raised by Austin’s account of speech acts (compare Wittgenstein on
“agreement in a form of life” as the basis for language games (1953,
241)). As Austin himself had acknowledged in How to do Things with
Words, the conventionality that made his theory of speech acts possible
embraced language and custom at once. In Sec, Derrida praised Austin for
that acknowledgment, because it (should have) entailed a recognition that
“the totality of all conventional acts,” including speech acts, is “exposed to
failure” a priori and that this risk is “in some sense, a necessary risk.”
So, for example, explaining how speech acts can “misfire” (instead of
being false), Austin says:

One could say that I “went through a form of” naming the vessel [christen-
ing a ship] but that my “action” was “void” or “without effect,” because I
was not a proper person, had not the “capacity,” to perform it: but one
might also and alternatively say that … there is no accepted conventional
procedure; it is a mockery, like a marriage with a monkey. Or again one
could say that part of the procedure is getting oneself appointed. … I do not
think that these uncertainties [the latter two] matter in theory, though it is
pleasant to investigate them and in practice convenient to be ready, as jurists
are, with a terminology to cope with them. (1962, 23–24; italics mine)

34
 Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut were underestimating the reach of “style” when they said
“Derrida = Heidegger + le style de Derrida,” but as a sound-bite description of Derrida’s
basic mission, it’s fair enough (in Gutting 2013, 57).
35
 If anything like “sponging” was going on, Derrida’s accusatory finger was pointed at the
standard cases, not the parasites. His argument was always that standard cases depend on
marginal ones, as an intrinsic condition of their possibility.
   TEXTS AND BODIES    223

To Derrida, this shows that Austin was fully aware of the impossibility of
“capturing” in “theory” the complexity of events as they really are. The
idea that “part of the procedure” (the “convention” that Derrida believes
is what ought to be at issue here) might include “getting oneself appointed”
to the priesthood in order to perform a marriage ceremony successfully is
especially revealing. Imagine asking Austin, as Derrida is in effect doing
when he claims that context is indeterminable, “well, how about the his-
torical process of establishing the priesthood itself—isn’t that also ‘part of
the procedure’?” Austin—a jolly chap, it seems—would, in congenial cir-
cumstances, most likely say, “Well, my dear boy (for only an excitable youth
who had fallen in with some mad German on holiday would ask such a
question), you can draw the line wherever you like, of course, but given my
heavy teaching schedule, I choose to draw it narrowly enough so that I can
actually finish a book on ‘speech act theory’—ha, ha-hah!”36 That’s what
Austin means when he says that these kinds of infelicities don’t matter in
theory—because the latter two infelicities point to eventualities that his
theory was not designed to cover. The whole appeal of theory, for Austin—a
classic modernist—was that it was formally limited. Its elements and rules
were defined by theorists to explain (generate, cover, account for) whatever
domain of idealized facts the theory itself had abstracted from the morass
of ongoing actuality. In the  case  of speech act theory, that domain con-
sisted of certain speech acts (promising, ordering, apologizing etc.) defined
by the theorist and taking place under normal circumstances, as “seriously
intended” and so forth—that is, “standard cases.” Obviously, only a lunatic
would try to codify actuality in its ongoing open-endedness—which is, of
course, why Derrida was suspicious of codification in the first place.
For Derrida the act of codification, of abstraction, of idealization—of
“theory” in the analytic sense—is itself, at best, a powerfully consequential
practice determined by a certain tradition of rational inquiry we cannot do
without (the sciences) and also, at worst, an act of violence committed
upon actuality in its ongoing open-endedness, sometimes with political
and social consequences (compare the Frankfurt School on Enlightenment
reason). If Derrida had political commitments (as opposed to political
positions he affiliated himself with in order to fit in at various junctures in
his career), they derived directly from his appreciation of the danger of
36
 This is intended to be more than amusing. Derrida’s pivotal chapter in Of Grammatology
(1967c) is called “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing.” It concerns the
socio-political artificiality, the conventionality of the “book”—illusion of containment and
completion.
224   T. DE ZENGOTITA

absolute idealization, even, perhaps especially, if the idealized absolute was

“materialism” (see above, Introduction to Chap. 9.2). From the mid-­
1990s on, however, as political pressures enforcing conformity eased,
Derrida allowed himself to articulate his real political position, such as it
was. “Democracy a venir” was the notion that dominated his later works,
those explicitly concerned with ethics and politics (Spectres of Marx (1993),
The Politics of Friendship (1994), Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (2004))
(see Daniel Mathews http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/04/16/
the-democracy-to-come-notes-on-the-thought-of-jacques-derrida/).
These ruminations deserve to be called his real political position, I think,
simply because they mirror so faithfully what he had been saying about the
role of ideal concepts ever since he first addressed Husserl’s account of
geometry at the beginning of his career (see below, Chap. 9.2.4.1). They
are, almost by definition, unrealizable—and hence necessarily violent
when politically applied by fanatics. On the other hand, we can’t do with-
out them, at least not at this moment in our history—and they can be
managed if we act politically in the light of ideals whose fulfillment we, at
the same time, perpetually defer.
Very reasonable—and at the end of the day we are justified, I think, in
recognizing something like a run-of-the-mill American liberal as the
author of the dazzling and confounding display that was the discourse of
Jacques Derrida.
In any case, the irony here is that a view of idealized concepts that
counseled caution in political application inspired the boldest interven-
tions in philosophizing. Unlike Searle, Derrida wanted philosophy to con-
cern itself, directly and immediately, with ongoing actuality and our (dis)
place(ment) in it.37 So, from Derrida’s point of view, it was all the more
egregious of Austin, in light of his recognition of how so many actual
conditions on speech acts inevitably escape theoretical containment, to
blithely proceed with “standard cases” as if those that fell short of that
standard were “external” or “accidental” when, in actuality, they just were
the way actual speech acts actually work! (1988, 15).
In summary, then, Derrida was in general obsessed with a Nietzschean
“violence” inherent in language and impossible to avoid, a gesture of
exclusion built into the very nature of categories and concepts—philo-
sophical ones being especially consequential for the culture as a whole.
Systematic thinkers who took “standard cases” as given for the purposes of
specific explanatory projects were complicit in the institutionalization of
37
 My apologies, but just had to coin at least one of those little parentheses gizmos of my
own.
   TEXTS AND BODIES    225

those conventional conceptual foundations, including especially the sub-

ject/object distinction, but also being/becoming, intelligible/sensible,
nature/culture, and other value-laden conceptual “binaries” that shaped
Western discourses. They were, in Derrida’s view, abandoning the primary
duty of thought—to critically examine just those categories and turn the
mind toward the living world. Hence, the moral tone.
Overwrought, out of proportion—a bit sophomoric? That’s as may be.
But it is quite intelligible and brings us to the crux of the matter as far as
Derrida was concerned. As he put it years later,

It is impossible or illegitimate to form a philosophical concept outside this

logic of all or nothing. But one can (and it is what I try to do elsewhere) think
or deconstruct the concept of concept otherwise … of which I say—as of
other analogous motifs, iterability for example, about which there will be
much to re-discuss—that they are not entirely words or concepts. (1988, 117)

And the question to ask of Derrida at the end of the day becomes: to
what extent can one really do that? If the procedure of deconstruction was
meant to haunt the scene of traditional ontology,38 finding ways to “belong
without belonging to the class of concepts of which it must render an
accounting, to the theoretical space that it organizes in a (as I often say)
‘quasi’ transcendental manner” (1988, 127). What value was added by
this ghost?

9.2.4  Derrida’s “Ontology”
For the educated anglophone reader committed to giving Derrida in par-
ticular and French theory in general a fair reading, this passing remark in
a letter Derrida wrote to a friend should be attached like a mezuzah to the
portal that leads to their work; I repeat it here: “I am profoundly con-
vinced, against Wittgenstein ... that, what we cannot speak about we must
(not) pass over in silence” (see, once again, Gutting’s Thinking the
Impossible). That’s why explaining Derrida in conventional prose leads
inevitably to a confetti of scare quotes—beginning with the title of this
section. In fact, his whole enterprise is aptly introduced simply by noticing
that. Making us suspicious of philosophical concepts was his basic aim
and—once again, not for the first or last time—he shared that aim with the
38
 Derrida’s term “hauntology” might have been used instead of scare quotes in the title of
the next section—but I decided against it because, for many people, annoying puns are one
of the most off-putting of all the stylistic conceits in his repertoire.
226   T. DE ZENGOTITA

later Wittgenstein.39 Wittgenstein’s strategy and style may have been more
effective than Derrida’s (I think so), but both were coping with the same
moment in the history of philosophy’s linguistic turn as it was realized in
their different traditions—the moment when language confronts its limits.
That is why it would be wrong to speak of a Derridean ontology in the
traditional sense; it cannot “say” anything to describe the unrepresentable.
Instead, it contrives to participate in it, to evoke it. In place of Wittgenstein’s
early silence and his later riddles, Derrida offers a torrent of fluidly related
“semi-concepts” that are supposed to accomplish this feat.
The question of the value of a philosophy that relies on semi-concepts
and their elusive effects remains open, of course—a separate question. The
point here is that Derrida was quite candid about his program. There were
no middle-range issues for him. Every text, every artwork was immediately
revealed as subject to (or disruptive of) classic metaphysical categories and
deconstruction was the way to (partial) emancipation in each case. One by
one, case by case—the metaphysical oppressor was what Derrida always
found and, like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s terminator, gunning for it was
all he did. J.L. Austin’s modest undertaking was but one in a long line of
metaphysically dominated projects he solicited in the name of shaking up
the whole.40

– Derrida’s dream
Deep down, my desire to write is the desire for an exhaustive chronicle …
the thing I’d like to have written is just that: a “total” diary. (Derrida in
Peeters 2013, 290)

According to his biographer, Jacques Derrida had fantasized since his

teens about an “absolute” autobiography. It “had first given him his han-
kering to write” and lay behind his lifelong habit, a nightmare for his
archivists, of keeping everything he ever wrote, every scrap of paper.
Derrida himself referred to this “wild desire to preserve everything,”
­saying he was “obsessed with the structure of survival of each of these bits
of paper, these traces” (Derrida in Peeters 2013, 2–4). Given the unrelent-
ing efforts of French theory to dismantle the subject, this autobiographical

39
 “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and
language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Wittgenstein 1953, 115).
40
 In the originary essay “DifferAnce” ([1967e] 2001), Derrida invoked the names of
Freud, Nietzsche, and Levinas as representative of an “epoch” determined to make the tra-
ditional ontology of Being and beings “shake all over” (1973, 153).
   TEXTS AND BODIES    227

longing in Derrida can come as a surprise. But the key to understanding

lies in the impossibility of satisfying that longing—and in the aura of those
“traces.” In fact, thinking about traces in this way, on the level of ordinary
experience, including the furniture of one’s everyday life (this old paper-
back I had in college, that knick-knack from the shore), takes us to the
motivating heart of Derrida’s “quasi-transcendental” project. One need
only (but vastly) expand the scope to get a sense of Derrida’s updated
(linguified) version of continental philosophy, his “ontology” of “writ-
ing,” and the role of iterability in it.

9.2.4.1 “Writing” and Possibility

After declaring that “all possible referents” were included in his newly
constructed concept of “text” (See above, introduction to Chap. 9.2),
Derrida went on to say,

That does not mean that all referents are suspended, denied, or enclosed in
a book, as people have … accused me of believing. But it does mean that
every referent, all reality, has the structure of a differential trace, and that
one cannot refer to this “real” except in an interpretive experience. The lat-
ter neither yields meaning nor assumes it except in a movement of differential
referring. (1988, 148; italics mine)

This “ontology” should be accessible (if not acceptable) to any informed

anglophone reader willing to exercise a little imagination. The notions
“text” and “trace,” expanded to encompass all interpretable reality, might
be too capacious to be of much use, but it is as understandable, in its way,
as the idea of the set of all possible propositions describing all possible
states of affairs in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. A bit baggier, to be sure, since
it is not confined to factual assertions but includes all possible “interpre-
tive experience,” which is not as well-defined a notion as “assertion” seems
to be (“seems” because Wittgenstein could not give an example of a sim-
ple object and its name and so could not give an example of an atomic
proposition either). The upshot is that, in the absence of pure givens
(presence, transcendental signified, etc.), everything we experience is
already interpreted in terms of something else. That “else” is the ­destination,
so to speak, of all interpretive acts (which “take time”), and that is what
Derrida means by the “movement of differential referring.”
And that movement is what matters most if we are to glean an under-
standing of Derrida’s quasi-ontology from his dispute with Searle.
Movement is built into the semi-concept “writing-as-trace.” On the subject
228   T. DE ZENGOTITA

talk level, it’s like this: the words you are reading are traces of my thoughts
and actions. That’s step one. Now zoom in to your actual experience of
reading them and/or my writing them. Those processes involve, in com-
pressed form, specific motions of their own from trace (trace of the imme-
diately preceding “from,” trace of preceding appearance of “trace,” trace of
the anticipated appearance of “trace”) to trace (trace of the preceding
“trace,” as these parentheses are a trace of the preceding parentheses). And
so on.41
Derrida himself could not stoop to such examples of the “structure of
the differential trace” for reasons already established—he was committed
to construing the subjective aspects (you and me, consciousness) of the
processes just described as “effects” of the materials involved (effects of
“writing,” of the gram, of the mark, of the trace, etc.) and, just as impor-
tant, committed to the literary/philosophical challenge of crafting his
own writing so as to reflect that “ontological” situation. But you can be
sure he did the phenomenology I’ve just recreated and then erased the
subject from his account of it. That is how to read Derrida. Note, by way
of confirmation and a harbinger of our eventual return to the notion “iter-
ability,” that no appearance of the word “trace” in the last two paragraphs
was really (experientially or literally) the same as any other.
Derrida launched his career with a critique of static (present) “ideality”
in Husserl’s Origins of Geometry ([1962] 1989), aiming to undo the atem-
poral abstractionist tendencies of early phenomenology. Heidegger won
him over by showing that time was the meaning of Being and Dasein the
perpetual becoming of that meaning. Heidegger’s basal insight on
Derrida’s reading of him was this: like (or as) consciousness itself—mean-
ing, significance, has to happen. Meaningful distinctions are not mere dif-
ferences, as in an abstract code, as in Saussure’s grammar—they have to
occur. They are events—possibilities made real, realized, and then, with
time or as time, undone and deferred, “effaced” forever, never to be purely
repeated but only iterated in significations to come.42 For Derrida, any
philosophy that will not deal with that eventfulness has turned away from

41
 It seems that the French word translated as “trace” carries immediate connotations of
tracking, of spoor.
42
 The intensity of the poststructuralist commitment to temporality was, as already noted,
pungently expressed by Julia Kristeva when she described how “writing” targets what she
called the “necrophiliac” stasis of Structuralism’s elements and rules and Structuralism’s
“imperial thinkers” who believe “that by codifying” the “remains of a process” we “can pos-
sess them” (in Kristeva 2002, 27–31).
   TEXTS AND BODIES    229

truth and any philosophy that deals authentically with eventfulness will
never arrive at truth.43 This ontology of “writing” was only the latest in a
long line of proposals by continental philosophers out to capture or (for
postmoderns) to evoke ongoing eventfulness. It is Derrida’s dream of the
absolute diary projected onto a level that transcends individual subjects, a
level on which all actual and possible subjects appear as effects, or potential
effects, of the play of a “writing” coextensive with the “entire field of what
philosophy would call experience” (this is a linguistic version of what
Husserl’s eidetic study of the personal-historical ego’s experience pro-
duced on the transcendental level). Searle may be forgiven for not getting
all that out of Derrida’s little critique of Austin, even if he read it care-
fully—but that is its basis.
Now, consider this:

Imagine a writing whose code would be … known, as secret cipher, by only

two “subjects.” Could we maintain that, following the death of the receiver,
or even of both partners, the mark left by one of them is still writing? Yes, to
the extent that, organized by a code, even an unknown and nonlinguistic one
[the “general text” again] … the possibility of repeating and thus of identi-
fying the marks is implicit … making it … communicable, transmittable,
decipherable, iterable for a third, and hence for every possible user in general.
To be what it is, all writing must, therefore, be capable of functioning in the
radical absence of every empirically determined receiver in general. (Derrida
[1977] 1988, 7; italics mine)

Searle launched his “Reply to Derrida” by quoting this passage. He

read it, correctly, as an attack on the use of “intended meaning” in a the-
ory of speech acts, but didn’t seem to realize that it was also an attack on
the very idea of such a theory. Perhaps for that reason, he chose to men-
tion only the absence of “empirically determinable receivers” and ignored
the affirmative claim about “every possible user.” But that affirmative
assertion makes for an “ontology” in which possibility is as constitutive of
significance as the “writing” in which significance is lodged.44 Above all, it

43
 “Intentionality [in Husserl’s sense] cannot and should not attain the plenitude toward
which it nonetheless inevitably tends. Plenitude is its telos … [but] if it is attained, it, as well
as intention both disappear, are paralyzed, immobilized, or die” (1988, 129).
44
 Compare Heidegger’s account of the possibilities lodged in tools, settings, and projects
in Being and Time (1927). Appropriated by many American pragmatists, that account reso-
nates with Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the use of words in concert with customary activities,
and in the unrealized possibilities implicit in those language games described in the
Philosophical Investigations (1953).
230   T. DE ZENGOTITA

is the essentially unrealized nature of possibilities that is violated by any

attempt to contain them in a formal theory—or, indeed, in any system of
well-defined concepts that gets entrenched in discursive practices. At the
same time, it is obvious that, being the creatures we are, we cannot do
without such practices and, for us in particular, without the architectonic
of the Western tradition. Hence, Derrida’s oft-repeated insistence that he
wasn’t out to do away with standard “metaphysical” binaries like subject/
object, being/becoming, intelligible/sensible, nature/culture. He could
only “disturb” them so as to afford intimations of the ongoing actualities
they mask in their attempt to depict.45
It may help to bring the core difference between Searle and Derrida
into focus if we come at it from this angle: Derrida’s detractors were espe-
cially exasperated by his—call it, slipperiness. No matter what turn a con-
versation took, no matter what the facts turned out to be, Derrida could
find a way to make it work for him. We are now in a position to understand
why, in some cases, a certain slipperiness in his argumentation could pro-
ceed justifiably from his “ontology” of writing and possibility (definitely
not in other cases). Take, for example, the way Derrida introduced the
claim that alteration is built into iterability with that nifty reference to
iter’s purported roots in Sanskrit. In his outraged reply to Searle’s “Reply,”
Derrida revisited that quote, citing it again in its entirety:

Such iterability—(iter, again, probably comes from itara, other in Sanskrit,

and everything that follows can be read as the working out of the logic that
ties repetition to alterity) structures the mark of writing itself, no matter
what particular type of writing is involved.

But this time he immediately added:

This etymology, of course, has no value qua proof and were it to be false, the
very shift in meaning would confirm the law here indicated: the time and
place of the other time already at work, altering from the start the start itself.
(1988, 62)

45
 “Thus we are obliged to think in opposition to the truisms which we believed—which
we still cannot not believe—to be the very ether of our thought and language. … And it is a
question not only of thinking the opposite which is still in complicity with the classical alter-
natives, but of liberating thought and its language for the encounter occurring beyond these
alternatives” (1967f, 118).
   TEXTS AND BODIES    231

Had some Sanskrit expert during Q&A put the “iter = other” etymol-
ogy into question and had Derrida given the expert the response he gives
here to himself, it would have seemed slippery indeed. But here he actually
was discussing the many ways in which misunderstandings of an expres-
sion are a constant possibility and a frequent actuality and how they can,
in turn, become understandings of another kind, and so, at worst, we
might suspect him of setting up a justification for future slipperiness or
slipperiness in general, which indeed he was. And so the question becomes:
is this a valid justification and for what slipperiness, exactly?
How many readers of this essay have mourned, as I have, the passing of
that exquisite expression “begging the question”? How many have felt, as
I have, a certain muted despair watching and listening while this subtle
figure is reduced to a synonym for “invites the question” by the talking
heads under the klieg lights? That is, of course, just a particularly piquant
example of a ubiquitous process. Nero Wolfe would not countenance using
“contact” as a verb, but I contact people all the time without even noticing.
On the other hand, I cringe when things “impact” people—and get almost
nauseous when I hear how “impactful” something is. But there is nothing
to be done about all this. anglophone researchers in historical linguistics
call it “semantic drift”—a perfectly intelligible notion. French theorists
called it the “play of the signifier.” It is Derrida’s “writing” over time and,
yes, it happens with speech too. Some people in my Bronx neighborhood
play “pick-a-boo” (not “peek”) with their babies and when I moved as a
very young child from England to New England we went from “ashes,
ashes” to “ahchoo-achoo” before we all fell down. This process is con-
stantly underway at the micro-level of dialect and slang (no one could pos-
sibly “list” instances or formulate rules for the process) and we only notice
the ones that catch on—which means get iterated more generally.
So Derrida’s remark was a justification for his insistence on the slipperi-
ness of language—but, ultimately, it was a claim that this “slipperiness” is
essential to language, as something like its very life. That is to say, events
of meaning, actual significations, occurring out of possibilities given some-
how by “text” and context (and by grammar and intentions as well, to be
sure). Such events and contexts are more and less customary—some
utterly routine, others less so, and yet others (Dada performance art) radi-
cally less so. But all are events of actualization and so must be admitted
first as possibilities. These possibilities in turn must be conceived as some-
how “built into” or at least “allowed by” all the significant entities and
232   T. DE ZENGOTITA

processes that bear upon and constitute the moment when these possibili-
ties are actualized and those are not with (or as) the passing of time in the
actual process of history, with all its specificity and concreteness and, most
especially, all its accidents—source of the new.
Now compare Searle’s idea of possibility. It seemed pretty vast to him
and he seemed to think (at first at least) that it took us to the level of
events:

The performances of actual speech acts … are indeed events, datable singu-
lar events in particular historical contexts. But as events they have some very
peculiar properties. They are capable of communicating from speakers to
hearers an infinite number of different contents. … Furthermore, hearers
are able to understand this infinite number of possible communications …
what is it that gives their speech acts this limitless capacity for communica-
tion? The answer is that the speaker and hearers are masters of the rules of
language, and these rules are recursive. They allow for the repeated applica-
tion of the same rule. … Iterability—both as exemplified by the repeated use
of the same word type and as exemplified by the recursive character of syn-
tactical rules—is not as Derrida seems to think something in conflict with
the intentionality of linguistic acts, spoken or written, it is the necessary
presupposition of the forms which that intentionality takes. (1977, 208)

Searle thought he was talking about real (though “peculiar”) events

here, but from Derrida’s point of view he was only talking about events
insofar as they can be contained in a formal explanation before they occur.
Searle’s events can mean only what his theory will allow them to mean.
They are anticipated by the system. They are what might be called “domes-
ticated events” and, for Derrida, Searle’s very wording—“masters of the
rules of language”—gives the game away and invites a Nietzschean
unmasking. The “infinite number of possible communications” that are
allowed by the “rules of language” aren’t singular events in their actuality
at all; they are “standard cases,” already purified, already abstracted from
history by an imperial subject.
Now we see why Derrida spoke always of “dissemination” rather than
“polysemy” when he dealt with possible interpretations of speech or writ-
ing. Polysemy gets you to “Visiting relatives can be boring,” to Chomskyean
ambiguities the rules of the grammar allow—the way the shuffle function
on an iPod allows pre-pared accidents to happen. Dissemination gets you
to the mistaken etymology of “iter,” to “pick-a-boo,” and a new meaning
for “begging the question” and to all their possible but un-actualized kin-
   TEXTS AND BODIES    233

dred—again, that vast expansion of the “field of the mark” that “every
possible user in general” entailed by the lead quote for this section—the
phrase Searle overlooked. Derrida’s “ontology” of writing and possibility is
Hegel’s Absolute Mind fallen into pieces, into all actual and all possible
significant events individually. Just as the phenomenology of the “trace”
recreated above was typically presented by Derrida in terms that erased the
subject experiencing the traces, so in his “ontology” of writing Derrida
simply erased Hegel’s Absolute Mind—eliminating, as it were, the absolute
author and absolute reader of the general text. What remains of subjectivity
are but ephemeral effects of an infinitely tiny slice of that general text that
happen to be, for the nonce, you and me—sites of events of signification.
To repeat, by way of setting up a conclusion, what was said by way of
introduction to this whole discussion of Derrida—for him, a philosophi-
cally adequate account of “possibility” in language would admit the
achievements of James Joyce in Finnegans Wake (1939) rather than being
bound by the rules, however recursive, and word types of a formal gram-
mar.46 With this fundamental difference in their understanding of the
notion “meaningful event” brought to light, we arrive at the point where
Derrida and Searle could have met, come to clarity, and agreed to dis-
agree. Ironically, the theme of “iterability” would have provided the per-
fect starting point.

9.2.4.2 Type-Token Versus Iterability

any linguistic element written or spoken, indeed any rule governed element
in any system of representation at all must be repeatable, otherwise the rules
would have no scope of application. To say this is just to say that the logi-
cian’s type-token distinction must apply generally to all rule-governed
­elements of a language in order that the rules can be applied to the new
occurrences of the phenomena specified by the rules. (Searle 1977, 199)

However botched his reading of Derrida, when Searle built his “Reply”
around the type-token distinction he describes here, he chose wisely. It
encapsulates the dependence of his (and Austin’s) project on abstraction
and offers a concentrated image of the target of Derrida’s critique at the
same time—a perfect object for some concluding reflections. Presumably,

46
 “in The Post Card (1987), referring to Joyce’s influence on the formation of his theories,
he goes further, confessing that he has ‘never imitated anyone so irresistibly’ as he has imi-
tated Joyce; and interestingly, Derrida formally remarks in the 1984 Joyce symposium that
‘without Joyce,’ ‘Deconstruction could not have been possible’” (Zangouei 2012, 31).
234   T. DE ZENGOTITA

when Searle gave Derrida his for-beginners tour of the type/token distinc-
tion, he did not realize that Derrida had to be familiar with it. Husserl had
used it in the Logical Investigations (with which Derrida was thoroughly
familiar) and of course it corresponds closely to Saussure’s broader abstrac-
tion of langue (grammar) from parole (speech), common currency for
French intellectuals of the period. More consequentially, Searle did not
understand as he wrote that “iterability” actually did the same work in
Derrida’s “ontology” of writing that the type/token distinction did for
abstractionist philosophizing—without resorting to codification, without
idealizing. That’s why it was called “post-structuralism.” And “post-­
structuralism” was “postmodern” precisely because it was committed to
undoing that gesture of abstraction. A “type” abstracts an ideal singularity
out of “token” instances that, given the way things actually go on in the
world, can never be absolutely identical and so makes it possible for us to
recognize “instances” as instances of the “same thing,” in both theory and
practice. Now this from Derrida, and we have our hands around the issue
between them:

the unique character of this structure of iterability … lies in the fact that,
comprising identity and difference, repetition and alteration, etc., it renders
the project of idealization possible without lending “itself” to any pure, sim-
ple, and idealizable conceptualization. No process or project of idealization
is possible without iterability and yet iterability itself cannot be idealized.
(Derrida 1988, 71)

“Itself” is in italics in the last sentence because it refers to eventful actuali-

ties, the process of iteration (which is, phenomenologically, temporality—time
itself) that somehow makes idealization possible and necessary. On Derrida’s
account the fictions that are concepts and categories are made possible and
become necessary because nothing in this eventful world is purely repeated,
nothing is absolutely identical to itself from moment to moment. Again,
there is nothing unfamiliar about this idea.  I would refer the reader once
again to, for example, Nietzsche’s “Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”
(1873) or, in a less dramatic register—the instrumentalism of John Dewey.
Or, as already noted, just go back to Plato (as Derrida does) to reprise his
basic argument: “Being” cannot rightly be attributed to sensible physical
things—only to intelligible ideas, concepts that cannot change and still be
what they are.
   TEXTS AND BODIES    235

But accessible as all this should be for an open-minded anglophone

reader, we have now arrived at a critical juncture for Derrida—the point at
which Searle might have authentically “confronted” him and pressed for
answers he would have felt obligated to provide. For Derrida now
finds himself in a trap of sorts—and it is of his own making. If some kind
of “trick” lies at the heart of deconstruction, this is it: Derrida has to admit
that there is also a “concept” of iterability:

The concept [of anything, concepts in general], which we metaphysically

need, is intrinsically all or nothing. Even the concept “difference of degree”
is, qua concept, all or nothing … all conceptual production appeals to ideal-
ization. Even the “concept” of iterability, which plays an organizing role in
“Limited Inc.,” supposes such idealization. But it has a strange status. Like
that of “differance” and several others, it is an aconceptual concept or
another kind of concept, heterogeneous to the philosophical concept of the
concept, a “concept” that marks both the possibility and the limit of all
idealization and hence of all conceptualization. (117–118)

For a fair-minded reader, the viability of Derrida’s project now hinges

on the validity of this claim to a “strange status” for just these “aconceptual
concepts” upon which his whole “quasi-transcendental ontology” relies. Notice
first that this passage echoes remarkably the “peculiar properties” of
speech act events as Searle described them when he was celebrating the
infinite reach of his recursive rules and word types. An accident, no doubt,
but a fortuitous one because the phrases mark critical points in both con-
texts: the point at which the author, bent on victory, permits himself to
indulge in subterfuge, on the one hand, and resort to sheer force on the
other—while his conscience exacts a minimal concession with words like
“peculiar” and “strange.” Searle, pretending to attend to “singular
events,” smuggles an infinity of idealized “standard cases” past us (and
perhaps himself). Derrida, his whole project riding on the viability of his
semi-concepts as somehow “heterogeneous” to concepts per se, must
concede that they are also concepts per se—but, as far as I can tell, he is rely-
ing on sheer assertion to persuade us of their intrinsic semi-ness.
Suppose, instead of “iterability” we consider, say—“dogs.” They can be
and have been classified, conceptualized, idealized, named by an abstract
common noun. But actual dogs aren’t transformed into concepts in the
process. How is that importantly different from the way the process of
iteration “itself” cannot be conceptualized? The question becomes all the
236   T. DE ZENGOTITA

more pointed if we consider the extent to which one might be tempted to

believe that the meaning of the word “dog” and the essence of the animal
“itself” were the same thing. Which is, of course, precisely what Plato and
Aristotle believed—a measure of how ambitious the claims of metaphysics
once were.47 Or—if concrete objects make the point too obviously—con-
sider some ordinary action like “running” or a dispositional property like
“elasticity” or a mental process like “musing.” How is the impossibility of
“idealizing” or “conceptualizing” running itself, elasticity itself, or musing
itself different from the impossibility of doing so for iterability itself?
I do not know how Derrida would have dealt with that question, but it
is an example of how a genuine dialogue might have begun had the parties
to this academic dust-up been more intent on understanding and less
intent on winning.
But even that imagined dialogue could only go so far. It is hard to
envisage an extended collaboration—though (but for politics) amicable
coexistence ought to be possible and some meta-philosophical issues
might be profitably discussed.48 These enterprises both call themselves
“philosophy” but they are profoundly different. The contrast between the
two concepts of “iterability” has distilled that overall difference between
them into something that can pass—at least rhetorically, in this context—
for an essence. The two concepts are so intimately related, so implicitly
dependent upon one another, yet so radically opposed. From the vantage
point of that contrast we can see at a glance how incommensurably
divergent these philosophical practices are. They collided in what Searle
rightly called a “confrontation that never quite took place,” though not

47
 I cannot in this space describe how often I am overwhelmed by the suspicion that
Western thought is driven most deeply by the desire to put things into words in some way.
48
 For example, in the “Afterword” to Limited Inc., Gerald Graff asks Derrida if he hasn’t
created something of a straw man for himself by attributing to abstract philosophizing in
general and Austin in particular, an insistence on absolute conceptual purity and complete
containment of facts by theory. Derrida admits that Austin’s personal affect and attitude
don’t reflect that insistence—that he is tentative and provisional and happy to admit excep-
tions and imperfections in his work. But for Derrida, following Heidegger in this, Austin’s
personal intentions (the very topic at issue!) are beside the point. It is the telos of Western
metaphysics he is addressing and that, he believes, is relentlessly at work underneath all spe-
cific manifestations—abstracting, purifying, containing, controlling. That is a topic both
camps might discuss. In a nutshell, it comes down to this: to what extent is abstract reason,
at work in the sciences and philosophy, necessarily complicit with social and economic sys-
tems of domination and exploitation? Noam Chomsky, for example, would not admit any
such necessity—but compare the Frankfurt School.
   TEXTS AND BODIES    237

for the reasons Searle supplied. Confronted with the idea that “possibili-
ties” in language are best exemplified by that carnival of free associations
Joyce staged in Finnegans Wake, Searle and Austin would say, “But that’s
no use, you can’t create a formal theory to explain all that!” To which
Derrida would reply, “Exactly! That’s my point!” At bottom, and quite
apart from the personal shortcomings of the parties involved, this con-
frontation never quite took place because these two ways of doing phi-
losophy are so different that arguments over which is the “right way” can
now be seen for what they are: as misguided as an argument over whether
painting or sculpture is the “right way” to make art.49
We have now seen how the most prominent of the textualistes among
creators of French theory went about overcoming the modern, especially by
way of dismantling the modern subject. In the next section, Deleuze will
represent the desirants, those who appealed directly, in the manner of
Nietzsche, to unrepresentable drives and forces to accomplish the same end.

9.3   Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995)

9.3.1  Introduction
Of all the major contributors to la pensée 68, Gilles Deleuze was the most
obvious outlier—a declared opponent of the linguistic/textual emphasis
that persisted in the work of the “poststructuralist” creators of French
theory whom Francois Dosse calls the “ultra-structuralists.”50 That is why,
like his friend Foucault, he survived the decline of all that and continues
to shape ongoing enterprises—in Deleuze’s case, most especially in the
arts and academic departments associated with them. As with Derrida, but

49
 Nor can either side claim to better represent Western Reason. The analytics, like the
scientists they emulate, can rightly say they have been true to the rigor of it, to the logic, the
method; they tackle problems they can solve. But Derrida and the tradition that shaped him
could claim to have better served philosophy’s original aim: wisdom, not knowledge—the
wisdom of fallible mortals whom Socrates originally represented and addressed.
50
 Deleuze’s engagement with Structuralism/post-structuralism was tactically contrived to
keep him in the conversation—bordering on downright disingenuous, if you attend closely
to his argument in “How Do We Recognize Structuralism” ([1967] 2004). He wasn’t swept
up in the French “linguistic turn”—and he came right out and said so later on, when the
pressures of fashion were dissipating. That is one reason many admirers position him as an
opponent of postmodernism. If you think of postmodernism as an extension of
Structuralism/post-structuralism, however disruptive, and take Derrida as the prototype that
makes perfect sense.
238   T. DE ZENGOTITA

not Foucault, his works are notorious for a particular kind of obscurity
that derives from a certain wildness in his thought, a wildness he was happy
to flaunt to the delight of his acolytes, the bafflement of other readers, and
the annoyance of so many critics. He was the most prominently featured
target of Alan Sokal’s and Jean Bricmont’s widely cited book Fashionable
Nonsense (1998), a favorite source for left-wing opponents of academic
postmodernism. In that book, Deleuze’s “abuse” of scientific terms was
excoriated as if he had been engaged in their explication. But he wasn’t.
He was possessed by a sensuous and intuitive vision for a new metaphysics.
It took the form of an art project on a cosmic scale, one that would evoke
“what it is like to be”—not a mere bat51—but “what is it like to be the
whole of reality,” with modern science serving as inspiration. Said Deleuze:
“I feel myself to be a pure metaphysician. … Bergson says that modern
science hasn’t found its metaphysics, the metaphysics it would need. It is
this metaphysics that interests me” (in Bogue 2007, 42).
I call this metaphysics a “vision” to play upon the word “see,” the way
it blends visual encounter and conceptual understanding—as when “I see”
means “I get it.” I call it sensuous and intuitive because not only sight (of
either kind) was enlisted in this venture. All the senses, all sensations, all
prearticulate feelings were summoned to the cause of escaping from the
prison house of language and the formal theories that codified it. It was an
attempt to ascend to the threshold of new kind of thinking, a thinking that
opened out to the inconceivable, to the real.52
I want this notion (and the term “notion”) available because I want to
show that the works of Gilles Deleuze are best understood as installments
in this philosophical art project that encourages willing participants to
acquire a special kind of sensitivity, one that yields a “sense” of the way
things really are, a sense of perpetual becoming at every level of order and
disorder in the universe, a sense that arises from certain notions when they
are well-deployed and dissipates when those notions are forced into the
confines of a conventional conceptuality that presumes to represent reality
and express subjectivity. Once again, the basic adjustment anglophone

51
 “What is it Like to Be a Bat” was a 1974 paper by Thomas Nagle, an analytically oriented
philosopher of mind who argued that consciousness is a reality unto itself, irreducible to
physical processes correlated with it.
52
 Frederic Jameson, author of The Prison House of Language (1972) and an influential
critique of Structuralism in particular and formalism more generally, was no fan of most
“theory.” But he was lavish in his praise of Deleuze because he was the one who explicitly
and consistently sought to escape that prison and engage with reality.
   TEXTS AND BODIES    239

readers need to make to understand French theory is to treat this kind of

philosophy as art, precisely because it aspires to something that exceeds
conceptuality. So we have in mind not just any art, but modern art, pre-
cisely because it refused the concept’s standard function—namely, to rep-
resent and express. This injunction applies to the creators of French theory
across the board but, as we shall see, it applies in spades to Gilles Deleuze
who invested most heavily in this quest to think the impossible—and, as a
consequence, his work presents the most difficult challenge by far to the
willing interpreter. In this section, in an extended treatment, I will do my
level best to meet it.
But first, a look at Deleuze’s beginnings—and, with the recommended
adjustment highlighted, it will be no surprise to find how profound a role
he attributed to imagination right from the start.

9.3.2  First Lines of Flight

9.3.2.1 Suffocating Interiors

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do. (Philip Larkin)

As we shall see, Gilles Deleuze—like Philip Larkin—had intensely per-

sonal reasons for loathing the Oedipal nuclear family he would one day
eviscerate in the Anti-Oedipus (1972). And, as we shall also see, a lot of
that probably had to do with certain persistent sensitivities and vulnerabili-
ties that shaped his character. He was right, I believe, to call himself the
“most naïve” of the thinkers in his cohort, and Derrida and Foucault
agreed with that assessment (Patton and Protevi 2003, 6). But his video-
taped interviews with Claire Parnet (Deleuze from A to Z 2012) show him
to be rather self-consciously innocent, as it were, a bit of an actor.
Compared to the elaborate flamboyance of Derrida and Foucault,
Deleuze’s affectations seem parochial, the conceits of small town school-
master (I can’t stand cheese, it’s like flesh; its cannibalism). But “naïve,”
yes, he was entitled to call himself that—in the important sense that, at an
early age, he took on the original aspirations of Western metaphysics in
spite of Kantian critique and all its limiting consequences. And he never
looked back. Gilles Deleuze was a precocious adolescent to the end of his
days.
240   T. DE ZENGOTITA

In his biography of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Intersecting Lives,

Francois Dosse ([2007] 2010) provides some vivid glimpses of Deleuze’s
unhappy childhood. His health was always poor and his anti-Semitic,
snobbish, bourgeois parents doted on his glamorous older brother—all
the more so after he joined the resistance and died in captivity, en route to
a concentration camp. They fashioned a “veritable cult” around his mem-
ory and treated little Gilles with something like disdain. Deleuze’s closest
friend, Michel Tournier, told Dosse that Deleuze “rejected family life very
early on as a result of his parents’ attitude” and Dosse seems to trace the
fact that, for the rest of his life, “Deleuze tirelessly denounced family life
and the stultifying world of the bourgeoisie” in general to that formative
experience (88, 89).
Just as formative, in another way, was his first exposure to the life of the
mind—and that hackneyed phrase will take on a precise and enduring
significance for Deleuze. Philosophy provided him a lifesaving “line of
flight”. With Parnet, Deleuze recalled the crucial moment: “From the
very first philosophy classes, I knew that was what I would do”—and he
attributed his original excitement to the particular way in which philoso-
phy first struck him (and “struck,” too, will prove apt): “When I learned
there were such things as concepts, the effect on me was something like
the effect of fictional characters on others. They seemed just as alive and
lively” (Deleuze from A to Z: C is for Concepts, 2012). That way of expe-
riencing concepts gave Deleuze special access to the philosophical “field”:
it became a theatrical landscape in which a cast of conceptual characters
contended for dominance as he constructed plotlines. From the very
beginning, it was imagination that served Deleuze best and the pay-off
was immediate.
While still in high school, he made a deep impression on his friend
Michel Tournier, who recalled that, “when Deleuze started studying phi-
losophy he was already head and shoulders above the rest of us … we fired
off words like cotton or rubber balls, and he shot them back, hardened and
heavy, like lead or steel cannon balls.” When Tournier and his teacher,
who also recognized Deleuze’s extraordinary gifts, brought him into the
circle of elite intellectuals gathered around Marie-Madeleine Davy at
Rozay-en Brie and the soirees at Marcel More’s Paris apartment, he was
just as well received. Dosse sums up: “When still a high school senior …
he was at ease discussing Nietzsche with Pierre Klossowski” and “observers
whispered, ‘he’ll be a new Sartre’” ([2007] 2010, 91–93). A heady brew
for young Gilles, so accustomed to parental disdain—but, above all, an
   TEXTS AND BODIES    241

escape and a validation that would equip him with the self-confidence he
would need to take the lonely philosophical path he chose.
Sartre was Deleuze’s first philosophical hero. Being and Nothingness was
published in 1943, during the darkest days of the German occupation, and
Tournier reports that Deleuze devoured that 722-page book in a week.
Along with most of the cognoscenti in Paris, they attended Sartre’s lecture,
“Existentialism is a Humanism,” at Club Maintenant in Paris, on 29
October 1945. It marked a decisive break.53 Tournier later reported: “We
were floored. So our master had had to dig through the trash to unearth
this worn-out mixture reeking of sweat and the inner life of humanism” (in
Dosse [2007] 2010, 95). Deleuze was already committed to a critique of
the “idea of interiority” and of the various modern humanisms associated
with it. In an early publication, a 1946 article called “From Christ to the
Bourgeoisie” (dedicated to his patroness, Mlle Davy), he described the
“unbroken historical link between Christianity and capitalism, which are
both trapped in the same delusional cult of interiority” (92).
Young Deleuze was not alone in longing for a philosophical “out-
side”—with the “inside” originally understood in terms of the Kantian
“subjective idealism” that still dominated the French academy after the
war. His teacher, Jean Hyppolite, was trying to situate Marx and Marxism
in relation to Hegel (see Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of
Spirit 1947), a relation of intense interest to many. And, of course, that
project  immediately implicated an “outside” of thought, that being the
basic point of Marxist materialism. Even Husserl, in his later work, ­pursued
a “genetic phenomenology,” seeking access to the social/historical condi-
tions that determined the emergence of thought (Joe Hughes in Deleuze’s
Difference and Repetition: A Reader’s Guide 2009, 6–10, 79) (For an
overview, see John Heckman’s “Hyppolite and the Hegel Revival in
France” in Telos (Summer 1973, 128–145)).
Of course Deleuze had to find his own idiosyncratic route to that “out-
side” so many were seeking. He had only flirted with phenomenology and
his Marxism was more assumed than expounded—an accessory essential
to his station but not of much interest in his work. He boasted of avoiding
the “three H’s” (Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger) who commanded the atten-
53
 This lecture elicited from Heidegger the landmark “Letter on Humanism” in 1946
(Heidegger 1977), at the behest of Jean Beaufret. That “letter” marked the onset of decline
for existentialism and humanism, which led to the critique of phenomenology itself that
attended the linguistic turn in France, the rise of Structuralism—with all its consequences for
French theory.
242   T. DE ZENGOTITA

tion of his teachers and peers and turned instead to an H of his own—to
David Hume. And in him, of all people, he discovered what would become
his metaphysics: “transcendental empiricism”  (jargon item #1). Hume
had approached this paradoxical construct without realizing it and Deleuze
would always relish wrenching an unintended conundrum from the depths
of an admirable philosophy.
So Deleuze had the gall to pronounce Hume’s empiricism “transcenden-
tal”—an outcome from which Hume would have recoiled in horror or (good-
humored fellow that he was) embraced as a parody of metaphysical reason’s
overreach. Inspired, I suspect, by Nietzsche’s call for “effective history” that
served contemporary life-affirming purposes, Deleuze liked to compare his
method to “buggering,” to taking the man whose work was the object of his
study from behind and, in a species of immaculate conception, engendering a
monster that would serve Deleuze’s purposes (see, e.g., Deleuze and History
2009, 208). Hard to say how Hume would have felt about that image—per-
haps it would depend on whether it was presented to him at home in
Edinburgh or in one of the Parisian salons that made him so welcome.

9.3.2.2 Revelations of Transcendental Empiricism: David Hume

We start with atomic parts [that] have transitions, passages, tendencies. …
These tendencies give rise to habits. Isn’t this the answer to the question
“what are we?” We are habits, nothing but habits—the habit of saying “I.”
Perhaps, there is no more striking answer to the problem of the Self. (Deleuze,
Preface to Empiricism and Subjectivity [1953] 1991; italics mine)

“Transcendental critique of the subject [is] at the core of transcendental

empiricism” says Anne Sauvagnargues, one of the most respected French
authorities on Gilles Deleuze (cited in Williams 2012, 42)—and the way
Deleuze himself here describes his “striking answer to the problem of the
self” supports her judgment. My reading of him hinges on the validity of
that claim. Outlier though he was in many ways, he was at one with the rest
of the creators of French theory in his determination to have done with
modern subjectivity. We find that commitment already taking shape in his
study of David Hume (Empiricism and Subjectivity [1953] 1991). One
other theme from that work needs highlighting—namely, the importance
Deleuze attached to the role of the imagination in Hume’s psychology. It
was not so much a faculty; it was a “factory.” There, Hume’s “principles of
association” (resemblance, contiguity, causality) did their work, generating
“human nature” as defined in Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature ([1740]
2003). That nature, arising in utter contingency during its “history,” was
   TEXTS AND BODIES    243

simply the coherence of human experience once it fell under the sway of
custom and produced that creature of habit, including the habit of saying
“I,” that is the human subject. Said Constantin Boundas, the translator of
Empiricism and Subjectivity:

empiricism is not a philosophy of the senses but a philosophy of the imagina-

tion and the statement that “all ideas are derived from impressions” is not
meant to enshrine representationalism but is rather a regulative principle. …
From a host of differential impressions, a subject is born inside the given.
([1953] 1991, 7–8; italics mine)

An account of the birth of the subject from “inside the given,” of the
subject as a contingent effect of other entities and forces—that was Hume’s
most profound contribution to modern philosophy. But Deleuze, from his
perch of procreation  as philosophical buggerer, noticed a transcendent
something at the nativity scene that le bon David had missed:

How can the mind become a subject? … Deleuze-Hume’s answer is that the
mind becomes a subject … as the result of the … the principles of associa-
tion contiguity, resemblance and causality [that] form habit, establish belief
and constitute the subject as an entity that anticipates. (Boundas 1991, 15;
my italics)

Anticipates what? Anticipates what the imagination offers up as coming

next and—within the nexus of social custom—as coming next if the subject
desires it, or even just allows it, falling back on regularities of causality
and  habits that regularly secured it in the past.54 And so it went: human
nature-in-history, with Nietzsche waiting down the road to take on the
same vision—with a shift in tone, a shift that Deleuze, growing angrier as he
grew more alienated, would embrace and embellish as the 1960s unfolded.
Now we catch a glimpse of the “transcendent” aspect of this conceptual
concoction called “transcendental empiricism.” Instead of the transcen-
dental subject Kant would introduce like a deux ex machina into a contin-
gent Humean landscape in order to subdue it to reason a priori, we have a
contingent landscape that transcends the subject that issues from it. In this
scenario, the principles of association that midwife the birth are operating
in a fully functioning socio-linguistic context. “How-do-­ grunting-
hominids-invent-language-and-prohibit-incest” questions are not on the
table. From our point of view, as evaluators of arguments, there is no mys-
54
 So much is owed here to Heidegger, it goes on and on—but let it pass.
244   T. DE ZENGOTITA

tery. The “given” is the social and natural environment into which neuro-
psychological flesh packets we call “babies” are born biologically. But, from
the point of view (if there were one) of those little flesh packets, there is
indeed a mystery—for they are not (yet) subjects. From that point of view
the question becomes: “given” to what?
Gilles Deleuze would spend the rest of his working life experimenting
with answers to that question—imagining answers to that question.
In his last essay, “Immanence: a Life” (2001), Deleuze looked back on
the founding gesture from the point of view of subsequent experiments
and imaginings:

what is a transcendental field? … a pure stream of a-subjective consciousness, a

pre-reflexive impersonal consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness
without a self. … There is something wild and powerful in this transcenden-
tal empiricism. (25; italics mine)

Wild and powerful. For Deleuze, no other kinds of ideas had value.
Trying to understand him means reaching for experiences of that “pre-­
reflexive impersonal consciousness”—however unlikely the prospect.
Deleuze gave us some sense of what he meant when he referred to delir-
ium as an example of experience without a subject. Think also of certain
moments between sleeping and waking—of multiple overlapping
­sensations and image fragments that exist more or less on their own—or
as given to various “larval selves.”
Deleuze ransacked the works of thinkers he admired, looking for the
“tools” he needed to realize this unlikely prospect.

though obviously indebted to Spinoza, Leibniz and Bergson, Deleuze

appropriates [them] by pushing them to their “differential” limit. …
Deleuze’s historical monographs … are preliminary sketches for the great
canvas of Difference and Repetition. (D.  W.  Smith “The Doctrine of
Univocity: Deleuze’s Ontology of Immanence” 2001, 38)

But among the philosophers he consulted, it was Nietzsche that

Deleuze acknowledged as his master. So it was fitting that he foisted upon
him the most outrageous of all his distortions of original intent:

Dionysus is a player. The real player makes chance an object of affirmation.

… We now see what this third figure is; the play of eternal return. This
return is precisely the being of becoming, the one of multiplicity, the neces-
   TEXTS AND BODIES    245

sity of chance—we must not make of the eternal return a return of the same.
(Deleuze [1995] 2001, 86–87; italics mine)

Deleuze claimed that Nietzsche’s madness prevented him from getting

to the “third moment” of eternal return—the one that would have been
what Deleuze wanted it to be:

The third moment remains absent. … We know that Nietzsche did not have
time to write this projected part. … Nietzsche gave us only the past condi-
tion and the present metamorphosis, but not the unconditioned which was
to have resulted as the “future.” (1994, 92)

Deleuze admitted that Nietzsche described eternal return as it is usually

described, as eternal return of the same (Cambridge Companion to Deleuze
2012, 89), a reading that posits the thought of eternal return as an exis-
tential challenge, a goad to ensure that one lives every moment as if
one were fated to repeat it forever. But Deleuze breezed by all that and
shaped the notion to suit his purpose—and, upon reflection, it stands up
pretty well. I can imagine Nietzsche approving of the “being of becom-
ing” as the “same” that always returns; it captures something essential in
his thought. And Deleuze’s Nietzsche, the one he introduced in Nietzsche
and Philosophy ([1962] 1983), the one for whom the perpetual becoming
of sheer difference in natural and social history was the only “constant”—
that Nietzsche proved to be what that Parisian moment called for. In that
book, Deleuze supplied much of the rhetoric, the attitude, and sheer
gumption that enabled creators of French theory to breach the closure
implicit in Hegel’s phenomenology and its descendants—and also to
abandon all theoretical orientations that sought closure, including Stru­
cturalism. Since no formal system could contain the historical world as
Nietzsche described it, Deleuze’s instantly influential book marked a turn-
ing point on the road to ultra-structuralism.
Dan Smith’s reference to the “great canvas” of Difference and Repetition
was an allusion to Deleuze’s comparison of himself with Van Gogh—the
great colorist—who hesitated to commit to color because his sensitivity to it
was so great that it amounted to a kind of fear. Van Gogh practiced with his
dim-lit portraits for years before making the leap into the vivid expressionist
landscapes that fulfilled his promise. And Deleuze practiced with his “por-
traits,” his studies of individual philosophers, before he gathered it all up
and packed it into an explosion of his own thought—Difference and
Repetition. (See Deleuze from A to Z: C is for Color and H is for History of
Philosophy, 2012.)
246   T. DE ZENGOTITA

9.3.3  Toward a New Image of Thought: No Image at All

When I took up the challenge of trying to understand French “theory” as
a fair-minded reader, I assumed Derrida would be the toughest nut to
crack. But, as already noted, Deleuze gave me the most trouble by far.
With Derrida, thanks to some insightful secondary sources, I was able (or
so I believe) to identify an essential moment, an “origin” (oh no!) that
brought coherence to the development of his thought. But in spite of bril-
liant rays of illumination provided by Dan Smith, in particular, and Joe
Hughes, Brian Massumi, John Protevi, Leonard Lawlor, Claire Colebrook,
and others, I found no comparable “starting point” for Deleuze. I was
reduced to scrutinizing entries in the 337-page-long Deleuze Dictionary
(2010) in a futile effort to integrate his ideas into a manageable whole.
It proved to be a fortuitous exercise for that reason. I learned the hard
way how committed Deleuze was to thwarting efforts to make a “manage-
able whole” of his work—his own efforts included. That made the process
of reading the Dictionary a Deleuzean process, a series of event/encoun-
ters. There is an echo here of Barthes’ claim to favor the alphabet as an
organizing principle, which may have been literally true (one imagines
him as a precocious ten -year-old, passing lonely hours reading an encyclo-
pedia). But, in RB by RB, that preference reads as a gentle put-down of
system-building structuralists, including himself. For Deleuze, the repu-
diation of system entailed a massive investment of time and energy, a full-­
bore quest for a new way to think.
One chain of event/encounters to illustrate: the dictionary itself intro-
duced me to the “rhizome” (jargon item #2: structured like a rabbit warren,
not a tree, so it doesn’t matter where you start and there is no real “end”
[as in, “conclusion”]). In the same moment, I met the “monad” (jargon
item #3: a singular individual determined at any moment by the unique
configuration of its relations) and, because both notions arose together, I
met the idea of conceptuality as an experienced “multiplicity” (jargon item
#4: as applied to the concept of “concept”: a collection of signification-
and-action tendencies ongoingly making connections and modifications up
to some imperceptible point of “becoming other” or dissipating). In fact (I
just noticed this now, as I write) the “monad” that was a concept in one of
the settings in which it depended on relations in that setting became a “mul-
tiplicity” as I tracked its itinerary through other settings and outlined pro-
spectively the settings it could have (virtually had) a place in.
   TEXTS AND BODIES    247

And so on, indefinitely. And that also happens to capture what is meant
by Difference and Repetition. There is no such thing as pure repetition.
There is always difference, no matter what is repeated, no matter how
many times (compare Derrida above, Chap. 9.2.3.1). Pure identity is an
illusion of Idealism—along with other tropes of closure like analogy,
resemblance, and opposition. Deleuze called these relations “the four iron
collars of representation” because, especially in Hegel—but throughout
the history of Western thought—they refused difference the ontological
standing it deserves. Some difference is obviously at work in three of the
relations: “A” can only resemble or be analogous to or oppose “B” if there
is some difference between them—but this is a dependent, subordinate
difference, not the wild motor of change that endows Becoming with its
Nietzschean claim over Being. The case of identity is trickier; it is not so
obvious how difference enters into self-identity. That is why it commands
the nexus of representation. But if identity is conceived as a relation, some
difference is implicated and even eternally self-identical Platonic ideas,
with no physical aspect for change to get a handle on, seem somehow to
be in relation to themselves if they are represented.
Since Deleuze’s conceptual multiplicities are always ready for further
encounters in ever-changing contexts, it fell to me, a finite reader/writer
with promises to keep, to decide when to stop. So I could finish the sec-
tion. So I could finish the book. Of course, with each decision, I fore-
closed on further encounters—which meant, with every decision, I risked
not having some encounter that would have qualified as a genuine “event”
(jargon item #5: everything that happens is, strictly speaking, an “event”
insofar as it is uniquely determined—but the term typically makes honor-
ific reference to especially fruitful happenings, as in the “events of ’68” or
the “events of 9/11”; at the same time, in its a metaphysical aspect, the
“pure event” refers to the “eternal structure” of becoming: just happened,
about to happen, never is55). I could only hope that, in each case, I had

55
 This obviously mirrors Husserl on pro- and re-tention and Heidegger on “having been”
and “not yet.” It bears repeating: the debt Deleuze and other creators of “theory” owed to
phenomenology is incalculable. They were as determined to escape the bubbles of its “life-
worlds” as they were to escape the epistemological prison of the cogito. Indeed, for them, it
often came down to the same thing. But inevitably, given their uniform educations and
entrenched habits of thought, that “escape” entailed a reworking of phenomenological
notions—efforts to open them up to some “outside” (compare today’s “speculative
realism”).
248   T. DE ZENGOTITA

more or less exhausted the potential of a particular conceptual multiplicity

(the feeling of “Ok, enough of this already”) or that, if indeed an eventful
encounter were being foreclosed, I would be blessed by the rhizome and
encounter it eventually, from some other direction (the feeling of “If it’s
really important, it will come up again”).
The key entries in the Dictionary proved to be “reflections” in some way
of others. They seemed to participate with each other, not systematically,
not categorically—but overlapping and supplementing, sometimes con-
trasting—above all, in motion constantly, shifting meanings as they traverse
a landscape of variously meaningful contexts. Not, in a word, “arbores-
cent” (jargon item #6: tree structure, see above for contrasting term, “rhi-
zome”). So, for example, as I wrote this sentence I was trying to think of
something (some kind of bush?) that has a stem with branches, that in turn
have branches but also roots that produce other stems so I could illustrate
how “arborescent” and “rhizomic” can overlap. I hit an “impasse,” a
“blockage” (more jargon items). I could only hope that the “event” of this
impasse would open up a “line-of-flight” (jargon item #7: a break in habit-
uality that opens a way to the new; compare “deterritorialized”) that would
take me to another example to show contrasting Deleuzean multiplicities
also overlapping and supplementing and, lo and behold, this sentence itself
is identifying what I was looking for. A genuine “event” must earn the
honorific bestowed on its eternal form through its productivity on the
plane of actuality—it doesn’t get to be a genuine event without opening up
significant lines of flight. So “lines of flight” and “events” implicate each
other. They overlap and supplement as well as contrast.
But some of these “semi-concepts” (Deleuze used that term, though
not as often as Derrida) also changed in more categorical ways over time
in various (not always convincing) ways. It was as if the same notion
appears in a different costume to fulfill the requirements of a new task
undertaken in a different setting56. None of these notions can be used to
organize the others into a theory in the Classical sense. There is no repre-
sentational claim being made of the sort that might be validated by put-
ting a coherent set of propositions next to states of affairs in the world and
56
 Is this sloppy conceptualizing, irresponsible and undisciplined improvising, immediate
evidence of a lack of rigor—or do we take Deleuze at his word when he calls himself a prag-
matist above all, dedicated to solving problems, to making something happen? If concepts
are tools adapting to the task at hand, then declining to specify each shift in meaning forces
the reader to attend to those tasks first of all as a matter of implicit protocol for reading
Deleuze? Or is that just an excuse?
   TEXTS AND BODIES    249

determining whether or not they “match.” Difference and Repetition was

written to break down the Classical “image of thought” as representa-
tional in that way so that, in the absence of a controlling image of thought,
language and mind might live in freedom.
More on that pipe dream anon. For the moment, this summary: phi-
losophy as art is taking up the position of Spinoza’s God, the point of view
of pure immanence, and creating an intangible sculpture of tropes to con-
vey a “sense” of what the universe is like according modern science since
Einstein, since quantum mechanics. That means going beyond what can
be said or thought in intuitive Kantian/Newtonian terms. For twentieth-­
century intellectuals generally, after all, that had been the stunning lesson
of the new physics: thanks to mathematics and certain experimental pro-
cedures, its theories could be confirmed. But they could not be perceived
or conceived, in the ordinary sense of those terms. Schrödinger’s cat was
impossible—but it stood for something real. Deleuze’s metaphysics set
out to think the impossible in this specific sense.
Though not perhaps as willing as I am to call Deleuzean metaphysics an
art project, serious students of his work understand this basic point about
his use of science and math. When Joe Hughes, with Deleuze’s reliance on
outdated sources in mind, says that he was not “concerned with biology
as such but simply found in it an inspirational metaphor” (2009, 55), he
points to a more general consensus (see, e.g., James Williams’ description
of Deleuzean mashups as “the glossing and transformation of scientific
and mathematical ideas, and the borrowing from all the arts” (2012, 45)).
Deleuze himself put it this way:

Science fiction in yet another sense, one in which the weaknesses become
manifest. How else can one write but of those things which one doesn’t
know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having some-
thing to say. … We are therefore well aware, unfortunately, that we have
spoken about science in a manner which was not scientific. (1994, xxi)

So there is really is no excuse for a critique of Deleuzean “fashionable

nonsense” that ignores this context. Defenders of disciplinary orthodoxy
can make a telling case against this kind of intellectual license without
resorting to reading in bad faith. If notorious passages suffused with sci-
ence and math references in, say, A Thousand Plateaus, actually make no
sense but were, at the same time, accepted at face value by newly minted
Deleuzeans who themselves showed no awareness of their “science fictional”
250   T. DE ZENGOTITA

provenance—that would actually make for a more compelling and insight-

ful critique of theory and its reception in the US than the essentially cleri-
cal task of “correcting errors” ever could.57 But it would also involve
serious and sympathetic research into what theory actually was—not
something polemicists are inclined to do.
As to the liberties taken with the philosophers Deleuze appropriated,
they should likewise be taken in context—suggested by this quote:

The time is coming when it will hardly be possible to write a book of phi-
losophy as it has been done for so long: ‘Ah! the old style …’. The search for
new means of philosophical expression was begun by Nietzsche and must be
pursued today in relation to the renewal of certain other arts. … One imag-
ines a philosophically bearded Hegel, a philosophically clean-shaven Marx, in
the same way as a moustached Mona Lisa. (1994, xxi)

And, once again, defenders of canonical disciplines are entitled to react

against such irreverent abuses—in much the same way as, say, Nixon sup-
porters reacted to the grooming habits of “dirty hippies,” and for much
the same reason. This was the 1960s, and social conventions of all kinds
were under attack. There is no doubt that Deleuze, always sympathetic to
transgression, saw that inclination intensify into an all-out assault on social
constraints as the events of 1968 unfolded, as he assumed his position at
the experimental university at Vincennes—and, above all, as the collabora-
tions with Guattari came to dominate his thinking.
Miguel De Beistegui attributes Deleuze’s opposition to the Classical image
of thought in Western philosophy to the influence of modern and pop art
(2012, 79). I think that underestimates the influence of Nietzsche, but
Beistegui and others are certainly justified in placing as much weight as they do
on this little gnomic utterance from Deleuze: “The theory of thought is like
painting: it needs that revolution which took art from representation to abstrac-
tion” (in 1994, 276).
That doesn’t mean that philosophy needs a revolution as radical in its
own way, it means as radical in the same way; that is, it should move away
from representation to something less depictive, more abstract—more
about itself. If that seems inconsistent with the ultra-structuralist critique

57
 I am every bit as serious about critique of theory, of which this is a small example, as I
am about my effort to explicate it fairly. If this book gives less space and time to the task of
critique, it is only because I believe that a really significant critique depends, first and fore-
most, on a fair reading of its object—and that is the principal aim of this book.
   TEXTS AND BODIES    251

of formalism, note that, in this context, the focus is on self-reference rather

than detachment from the living world.58 The comparison endows abstract
art with the freedom of a signifier released from its signified; it invites us
to think of abstract art works as life forms.
Which is close to what philosophizing would become if it gave up rep-
resenting and focused on producing, on producing expressions with force
and influence manifested unpredictably, in settings in which they happen
to erupt, and then move on, morphing as they go, into other circum-
stances—and so on.59 This is why Beistegui connects Deleuze’s “reversal
of Platonism” to modern art. In jettisoning representation, Deleuze would
free natural reality from the status of mere copy and free, at the same time,
reason in general and philosophy in particular from its supposedly exalted
aim of making the best copies of the Ideas (or, later, Facts). Philosophy
could have its own being, its own becoming, just like other life forms.
In his landmark paper “The Concept of the Simulacrum: Deleuze and
the Overturning of Platonism” (Continental Philosophy Review 2005,
89–120), Dan Smith gives a brilliant account of how Plato was forced by
circumstances to conceive of his Ideas in the first place. In a nutshell, Plato
found he could only distinguish “genuine copies” from mere simulacra
(and, not incidentally, Socrates from the sophists) if he anchored “resem-
blance,” not in mere physical similarity, but in some “inner” (or invisible)
Ideational affiliation between copy and model. Then some random youth
who accidently resembles a man not his father (simulacrum) more than
the actual son (genuine copy) could be rejected. The idea that thought/
language is “true” by virtue of faithfully re-presenting what it copies thus
took hold of the idea of reason and persisted through descendent forms of
Western rationality, including the natural sciences—thus constituting the
“image of thought” Deleuze was out to dismantle in Difference and

58
 More overlap with Adorno; note that abstraction, usually the villain on the scene, is a
good thing in this case. That is because Deleuze’s idea of thinking (line of flight, affirmative
difference, novelty, open-ended, never “settled”) could be described as “abstract” in its self-
referential orientation compared to representation, the font of all banality and conformity.
59
 There is nothing obscure, by the way, about the idea of the “force” of language: think of
your body responding to a sudden cry of pain or the literally uplifting effect of anthems for
the faithful (singing La Marseillaise in Rick’s Café in Casablanca). Passages in Walter Ong’s
study of oral cultures, The Presence of the Word (1967), might also serve to remind the skepti-
cal of what it means to speak of language having force. See also Deleuze on writing “for”
animals.
252   T. DE ZENGOTITA

Repetition.60 Smith also shows how Deleuze’s promotion of the simula-

crum neutralizes all claims of “privileged position” and “hierarchy” in
thought (the political implications were clear). Nietzsche’s cosmos is all
there is and, although there is much in it that exists, as it were, “poten-
tially,” we will find that, thanks to Spinoza’s univocity,61 virtual existence
has neither more nor less being than what exists actually.
That will be Deleuze’s metaphysical vision and anyone willing to think
loosely (because, what the hell, why not? There will be no quiz) might get
a sense from it that Schrodinger’s impossible cat has found a home away
from home in this notional place.

9.3.4  Spinoza’s God Does Phenomenology in a Nietzschean

Cosmos

9.3.4.1 Philosophy as Art

Transforming language-as-representation into language-as-productive
force is an essential part of the process of appropriation through which
Deleuze assembled his cosmic artwork. One consequence was that, in
writing about it, I caught myself (as in writing about Derrida, but more
so) compulsively putting scare quotes around every other word, or so it
seemed. But that’s what one would expect if the mind really has the capac-
ity to “get” access to whatever there is that cannot be conceived (said) in
ordinary ways—namely, a continuing sense that ordinary language isn’t up
to the task.62
An example of how Deleuze saw this issue: apropos of von Hofmannsthal’s
Lord Chandos Letter ([1902] 2005), he remarked, “the writer … sees the
animal as the only population before which he is responsible.” The writer

60
 Once again, Heidegger’s influence is apparent: see the discussion of “assertion” in Being
and Time.
61
 Spinoza’s univocity is an ontological monism that says that every particular happening/
entity is a mode of the one Sub-stance—so all being “is” in the same way: if a possibility “is”
then it “is” as much as an actuality “is.”
62
 Compare George Steiner’s “lacking word” reading of high modernism in Chap. 3. Like
all his confreres, Deleuze was deeply invested in the work of the radical modernists in the arts
and literature—but, once again, even more so. He wrote more books and papers about the
arts than all his colleagues combined. “More” is a word that readily attaches to Deleuze. But
the most significant source of Deleuze’s view of language is Nietzsche’s early essay “On
Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” A half hour with that little essay provides a key for
decoding the Deleuzean discourse.
   TEXTS AND BODIES    253

pushes “to the limit that separates language from animality, that separates
language from the cry, that separates language from song. … One has to be
on this limit, that’s what I think. Even when one does philosophy. One has
to be on the limit between thought and non-thought” (Deleuze and Parnet
2012: “A is for animal”). Alain Beaulieu  nails it when he says: “Deleuze
seems to imply that animals intuitively have this capacity to express an
impersonal life with its network of affects … the task of writers and philoso-
phers consists of tuning into the forces of an impersonal life similar to the
actions and reactions of an animal and its environment” (Beaulieu 2011).63
No surprise to find that, in her introduction to the Deleuze Dictionary
(2010), Claire Colebrook worries that the very idea “might seem a
particularly craven, disrespectful, literal minded and reactive project”
­
because the Dictionary entailed the risk that “in systematizing Deleuze’s
thought” we “reduce an event and untimely provocation to one more
doxa” (pp.  1–2). Similarly, Joe Hughes, in his invaluable Deleuze’s
Difference and Repetition: A Reader’s Guide (2009) wonders if the “idea
of a reader’s guide which attempts to bring the vibrations, rotations and
whirlings of difference and repetition into the dubious clarity of everyday
language is in fact a fundamental betrayal of Dells aesthetic project” (23).
And, tasked with introducing The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze
(2012), Henry Somers-Hall devoted ten pages to the difficulties involved
in reading him: “Deleuze introduces a certain obscurity into his language,
a stuttering or in his own words a deterritorialization of language that
prevents reliance on ready-made categories of thought” that enable us to
“think that which is outside of the intellect” (5).
“Stuttering” was especially interesting to Deleuze—an everyday
example of the “schizophrenic” poetic creations of Antonin Artaud
with which he was well-nigh obsessed. One needs to reflect upon the
phenomenon as concretely as possible to see why. The near-spastic ten-
sions and suspenses that constitute a severe case of stuttering testifies
to (as Deleuze would put it) collisions of hidden forces in the depths
of bodies that determine experienced actuality. When you watch and
listen to someone stutter, it’s like watching a schizophrenic make

63
 Certain feminist critics rightly discerned a boyish “masculinity” in Deleuze’s fascination
with animals—wolf packs in particular seemed to appeal to a lingering Mowgli/Tarzan fan-
tasy at work in his thinking. And later, fully invested a kind of panpsychism, he saw the
“origins” of art in the territorial markings of animals and was as comfortable with that con-
tinuity as any nineteenth-century evolutionist would have been.
254   T. DE ZENGOTITA

art—conflicting impulses are visibly uprooting lines of habituality and

intentionality. What I will be calling “the anguish of actualization” is here
on dramatic display.64
Notice how closely this tracks with Adorno looking to the emancipa-
tory potential of modern art—but the idea of a philosophy that itself
“stutters” like Artaud is way more radical than anything Adorno did in his
own work, which was conventionally framed and executed. Like the classic
modernist he was, Adorno practiced what he preached in a separate com-
partment (see his corpus of experimental musical compositions). But in
Deleuze, and especially in Deleuze and Guattari, there is a full-blown,
essentially postmodern, effort to violate compartments and experiment—
artistically, in the texts—with philosophical and scientific language, and
always to the same end: in effect, to evoke that field of “a-subjective con-
sciousness” that Deleuze found implicated in Hume’s transcendental
empiricism, to make visible (to “see”) the play of forces that operate within
and between bodies and contexts, the differential fields of stimuli and
impulses, the ongoing momentum of habit, and, especially, the constant
interruptions of chance—the breaks and impasses that result unexpectedly
in new series of thoughts or feelings or actions (this way lies their “vision”
of the political as well).
As with Derrida especially, this exposition will deploy ordinary subject
talk as needed to clarify what is obscure in Deleuze’s work—though, in his
case, it is not so much a matter of breaking a ban because Deleuze’s strat-
egy was not so much to destabilize (deconstruct, etc.) as to attack head on,
to smash. But I will be arguing that, hanging around the wreckage was a
poetically resurrected subject so magnificently idealized as to escape notice
as such: Spinoza’s God.
The attacks on the subject that were Deleuze’s focus in his early work
eventually evolved into an attack on identities of all kinds. It was as if he
wanted to “disguise” his original project when he undertook to undo self-­
sufficiency and autonomy in any entity whatsoever, which was what his
“scientifically” updated Spinoza-Nietzschean ontology did. But when we
looked at the origins of this ludicrously (from ludic, pertaining to play)
ambitious undertaking, we saw very clearly what the original target was. I
don’t mean to suggest that Deleuze intentionally hid his loathing for the
64
 Deleuze himself said: “A creator who is not grabbed around the throat by a set of impos-
sibilities is not a creator. … Without a set of impossibilities, you won’t have a line of flight,
the exit that is creation.” Imagine a stutterer improvising a language of gesture at the height
of his frustration: an example of a creative “line of flight.”
   TEXTS AND BODIES    255

modern subject under his all-embracing takedown of “substances.” I just

want to make sure we don’t lose sight of the original target of his weirdly
cheerful fury (Nietzsche would have approved of “cheerful fury,” surely).
But perhaps it wasn’t a disguise in the usual sense, so much as a growth,
an extension of the original undoing that became so elaborate and omnivo-
rous that it might later seem to some readers of Deleuze and Guattari that
their ultimate creation, their “schizo” subject, was only one manifestation of
“schizo” (rhizomic) processes of nature at every level, from the astronomi-
cal to the nuclear. The sheer scope of this metaphysical aspiration makes it
seem both practical and ironical to propose an “image of thought” suited
specifically to Deleuze’s work. So will propose one that  I believe it does
justice to his enterprise and might even have met with his approval—though
he insisted that, unlike his philosophical ancestors, the only “image of
thought” he subscribed to was no image at all. I suggest that the most per-
sistent and potent themes in Deleuze’s thought, in his new metaphysics, are
all oriented by the unasked but controlling ­question—“What would it be
like to be Spinoza’s God doing Phenomenology in a Nietzschean Cosmos?”
In accordance with Deleuze’s rules for critical reading, it is incumbent
upon me to provide an account of the genesis of this new image of
thought—which means identifying the problem the new image is sup-
posed to solve and the method of its solution. The problem, in Deleuze’s
case, is providing modern science—post-Einstein, quantum theory—with
a suitable metaphysics. That meant talking about what Somers-Hall
described as “that which is outside the intellect.” And to what do moderns
turn when they want to do that?
To art. It’s so conventional!
Just how closely affiliated Deleuze thought philosophy and the arts
should be was perhaps most evident in his videotaped conversations with
Parnet (Deleuze from A to Z 2012). In that casual setting, bantering with
his charming interlocutor, it was obvious that Deleuze was not simply hav-
ing difficulty maintaining the distinction between the two—he didn’t want
to. He manifestly longed to be an artist. So, for example, after rehearsing
for Parnet his boilerplate lines about painters inventing “percepts” and
writers inventing “affects” while philosophers invent “concepts,” Deleuze
admits that “actually all of these elements are involved in both art and phi-
losophy, so for example, the great philosophers like Spinoza and Nietzsche
hurl off powerful affects” (“I is for Idea”). In the work of the great think-
ers, “philosophical concepts are like personalities” and Nietzsche “creating
the concept of the priest” reminds us of how “another kind of artist would
256   T. DE ZENGOTITA

create a painting of the priest” (“J is for Joy”; italics mine; see his memory
of first encountering philosophical concepts above,  9.3.2.1). And finally,
just as great painters produce “percepts at the edge of the bearable,” so
philosophers should create “concepts at the edge of the thinkable … and
between the creation of a great character and the creation of a concept, so
many links exist that one can see it as constituting somewhat the same
enterprise” (“L is for literature”).
But, at the end of the day, Deleuze never came right out and said his
metaphysics was a work of art—period. I therefore propose to bugger him
as he buggered philosophers he admired and foist upon him this claim: his
new method to address his new problem was essentially artistic, even by
his own definition.
Yes, Deleuze created concepts (or semi-concepts)—with such abandon,
so profusely—and that super-abundance alone is suggestive. But they were
most effective, most Deleuzean, when they in turn “hurled off” affects
and percepts that caused people who fell under his spell to see and feel
differently, just as Van Gogh and Proust and Bacon did. Perhaps more
devotedly than any other philosopher, Deleuze responded to Nietzsche
when he called upon his followers to make philosophy like art, not math
and science.
Perhaps we should not be surprised to find that the world disclosed to
Deleuze when he assumed the position of Spinoza’s God was already express-
ing itself—as if to welcome him home, to the heart of immanence. Which
makes this the right moment to ask why Spinoza’s God specifically?

9.3.4.2 Expression, Event, Effect

The world does not exist outside of its expressions. (Deleuze and Guattari
in Massumi 2002, 1)
A specifically philosophical concept of immanence brings with it a specifi-
cally philosophical “danger”: pantheism or immanence. … It at once gives
back to nature its own specific depth and renders man capable of penetrating
into this depth. It makes man commensurate with God. (Deleuze Expressionism
in Philosophy: Spinoza 2005, 322; italics mine)

There is no ambiguity about these two quotes, although Deleuze’s

phrasing in the second one seems to suggest a real (though scare-quoted)
danger and he does not explicitly take on the role he is flirting with.
   TEXTS AND BODIES    257

Elizabeth Grosz, in an essay on Bergson’s influence on Deleuze, made a

similar point from a more detached standpoint:

Bergson understands analysis, which science most commonly utilizes as its

method, as what decomposes an object into what is already known. …
Intuition by contrast is that mode of (internal) transport into the heart of a
thing. … It is an attuned empiricism that does not reduce its components and
parts but expands them to connect this object to the very universe itself. (Grosz
2005, 8; italics mine)

Clearly, only a God existing in peculiar intimacy with His creation could
enjoy an empiricism that comprehensive and finely attuned. Such an attun-
ement, cast into a description, would amount to a phenomenology as if
performed by God—by Spinoza’s God in particular—because Spinoza’s
God was coextensive with, indeed identical to, all nature, existence itself.
That was his atheism, for which he suffered sanctions in his day.65
So the cosmic art project is laying a claim of some kind to the point of
view of Spinoza’s God—that is the “point of view” that everything that
exists would have of itself and everything else (debt to Leibniz’ monads
noted) at every level of its organization. Ten pages after mentioning the
danger of pantheism that expressionism brings with it, this time referenc-
ing Spinoza specifically and admiringly, Deleuze spells out the conse-
quences of this awesome affirmation in language that leaves little doubt as
to his inclinations:

Spinoza accepts the truly philosophical danger of immanence and pantheism

implicit in the notion of expression. Indeed he throws in his lot with that
danger. In Spinoza the whole theory of expression supports univocity; and
its whole import is to free univocal being … to make it the object of pure
affirmation … realized in expressive pantheism or immanence. (in
Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza 2005, 333)

But why a Nietzschean cosmos? Much as Deleuze admired Spinoza for

his daring, his naturalism, and his ethics of joy over sadness—a universe

65
 A quick reminder of how radical a view this was in its context: for the posthumously
published Dutch version of de Spinoza’s Ethics: Including the Improvement of the
Understanding ([1677] 1989), Spinoza’s friends arranged to leave out the clause “or
Nature” as it appears in the Latin version, thusly: “That eternal and infinite being we call
God, or Nature, acts from the same necessity from which he exists” (Part IV, Preface).
258   T. DE ZENGOTITA

identified with God’s being as it was understood in the seventeenth cen-

tury was too stable to be credible for a twentieth-century ontologist.
Nietzsche was the decisive influence on Deleuze—and, of course, Spinoza
anticipated him in many ways. But the Nietzsche of difference, the
Nietzsche of forces, the Nietzsche of flux, the Nietzsche of philosophy-as-­
art—that was a vision Spinoza couldn’t possibly anticipate.

– “The World is an Egg”66

‘The world is an egg’ (Deleuze 1994, 216) in that the world is a dynamic
process of metamorphosis. … Hence, if the world is a city, it is also an egg,
not a static collection of edifices but a living entity in formation. … Each
locus looks out on a different city in formation, and there is no single origi-
nary ovum over from which the city-organism arises. (Bogue 2007, 57; italics
mine)

Bogue’s decision to feature the mythical Dogon egg as a way of evok-

ing world-making processes of autonomous morphogenesis was inspired.
The analogy with a city is a bit shakier, a bit too dependent on subjective
perspective, though the essential point about the absence of a “single orig-
inary ovum” gets made. But perhaps it would be wiser to begin with some-
thing like an “originary ovum” and review, in biological terms, why it
doesn’t hold up as an account of the actualization of an organism. A well-­
educated person’s average understanding of genes and their “expression”
in phenotypes—that is, in living organisms—is sufficient to sustain an
account of some essential, if preliminary, aspects of this issue (pun
intended). The complicating factors might then be situated more securely.
I have no idea whether Deleuze was alluding to this standard biological
usage when he deployed the term “expression”; it seems unlikely, given
the context of his Spinoza studies—although he did read a lot of (mostly
outdated) Romantic biology. In any case, the terms of art we need if we
are to imagine the “point of view of pure immanence” in relation to the
natural-historical world can be roughly arranged around that usage: these

66
 “readers may recall from A Thousand Plateaus the image of the cosmic egg from the
Dogon mythology, complete with the distribution of intensities running across the surface of
the egg. According to the ancient myth, seven vibrations criss-crossed the egg in spiraling
zig-zag lines, morphing its shape into a helix before it birthed the world” (see Marcel Griaule
and Germaine Dieterlen, “The Dogon” in African Worlds: Studies in the Cosmological Ideas
and Social Values of African Peoples, by Daryll Forde (Oxford University Press 1954: 84–85)).
   TEXTS AND BODIES    259

include, most importantly, differential field, intensity, event, effect, sense,

molecular versus molar, virtual versus actual.67
If organisms developed from eggs or seeds in strict accordance with the
set of instructions encoded in the genotype, we would have a perfect
example of how Deleuze thinks of the “plane of immanence,” of “virtual-
ity,” as the modern metaphysical equivalent of Platonic Ideas. He used the
term “Ideas” for virtual structures in his early psychologically oriented
work, when he was channeling Bergson and latching onto Proust’s descrip-
tion of involuntary memories as “real but not actual, ideal but not
abstract.”68 But a moment’s reflection on the difference between the
information encoded by sequences of nucleotides on a strand of DNA and
the physical molecules themselves shows why that information might
stand as a perfectly intelligible modern iteration of the Platonic Idea. After
all, the same information could be coded (represented physically) by
something other than nucleotide molecules—as indeed it is nowadays in
computer models. So the pure (that word again) information itself, the
meaning of the sequences of nucleotides, the messages they are sending to
proteins that will differentiate into organs during morphogenesis—that
meaning, that message, could quite intelligibly be called nature’s “Ideas”
of physical organs that have yet to become.
In fact, later, working with Guattari, and with impudent intent to con-
found an easy reading, they chose to retain the term “Ideas” to name
virtuality in general. They wanted to underscore the claim that, yes, as
Nietzsche himself had proclaimed, the “business of modern philosophy is
to invert Plato,” but if the term “invert” is taken seriously then essential
elements of Platonism will be retained even as they are displaced into physis,
into what Plato thought of as the fallen world of the mere copy—the sen-
sible physical world beset by chance and change.

67
 In what follows I will be calling rather freely on imagery that dates to Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, the umbrella title for Anti-Oedipus (1972, trans. 1977) and A Thousand
Plateaus (1980, trans. 1987). So credit (or blame) for this phase of the cosmic art project
goes to Felix Guattari as well as Deleuze.
68
 “Deleuze invokes Bergson’s theory of pure memory … Bergson believes that pure mem-
ory stores every conscious event in its particularity and detail. The perceptions of actual
existence are duplicated in a virtual existence as images with the potential for becoming
conscious, actual ones. Thus every lived moment is both actual and virtual, with perception
on one side and memory on the other; an ever-growing mass of recollections” (Stagoll
“Memory” in The Deleuze Dictionary; italics mine).
260   T. DE ZENGOTITA

But we are brought up short along this line of speculation by the fact
that genes of organisms don’t really dictate their phenotypical actualiza-
tion in detail due to a host of complex interactions that arise during mor-
phogenesis, during the organism’s development. Analogously, a Deleuzean
“concept” is called a “multiplicity” because it is not a fixed definition; it is
a mobile grouping of thoughts, of thinking and speaking processes, and
associated activities (writing, teaching) that happen among people involved
in a conversation (perhaps a long one, over months and years) and roughly
governed by something like a Kantian “regulative idea” (i.e., a necessary
fiction) and is only to that extent coherent (let alone the same!). In this
case, the concept being released into this conversation can be roughly
stated thusly: suppose we think, not only of the information encoded in
the genes of a given organism at conception, but of all the contingencies
that will affect the morphogenetic process in each and all cases, suppose
we think of all that as the “information” that really and truly conditions
the emergence of life forms in every detail—suppose we think of all that as
a kind of “SuperGenome.”
The actual process of morphogenesis, like all natural processes, is con-
stantly subject to random impingements from internal and external envi-
ronments seething with other entities and forces, from cosmic rays to
maternal diet, from traffic noise to antibodies—there is no “isolating” the
event of actualizing an organism. From overall physiognomy to the tiniest
details of skin lesion or stem striation, what actually eventuates in all
cases—and at each moment—is a product of a vast and various conver-
gence and divergence of entities and forces. The SuperGenome “behind”
every organism.
Since the aim is a metaphysics for the twentieth century’s scientific
age—not the practice of any particular science—what emerges from that
realization is precisely the “meta-” that was sought. But one more step
remains to be taken (brace yourself). The imagination must now move
beyond the issue of morphogenesis in organisms and, in one massive and
propulsive leap, conceive of the entirety of events in the universe—past,
present, and future—as “emerging” from and in that universe, and the
totality of circumstances that specify all possible events in it and, by way of
specific conjunctions of entities and forces in particular circumstances,
produces all actual events. The open-ended totality of those conjunctions
and possible conjunctions just is the “virtuality” that immanently contains
those actualizations and possible actualizations. That is what “plane of
immanence” and “virtuality” came to mean in later works. Call it the
SuperDuperGenome.
   TEXTS AND BODIES    261

Of course, if we perform this final extension, we can’t define any phe-

nomenon with anything like the specificity that science requires if it is to
conduct its inquiries—that is precisely the abstraction requirement poor
Searle was trying, hopelessly, to get Derrida to submit to, the one that
Durkheim and Moore and Saussure so successfully embraced. But Deleuze
wasn’t trying to practice this or that normal science inquiry; he was trying
to produce in us a “sense” of what science as a whole is about, to provide
a “metaphysics,” properly so called, of the physical world the sciences were
exploring. And this puts him precisely in the “discordant” realm of the
Kantian “sublime” where only art may venture.

– The Anguish of Actualization

In Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the egg is associated with the body-­
without-­organs … [when] Deleuze and Guattari discuss the difficulty asso-
ciated with the organization of the human body … they state that the human
suffers from being organized this way, in not being organized differently, or
in not having an organization at all. (Robert Leston 2015, 372)

Roland Barthes introduced us to the “anguish of the schema” into

which he had to squeeze his ideas during his structuralist phase—and
“anguish” stood in contrast to the ease of writing and thinking “natu-
rally,” no matter if that also meant “conventionally.” Robert Leston here
reports that Deleuze and Guattari appear to deepen that notion in a judg-
ment rendered against organization of any kind. At the portal where virtu-
ality actualizes, whatever is becoming-actual must struggle against
alternatives immanent in the virtual—which means the configuration
(mix) of contending entities and forces constituting the already actual. It
is  as if whatever actualizes has to squeeze itself through the portal as if
emerging from a packed subway car, as if a specific anguish attaches to
being a particular anything in the flux of becoming. That anguish has
replaced Spinoza’s serene conatus, thanks to the contention that reigns in
the Nietzschean cosmos.
Why this actualization and not that one, from among the “possibilities?”69
Consider a favorite Deleuzean example of an event of actualization: a bolt

69
 Deleuze refused to talk about virtuality as a set of possibilities—though he doesn’t give
a satisfactory explanation. My guess is that, if he had, a deflating realization would have
followed: his notion of “virtuality” is very close to Heidegger’s “possibility” with Spinoza’s
God in the place of Dasein and the works of nature in the place of “equipment.”
262   T. DE ZENGOTITA

of lightning. Consider it in all its particularity and ask why this bolt of
lightning and not some other, perhaps brighter or sharper or longer-­
lasting, bolt of lightning? And the answer is, of course, because a particular
arrangement of entities and relative charges and forces happened to obtain
at the moment of actualization and not some other, slightly different but
possible, such arrangement.
If Spinoza really were the presiding spirit here, that would simply mean
that only the bolt of lightning that actually happened was ever really possi-
ble. Indebted to Nietzsche more than Spinoza, Deleuze could not tolerate
that. An ancient materialist, the imperturbable Lucretius, had provided him
with just what he needed to meet the case. Lucretius described his atoms as
subject to random “swerves”—and, on that basis, Nietzsche’s ever-colliding
wills to power were restored to their commanding positions in this meta-
physics of a modern science that relied, after all, on quantum mechanics.
Chance is king in a Nietzschean cosmos and contention is its métier.
Whatever else one might make of this SuperDuperGenome notion, it
must be admitted that it is what actualities “express.” It is likewise what an
actuality exists in “virtually” (immanently) until the “event” of its “actual-
ization.” So, unlike Platonic Ideas, Deleuzean Virtuality does not exist
apart from actuality—it just is that actuality insofar as that actuality is con-
stantly in the process of producing its own next moment. If the actuality in
question is a bubbling stream, fast moving water over pebbles and rocks
and fallen branches, then (from our point of view) it is easy to see actualiza-
tions emerging from already actual configuration of entities and forces, easy
to see how virtuality exists in the already actual. If the actuality in question
is a mountain range hundreds of millions of year in the making through the
shifts and submersions of tectonic plates the size of continents, then—not
so easy.70 But, for Spinoza’s God, there is no essential difference. All is
becoming and all becoming is actualization of the virtual. By the same
token, each actualization alters the virtual, shifts ever so slightly (or not so

70
 At a time when I was immersing myself in Deleuze’s art project while working on this
book, I happened to be hiking on Mt. Katahdin in Maine when it occurred to me to “touch
the mountain.” Not the slab of rock next to me (though that was all I could physically
touch), but the whole mountain. And something happened; I could “feel” the mountain’s
ephemerality as well as its massive solidity (no illicit substances were involved). Or, better, I
got a “sense” of its ephemerality on time scales accessible to Spinoza’s God but not usually
to me (see discussion of “sense,”). That’s all. Not a conversion experience, it didn’t make me
a Deleuzean—but an experience nevertheless. Cezanne’s’ paintings of the mountains of
Provence have a similar effect.
   TEXTS AND BODIES    263

slightly: a section of the stream’s bank suddenly gives way) the configura-
tion of entities and forces that will condition subsequent actualizations.
Finally, it is not possible (or necessary) to assign a definite locale to an
actualization.71 How far away in time and space would one have to go to
take note of every condition on the actualization of that lightning bolt?
Perhaps it flashed out just to the east of the Mississippi, just north of
Baton Rouge, but the fast moving mass of air that was its proximate cause
took shape in the Arctic. Spinoza’s God would know and we can’t—but it
doesn’t matter. All we want is to get a sense of the way things happen and
then to allow that sense to condition the way we happen—philosophically,
artistically, personally, politically.
From the point(s) of view of Spinoza’s God, there is no practical need
to organize reality into manageable categories when the whole of what
happened, happens, and will happen is right there. Not even “there.”
Here. For Spinoza’s God is all of it, the virtual and the actual, the molecu-
lar and the molar at every level and space/time location in the Universe.
Spinoza’s God doesn’t have to imagine it. But Deleuzean philosopher/
artists, emulating that imagined God, do have to. They linger perpetually
at the portal between the virtual and the actual, participant/observers in
the ontological event of becoming.72
Let’s look at it from another angle:

Deleuze constructs a concept of the ontologically primitive event—the

event which ontologically depends on no underlying substance, but on
which all substantial things ontologically depend. (Bowden 2011, 262)

71
 Expression is “non-local, belonging directly to the dynamic relation between a myriad of
charged particles. The flash of lightning expresses this nonlocal relation. Expression is always
fundamentally of a relation, not a subject. In the expression product and process are one”
(Massumi 2002, 18).
72
 I came eventually to understand the never-ending (and never-beginning) quality of the
commentaries by the Deleuzeans—D.W.  Smith and Joe Hughes, John Protevi and Brian
Massumi, Leonard Lawlor and Claire Colebrook, and the rest. Over years of lingering at the
virtual/actual portal, after many arrests and lessons learned and paroles undertaken, they
sustained a continuous quest for moments of “getting” the Deleuzean vision, a “sense” of
what only Spinoza’s God could really “know.” They produced an improvisational catechism
that settles around their thought and prose like the aura of a reputation earned, an aura vis-
ible only to those who have attempted the journey themselves—or find themselves immedi-
ately committed to it as if this, yes, and only this deserves the title “life of the mind.” I think
that’s how they feel and the hippie in me applauds them.
264   T. DE ZENGOTITA

An interesting juxtaposition: this categorical claim from Bowden and

Deleuze’s just cited assertion that “the world does not exist apart from its
expressions.” Does this mean that expressions and events are the same
thing/concept? Are they somehow different but both, separately, ontologi-
cally fundamental? Just for fun, we could throw in Zizek’s claim that
Deleuze is “the philosopher of the virtual” and follow its implications to
the conclusion that “virtuality” is ontologically prior (Zizek 2012).
Sources too numerous to need naming are also constantly insisting on the
ontological priority of “difference”—understood as a process of differen-
tiating, as growing seeds “differentiate” into plant parts—in Deleuzean
metaphysics.
No wonder the weary positivists lose patience—and if they just quit and
moved on to something more congenial, no harm done. More venture-
some inquirers will get into the spirit of the thing. We are in the Rhizome—
it’s art, it’s play, it’s an experiment, loosen up. For those who join in the
fun, what will eventually emerge is that these notions are perspectives on
(effects of) one colossal event of becoming-actual, the expression of the
universe, which is the universe. Foucault got it right away:

a bolt of lightning that will be named Deleuze: a new way of thinking is pos-
sible. … It does not lie in the future. … It is here in Deleuze’s texts, springing
forth, dancing before us, in our midst; genital thought, intensive thought, affir-
mative thought, acategorical thought. (Foucault, reviewing Difference and
Repetition and The Logic of Sense in Critique 1970, 885–908; italics mine)

Foucault was not just hailing his friend with the customary hyperbole
when he called him a bolt of lightning—he was also deploying that favor-
ite example of an “event.” Foucault was also, I think, genuinely excited.
Deleuze had produced a pair of profoundly original Nietzschean books.
The scope and verve of the affirmation they announced moved Foucault
to declare, in the same review, that the twentieth century might one day
be known as the “Deleuzian century”—after the manner of certain histo-
rians who once thought it apt to talk about “The Age of Voltaire.” That
such a possibility even occurred to him speaks volumes, not only about
how high his opinion of Deleuze’s achievement was, but also how high
the high drama of their time had become for Foucault at the beginning of
the 1970s. Gilles Deleuze was accomplishing what they were all aiming
for. He had found a new way to think, a way to “think the impossible”, to
break out of the “iron collar” of representation, the legacy of a linguistic
doxa that had imprisoned philosophy and common sense alike since
   TEXTS AND BODIES    265

Plato and Aristotle. Which meant he had invented a vocabulary capable of

evoking dynamic realities so singular they could not be categorized, yet so
universal that, once their necessity was “felt” (no other word will do), they
could not be denied either—and their influence, once felt, would inevita-
bly change trajectories of thought and action.
How far can that lightning example of an event go to clarify, not only
what is meant by event, but other notions on our list of terms essential to
this cosmic art project? Beginning with the lightning itself: each bolt is
unique (a singularity) both as to its molar configuration and the molecular
mix of bodies and contending forces that cause it to be this particular bolt
of lightning—where “molar” means something like the level at which we
perceive relatively separate and stable entities in our everyday experience
and “molecular” means the inaccessible entities and processes that—by
chance in every instance—constitute the molar entities. Each bolt of light-
ning actualizes what existed virtually among the mixes of bodies and
forces that obtained “locally” on the occasion of the flash. We could also
speak of those forces and associated bodies as a differential field of intensi-
ties73 that, at a given moment, produce the bolt of lightning as an effect (as
in “cause and effect”) of a particular mix of intensities, of forces. We could
also say, returning to our initial position, that the bolt of lightning expresses
that particular mix:

“force” means any capacity to produce a change or “becoming.” … All of

reality is an expression and consequence of interactions between forces, with
each interaction revealed as an “event.” (Stagoll “Force” in The Deleuze
Dictionary 2010)

But expression in this natural/historical context will not be quite the

same thing as an event. Rather, it is an aspect of an event, a perspective on
it, the natural/historical “physical” aspect, often implicitly coinciding with
the molar (“revealed as”)—though it goes deeper and includes the molec-
ular entities and forces at work in their singular way. But the event also
reaches “beyond” or “above” its physical aspect to include what Deleuze—
borrowing this time from the Stoics—calls “effects,” or even “surface
effects.” Leonard Lawlor describes it this way:
73
 In contrast to an extensive property, which changes when size changes (mass, volume,
length), an intensive property doesn’t change if part of the sample is removed—color, hard-
ness, pressure, charge, temperature, density, for example. Qualities and forces, not geometri-
cal dimensions.
266   T. DE ZENGOTITA

The event is paradoxical, it is two-sided; it is always both incorporeal and

corporeal, ideal and factual. … Despite the doubleness what, first and fore-
most, defines the event … is singularity … what makes something be a sin-
gularity lies in its being caused, effectuated, or realized by mixtures of bodies
… there can be no event that does not begin as an accident. (2012, 114)

The “incorporeal” and “ideal” aspect of this two-sided event is what

Deleuze (now buggering traditional linguists) calls “sense”—as in the
“sense” of a proposition or what is usually called meaning or the thought
the proposition expresses.74 But sense, for Deleuze, is something more:

Sense is both the expressible or the expressed of the proposition, and the
attribute of the state of affairs. It turns one side toward things, and another
side toward propositions. … It is exactly the boundary between propositions
and things. ([1969] 1990, 22; italics mine)

And, to nail down what I want to stress, he also says this:

It is the characteristic of events to be expressed or expressible, uttered or a

utterable, in propositions which are at least possible. ([1969] 1990, 12; italics
mine)

If “expressible” wasn’t enough, then “propositions which are at least

possible” leaves no wiggle room. The anchor term for Deleuze’s linguis-
tics—“sense”—is not just a boundary between propositions and things
but a boundary between things and possible propositions. Deleuze wants
to stimulate in us a “sense” of what “sense” is without addressing subjective
experience as ordinarily understood. That is why Foucault, in that rave
review, suggested that “The Logic of Sense could have as a subtitle: What Is
Thinking?” and he felt justified in that because, to his mind, the way
Deleuze evoked “sense” meant that “we arrive here for the first time at a
theory of thought that is entirely disburdened of the subject and the object”
(1970, 9; italics mine).

74
 Foucault felt entitled to assimilate the event almost entirely to its sense-effect and cele-
brate the event per se as “incorporeal” (“Theatrum Philosophicum” in Critique (1970,
885–908)). He seemed delighted to be able to talk about processes usually consigned to the
mental without renouncing his commitment to materialism; Deleuzean metaphysics had dis-
closed what he took the liberty of calling “incorporeal materiality.” That phrase is typical of
the paradoxical lengths to which interpreters have had to go to cope with The Logic of Sense.
   TEXTS AND BODIES    267

As we are now in a position to understand, no higher praise for a thinker

in this milieu could be imagined. Thought without a thinker—Deleuze’s
dream, and Foucault’s as well. With Deleuze’s notion of “sense,” it seemed,
“pre-reflexive impersonal consciousness” had finally been realized. To my
mind, it is the relation to possible propositions that guarantees that imper-
sonality, but Deleuze does not lean heavily on that aspect of the matter for
some reason (Compare Derrida above, 9.2.4.1).
Beyond that observation, I can’t make head or tail of “sense.” And I
was struck by how discussions of sense by Deleuzeans upon whom I relied
for substantial guidance were unusually confusing as well. The closest they
came to clarity was by way of examples. Claire Colebrook offers a very
evocative one (in a video interview I can’t relocate) when she asks us to
imagine what it is like to arrive as a guest for dinner at a couple’s house
and to realize—to get a “sense”—that they have been fighting (more con-
tention). We immediately know what she means because she is using sub-
ject talk. But what light does that example shed on the claim that “sense”
is a “boundary” between propositions and things? I try to make it work:
there’s the surface mix of the body mannerisms of the couple—the pacing
of gestures, inflections of voice, smiles a bit too wide. But all the possible
propositions that might occur (to me?), just how is that at work in this
prosaic—though vivid—example? A frequently used example is that of the
“battle” which, as a sense, is said to “soar over” the mix of bodies and
weapons on the battlefield. As with Colebrook’s example, I understand
roughly what that means, but, again, I cannot grasp how this sense of
“battle” is an aspect of both the mix of bodies and weapons and all possi-
ble propositions about the event of any battle—where “propositions”
includes novels about war that Deleuze mentions in this context (1990,
100). I just don’t know what that means.
What is clear is that Deleuze wants sense to do the same work, from the
standpoint of genesis, that Wittgenstein did, from the standpoint of stipu-
lation, when he maintained in the Tractatus that propositions and states of
affairs must, in some way, share some “form” that enables the former to
picture the latter. That is, he wants “sense” to account for how language
can relate to the world at all. I used the phrase “relate to” rather than
“represent” because Deleuze is certainly not enshrining representation at
the center of his theory of language. We know that, first of all, because
representing is an inferior function but, more importantly, because sense
is accounting for the genesis of language and his cardinal principle is that
the ground must not resemble what it grounds. It comes down to this for
268   T. DE ZENGOTITA

me: understanding how “sense” can be the boundary between proposi-

tions and the event-causing mix of bodies is so difficult because, with
speaking subjects and representation/resemblance banned from the scene,
there is no way in my mind to account for the “incorporeal” aspect of
sense. This impasse may also explain why The Logic of Sense, though “writ-
ten in the same period as Difference and Repetition … is idiosyncratic in a
number of ways, and its central claims play out at significant distance from
many of Deleuze’s other works … and the true Deleuzean philosophy.”
No wonder it has “been for so long neglected in the secondary literature”
(Roffe 2012, 106; Bowden 2011, 262).
Nevertheless, this account of sense does accomplish this much for me: it
somehow makes it easier to grasp how human consciousness (perceiving,
thinking) could plausibly be understood as a “surface effect” of an event
with much profounder and more extensive aspects from the point of view
of Spinoza’s God.75 Say you are in some room looking at some interesting
piece of furniture—a roll top desk, say. Yes, the desk is a “molar” entity
and so is your body sitting in its chair. “Molecular” entities and forces
constitute the desk just as they constitute you, your eyeball, retina, rods
and cones and neural connections to your upper cortex, likewise consti-
tuted. If you’re stuck in a conventional subject/object bubble, you won’t
automatically think of the whole “your-body-molecules-processing-light-
waves-bouncing-of-desk-molecules” as an indissoluble and univocal
whole. But it can be done. Then that whole is one event, the expression of
the mix of bodies and forces that constitutes both your body and the desk
simultaneously. But your consciousness itself has not been forgotten, its
existence is not being denied. It goes on—it’s a “surface effect” of the
whole event, an aspect. It is purely reactive, however, at least insofar as it
“represents” the event.
The upshot is this: if you could assume the point(s) of view of Spinoza’s
God, then the boundaries around entities and events that we as embodied
beings with taken-for-granted perceptual and linguistic categories would
evaporate into utter arbitrariness. But your passing awareness is not denied;

75
 This account of “surface effects” bears an inescapable similarity to Galileo’s dogmatically
mechanical world-picture described above (see pp. 19–21). And it calls to mind an accidental
connotation—the way “surface effect” seems to echo cinematic “special effects”—and that’s
apt because this is an effort to relegate the subject’s experience to a transient periphery of the
universe where it belongs. Galileo’s decision to call heat (and color and sound) “secondary
properties” as compared to “primary properties” that really exist—also makes it apt to say of
Deleuze and Guattari’s usage: it was immanent in Galileo’s.
   TEXTS AND BODIES    269

it is simply reconceived as a “surface effect” of those profounder and more

extensive aspects of the total event/situation. That would seem perfectly
reasonable from the point of view of Spinoza’s God and that was always
the point of view Deleuze and Guattari aspired to. They liked putting
“man” in his place—like all of that cohort; they were convinced he
deserved it and took righteous satisfaction in delivering the verdict: “In
truth, there are only inhumanities, humans are made exclusively of inhu-
manities, but very different ones, of very different natures and speeds”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 190).
You could call this a “phenomenology” of a sort. But the subject pole
(to use Husserlian terms) is only initially, as it were, occupied by the ego
of a human consciousness that finds itself rooted in the “thesis of the natu-
ral standpoint” of everyday life. That’s a necessary starting point, since
even Felix Guattari—explaining A Thousand Plateaus to Patti Smith in his
room at The Chelsea Hotel while they shared the last joint in her Navaho
bag—was confined as a mortal embodied being to that room at that
moment. It was his imagination that roamed beyond the “territorialized
couplings” of prosaic binaries (like mental/physical, here/there, now/
then) and let, say, the new idea of “chaos theory” propel him into Being-
as-one-can-imagine-it, given such stimulations. This was the 1960s and
that should never be forgotten by anyone trying to understand what these
people were up to. The metaphysics of Deleuze and Guattari ought there-
fore be reckoned a phenomenology with imagination instead of percep-
tion dominating the subject pole. And, again, the yield is philosophy as art
with the subject position of Spinoza’s God as the destination of human
creativity in philosophical work. Did they get there? Of course not. But—
still crazy after all those years—they tried.

9.3.4.3 Capitalism and Schizophrenia

We don’t claim to have written a madman’s book, just a book in which one
no longer knows … who exactly is speaking, a doctor, a patient … if we have
tried to go beyond this traditional duality, it’s precisely because we were
writing together. … The process is what we call a flux … a notion that we
wanted to remain ordinary and undefined … it goes beyond all dualities. We
dreamed of this book as a flux-book. (Guattari 2009, 73)

And there it is again, this time from the point of view of a consciously

crafted writing process as Guattari recalled it years later: disrupt the auton-
omous subject and release the flows! And what flows they were.
270   T. DE ZENGOTITA

Chapter 1 of Anti-Oedipus is called “Desiring-Production” and the first

lines reads: “It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, and
other times in fits and starts. It breeds, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks.”
A few pages later Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer is quoted: “I love every-
thing that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfe-
cund” and “my guts spilled out in a grand schizophrenic rush, an evacuation
that leaves me face to face with the absolute” ([1972] 2009, 5).
So, right away, you know this is something else. You know you are not
reading another study of Spinoza. You are being welcomed to the Carnival
of Schizo Pulsions. And you have been hit with an example of a theme
Deleuze and Guattari will hammer you with throughout the book: lan-
guage can have force, it can produce force, and it can produce more
force—and not merely represent. But the most basic substantive claim is
being introduced as well. On the first page, right after “shits and fucks,”
the next line says: “What a mistake to have ever said the Id.”
And with that Anti-Oedipus (read: anti-unity, anti-stability, anti-
being—pro-becoming, pro-difference), the most sensational of all the
works of French theory, was launched.
Vincent Descombes hit the nail on the head when he said:

If in 1972, Deleuze succeeded with the Freudo-Marxist synthesis where

everyone else tried in vain, it was because he adopted an irreverent style which
meant, in the end, that his synthesis was neither Marxist nor Freudian. …
The vocabulary of the Anti-Oedipus is sometimes Marxist, sometimes
Freudian, but the critical strand is Nietzschean from start to finish. ([1979]
1980, 173; italics mine)

And that irreverence, which marked Deleuze’s attitude from the begin-
ning of his career, was without question essential to the book’s success—
how could it not be, given the frequency with which Anti-Oedipus is
celebrated or denigrated as the book that captured the spirit of 1968,
when irreverence was the order of the day. And on this point especially,
Felix Guattari was the perfect collaborator. As a student of Lacan’s, he was
prepared to innovate outlandishly in whatever settings he found himself,
clinical or political. But his taste for irreverence extended beyond texts and
lectures, however performative; he was an activist above all. Charismatic,
aggressive, sexually provocative—he dominated their relationship from
the beginning. The force of his example drove Deleuze to extremes of
   TEXTS AND BODIES    271

thought and proposals for practice that the shy and sickly author of
Difference and Repetition could not have countenanced.
Lacan was in fact Guattari’s training analyst and before he teamed up
with Deleuze to critique the Oedipal—the lynchpin of Lacanian theory—
he was widely regarded as the chosen heir. But when Lacan caught wind
of the traitorous project, he banished his protégé and replaced him with
his son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller. The world of the French Intellectual
Nobility (Kauppi 1996) did indeed resemble a village, but it was a rarified
one, especially given the veneration in which its inhabitants were held.76
Yet another reason why the language of theory was so often obscure: like
teenagers in a clique, sharing an evolving slang, the creators of theory
could take a lot for granted.
When Felix Guattari came to confer with Deleuze in his study about
their book, he brought with him a sensational resonance, residual emana-
tions of the turbulence that had flowed so recently through the streets of
Paris in the schizoid rush of revolution. Both he and Deleuze insisted that
their books were “expressions” or “effects” of the “events” of May 1968,
but only Guattari had actually participated. Deleuze just thought about it.
But his thought had always been Nietzschean—the play of forces and their
consequences had always obsessed him. With Guattari, he was discovering
what he had meant all along and was inspired to go for broke.77
But the original target of the ultra-structuralists remained the focus, in
spite of the mind-boggling reach of the discourse they would concoct. Of
all the ways the major French theorists found to decenter, deconstruct,
and demote the modern subject, in philosophy and action, their approach
was the most transparent. It was a frontal assault. Whether we look at
Guattari’s early efforts, instituted at the Le Borde clinic, to create “social
subjects” that could replace the interpellated subjectivities of the suffering
patients and the professional staff or at Deleuze’s straightforward denials
of the significance of consciousness, that hapless shuttlecock of molecular
determinations, we are struck by the same directness—especially in com-
parison to the tactics employed by other practitioners of theory. For

76
 In 1960, when Sartre was in a terrorism-supporting phase of his career, regularly exhort-
ing French troops in Algeria to desert, de Gaulle was asked why he took no action against the
philosopher. He replied, “One does not arrest Voltaire.”
77
 Deleuze himself, alluding to Kant, once said that Felix had awakened him from “dog-
matic slumbers.” He called Felix the “diamond miner” and relegated himself to the role of
“polisher.” Others, for example, Slavoj Zizek, saw in that influence the corruption of a great
philosopher (in Zizek 2012).
272   T. DE ZENGOTITA

Deleuze and Guattari, the subject did not have to be seduced into recog-
nition of the “other” in itself or tricked into unraveling in “writing.” One
simply, in accordance with the will to power and the priority of action,
forced the issue, in both senses of the word “issue.”

–– The Oedipal Trap and the Revolutionary Assemblage

From a rational point of view, one would expect the pauperized masses of
workers to develop a sharp consciousness of their social situation, to develop
a will to eliminate their social misery … [but] … it was exactly the pauper-
ized masses who carried fascism, the ultimate in political reaction, to power.
(Wilhelm Reich The Mass Psychology of Fascism 1946, 7)

With this formulation, Wilhelm Reich, a renegade psychoanalyst in his

own right, gained a lot of traction among French intellectuals in the con-
text of the political recuperation of traditional authority after 1968. It
became the problem that had to be addressed. And his claim that the
nuclear family with its regime of sexual repression was the “germ cell” of
that longing for fascist authority inspired two of them in particular. Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari collaborated not merely to address Reich on
an intellectual level, but also to incite people to undertake new practices in
their lives, practices that would bust them out of society’s Oedipal prison,
thanks to the release of desires not constituted by a Lacanian tragic lack—
but by an entirely affirmative and multiplicative Nietzschean will-to-­
power. As we saw with Kristeva, the “philosophers of desire” felt authorized
by desire itself to force temporality, with all its disrupting effects, into the
structures—both intellectual and political—that had been defined by the
modern subject and imposed upon the world it so defined.
In this work, Deleuze and Felix Guattari deployed a battery of novel
concepts that make what sense they make in service of this insistent aim: a
fundamentally impossible Freudo-Marxian synthesis that would shatter
the structure of modern subjectivity and disrupt the tyranny of Saussure’s
“despotic signifier” in the name of sheer desire. Freudian “free associa-
tion” was the ancestral “rhizomic” process—the prototype of a thinking
that refuses to be channeled by concepts or presuppositions or conclu-
sions. Surrealism again. The energetic uncontainable of that thinking,78

78
 The jargon of cognitive gerunds—as in “thinking the limits of the body” or “theorizing
the post-soul aesthetic”—belongs in this environment. The message: fluid, open, unfixable,
not dominating, not dominated—not “about” a separate “object.”
   TEXTS AND BODIES    273

now joined to action, is what the “schizophrenia” image supplies, opposed

as it was in the jargon of the day to the “paranoia” of system building in
theory or in society, capitalist or communist. As Michel Foucault pointed
out in the introduction to the English language edition, the book’s true
adversary was not so much capitalism as the “fascism in us all, in our heads
and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to
desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” The creators of
French theory understood that “fascism” as the direct descendent of the
cogito whose project Descartes had so prophetically described when he
called upon moderns to become “lords and masters” of nature. When
Deleuze and Guattari proclaimed that there “is only desire and the social
and nothing else,” they were declaring war upon the modern subject—
and their book was their “war machine.”
There are a lot of “machines” in Capitalism and Schizophrenia.79 They
are all “desiring machines”; that is, they are all, no matter how unlikely or
temporary the configuration, fueled by a plethora of forces, impulses—
“pulsions” is a well-chosen word. The ubiquity of this image serves the
same purpose, over and over again: it calls our attention away from the
conventional molar machines we are accustomed to—typewriters, cars—
and focuses us instead on some “assemblage.” The basic aim here is to
create an alternative to the closure effects of Hegel’s remorseless totali-
ties—but, of course, all the other versions of linguistically fabricated enti-
ties are being targeted as well. The assemblages that really matter are
ever-morphing grand historical constructions—markets, armies, states.
But for illustrative purposes simple examples serve: a man riding a bicycle
is an assemblage: there is the force of his pedaling legs, obviously—but
also the resistance of the pedals and the crunch of clutch and brake, the
tire’s traction, the texture of the road’s surface, on and on. A campsite for
recreational vehicles at a state park as evening descends is an assemblage—
the electrical outlets, the fires and stoves and coolers, the paths leading to
the toilets and the docks, and the living bodies in action along all those
conduits and junctures.

79
 It is worth remembering that the idea of human beings and groups as “machines” itself
goes back, somewhat ironically, to Descartes (see, e.g., in the Enlightenment, La Mettrie’s
Man the Machine, and a slew of other works leading up to the mechanism still evident in
Comte and even Durkheim). Cartesian dualism had a materialist aspect that many French
thinkers, including Descartes himself, sometimes found irresistible.
274   T. DE ZENGOTITA

Such constructions play a key role in the art project: at every historical
moment, they are treated as the agents of whatever process of becoming is
in focus—up to the point where even speech, in all its manifestations, is
conceived as a product of “collective assemblages of enunciation” (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987, 7). The world of the Anti-Oedipus, like the fantastic
landscape that houses A Thousand Plateaus, is swarming with these newly
discovered creatures (though they’ve been there all along); one creature
alone has passed from the scene. There are no individual people doing and
saying things. Parts of the assemblage that we used to think of as people
moving their limbs in various ways and uttering various noises are admit-
ted, but they are merely parts, like the tents and the canoes. It is “the
assemblage that enunciates”—which means that, if you descended to the
molecular level with Spinoza’s god at the moment that George asks Martha
if she wants mustard on her hot dog you would realize that the sound
waves that really constitute those words are products of the open-­ended
molecular  totality of the chance-saturated circumstances at that moment
and what George and Martha think is going on is a surface effect of all that.
Why think of the infant’s mouth and the breast as a “desiring machine”?
Because, taken as a unit, it traverses the classic subject-object boundary,
violating the unity of the monadic subject and liberating a nomadic subject
of organs without a body, thus evoking the multiplicity and machinic
implacability of desires, and—once the bottle is substituted for the breast—
tying this dismembered self to a bottle-making factory under the regime
of late capital—the ultimate schizo Deathstar machine now undoing itself
in spite of itself, caught up as it is in a frenetic and fragmented connectivity
that has taken on an unstoppable life of its own.
Anti-Oedipus aimed to merge the “private theater” of the Freudian
psyche with the political reality of “desiring-production,” where Marx
supposedly held sway. But the operations of forces in flux in the book as
written proved to be, in accordance with the schizo imperative itself, too
promiscuous to be contained by any recognizable form of Marxist theory
or action. And action was very much the point. “It is not enough to say
‘Long Live the Multiple!’” proclaimed Deleuze, with Hegel’s Dialectic in
his sights, “you must do and make the multiple” (in Bogue 2007, 84).
Felix Guattari, for his part, was always doing that—always organizing,
always motivating. He was a leader of the “Institutional Therapy” move-
ment in France (see Thomas Szas in the USA and R.D. Laing in Great
Britain for parallels). At the La Borde clinic in particular, he and his cohort
devised various practices designed to dismantle systems of authority and
   TEXTS AND BODIES    275

exclusion of the kind Foucault described in his genealogies of discursive

practices. Much light can be shed on the riot of novel notions in Anti-­
Oedipus simply by looking to Guattari’s application of them at La Borde—
and, in 1968, beyond the clinic’s walls as well, for he regularly led staff and
patients on expeditions into the center of Paris so they could experience
directly the larger machines to which clinics and schools and the like were
subordinated. But it was on the level of daily practice that his innovations
foreshadowed the conceptual innovations of Anti-Oedipus. So, for exam-
ple, patients, staff, and doctors at his clinic would exchange roles on a
regular basis and then meet to discuss what they had come to understand
as a result of these “displacements.” The ubiquitous expression “travers-
ing” in Anti-Oedipus basically means “moving across” institutionalized
structures and discourses and seeing what happens—allowing things to
develop (schizophrenically, rhizomically) in all directions, in whatever way
they do, while learning collectively, as a “social subject,” from what hap-
pens and then going on to do more of the same (for an especially insight-
ful assessment, see Bourg 2007, 141–143). In essence, Anti-Oedipus was
a recipe for and a reflection on community experiments as a way of life—
praxis fused with theory, a paradigm for the wave of such experiments that
were launched in the spring of 1968 and lasted into the early 1970s.
Jean-Luc Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy ([1974] 1993) was another
fruitful resource for the “philosophy of desire” wing of the ultra-­
structuralist radicals in the early 1970s.80 The phrases “institutional ther-
apy” and “libidinal economy” perfectly express the aspiration for
political/psychological synthesis that inspired the 1968ers—witness the
moment when, at the height the events of May, they christened a
Sorbonne auditorium L’Amphithéâtre Che Guevara-Freud. The coinage
in its context captured a widely shared view of Freud and Marx—namely,
that they had both discovered an “unconscious” that determined events,
the one at the individual level, the other at the social. But it would come
to stand for the hope that a politics that privileged culture or mentality
in some way could still be real politics. That would become the essential
point—we saw it taking shape in the pages of Tel Quel (see above, Chap.
8.2). But it was really later, after the 1960s movements had fallen short,
that the question of a cultural politics became most salient, especially in
anglophone settings. Up and coming intellectuals with 1960s roots,
80
 Lyotard later repudiated Libidinal Economy, calling it his “evil book” and claiming he
needed to explode himself out of Marxist habits of thought by writing it. Along with
Foucault, he was one of the few to disavow Marxism categorically.
276   T. DE ZENGOTITA

t­aking positions of responsibility in various institutions, needing to

believe they were not selling out, needing to believe that they were con-
tinuing the struggle, welcomed formulations that affirmed that cultural
struggles were really political struggles—as Foucault’s concept of “dis-
cursive practices” did so effectively. For Deleuzeans who kept the faith,
especially those engaging with the schizoid assemblage that was the
Internet in its early years, Capitalism and Schizophrenia read like some
prophetic glossary of essential terms.81
But, for all its political ambition, I think that Capitalism and Schizophrenia
remains, at bottom, a phase in the development of Deleuze’s cosmic art
project—indeed, its culminating phase. When Deleuze allowed Guattari to
goad/inspire him into taking nuanced psycho-biological notions from
Difference and Repetition and explode their scope of application, scattering
them across their newly forged universal history made up of more or less
random fragments drawn from the anthropological archive and subsuming
them willy-nilly into a taxonomy of nomadic and barbaric stages of social
development—and so on, and on, like some parody of the great evolution-
ist schemes of the nineteenth century—when he committed to that, he
experienced the ride of his life, the wild and the powerful bore him away at
last. But the result cannot be taken seriously as an empirically based, respon-
sibly thought-through, account of human history. And the fact that they
didn’t hesitate to extend that account beyond human history to subsume
the becoming of the very universe in the same terms only reinforces the
impression that the ghost of some nineteenth-century Romantic evolution-
ist—perhaps Lamarck—had absconded with their discourse:

Capitalism and Schizophrenia … will bring to the fore naturalist tendencies

that are only implicitly present in the still-Kantian framework of Difference
and Repetition … the “of” in the phrase “the experience of this concretely
existing individual here and now” is … the experience by human subjects of
this individual object in front of it, and it is the experience enjoyed by the
concretely existing individual itself, even when that individual is non-human
or even non-living. (Smith and Protevi “Gilles Deleuze” in The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Italics mine)

So the pantheism that Deleuze flirted with in his Spinoza studies was
transformed in his work with Guattari into a doctrinal panpsychism that he
81
 This helps to explain why identity politics activists in the USA gave so much attention to
regulating language, especially in educational institutions. To shape language was to shape
institutions—that was the conviction behind the forces of “political correctness.”
   TEXTS AND BODIES    277

embraced without a murmur, as if it were an inevitable development. And

perhaps it was. Many artists experience conscious life as a shareholding:

The everlasting universe of things

Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
Now lending splendor, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters,—with a sound but half its own. (P.B.  Shelley “Mont Blanc”
1817)

Of course, thanks to the doxa of genres, we are conditioned to accept

the expression of such sentiments in the work of a Romantic poet, but
when they appear before us dressed up as anthropology and history, some
are inclined to look askance. That is why I keep emphasizing the art proj-
ect theme. A fair-minded anglophone positivist needs to approach the
works of Deleuze and Guattari as if they were attending a reading of a
new-fangled epic poem in an off-Broadway experimental theater and then
see what, if any, value they bring.
Of course, true believers didn’t need to shift categories to embrace
panpsychism. Radical environmentalists of various stripes found it imme-
diately appealing and welcomed the “notion of the nonhuman, inhuman,
or posthuman … as the defining trait of nomadic ethical subjectivity”
(Braidotti 2012, 172). Now they could conceive of the “enunciating
assemblage” as inclusive of the whole environment, not just the human
context. Now when they “spoke for” the planet it wasn’t a metaphor—
Gaia hypothesis or not.82 So Deleuze and Guattari were already anticipat-
ing a posthuman moment that would become ever more baffling as it
became ever more salient with the development and convergence of bio-
and digital technologies (see Chap. 12, below).
Consider, for the sake of enrichment, a specific example of how
Deleuze’s original concepts were extended and elaborated in Capitalism
and Schizophrenia. In what follows, I rely heavily on a lecture by Manuel
DeLanda called “Intensive and Topological Thinking” (https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=0wW2l-nBIDg). This is one of several DeLanda

82
 See also “Deleuze is in my bones” in an interview with Bruno Latour, where it becomes
clear that the whole “agency of things” trope in “Actor Network Theory” echoes Deleuze’s
metaphysics: http://figureground.org/interview-with-bruno-latour/.
278   T. DE ZENGOTITA

lectures available on YouTube, all of which vividly convey the spirit of the
Deleuzean enterprise.
The key term “singularity” began life with Deleuze as a reference to
something like the sense-certainty moment in Hegel’s Phenomenology, a
moment when the subject, emerging from the given of the transcendental
field, is absorbed in the immediate object/content of an intuition; it was
later expanded to include multiple “sensitive points” in the transcendental
field, a multiplication that seemed somehow to put more “experience”
into the impossible notion of pre-subjective experience. By the time of the
Guattari collaborations, it had taken on a topological, quasi-scientific sig-
nificance—referencing threshold effects and changes of state in dynamic
systems (e.g., water’s boiling point as a function of variable intensities like
pressure and temperature).
The motivating intention at that juncture was the hope that singularities
understood in this way might also apply, at least in principle, to societies as
dynamic systems. Could “revolution points” be identified as singularities
on a Riemann topological graph if the right variables were chosen along the
N-axes—with this all-important amendment: it might be practically impos-
sible to identify the relevant variables, let alone “measure” them for values,
but the metaphysics of univocity (Spinoza’s monism), fusing with a meta-
physics of becoming across all levels of order and disorder in the universe,
would be vividly evoked along with the in-­principle possibility of scientific
describability for revolutions in human history that testifies to a completely
naturalist ontology.
I am arguing, in effect, that the idea of that topological graph, with its
many thousands of axes referencing social/economic/political trends, is
essentially an artwork—one of many in a vast installation called Capitalism
and Schizophrenia. It evokes, on the one hand, the uncontainable com-
plexity of human historical circumstances and happenings while at the
same time assimilating human history in principle to the same theoretical
apparatus that applies in fluid dynamics. Feel free to indulge in a love of
science fiction by imagining a day when the Internet-of-Things, measur-
ing actual values for the relevant variables, converges with advances in
network theory and computer modeling to actually produce something
like the graph in question. Such imaginings will be constrained to some
extent by concepts drawn from science and math, with the extent being
determined by how much you happen to know about the science and
math. But ultimately the extent and accuracy of such knowledge is beside the
point. This is art. Deleuze’s whole metaphysical vision, like Delanda’s topo-
logical graph, should be understood as art—philosophy-as-art.
   TEXTS AND BODIES    279

From the points of view of Spinoza’s God, virtuality can be conceived

as a collection of all the conditioning factors in the actualization of any-
thing (represented on the N-axes of the topological graph) that go into
making whatever temporarily presents itself as “being.” Calling that a
SuperDuperGenome means looking at all actualizations as if they were
instances of very complicated biological morphogenesis, no doubt too
complicated for us ever to know all the force factors in actuality, but nev-
ertheless a process of the same kind as in the development of an organism—
wouldn’t that just be the metaphysics of modern science Deleuze seeks?
And doesn’t it make sense that he would eventually find himself accom-
modating a certain animism, even panpsychism. It’s not contributing any-
thing to science itself, but it is saying that we know that in principle
everything that develops (not just life) develops in this way. It is an account
of the genesis of actual experience, not a representation of possible experi-
ence—and that was the goal Deleuze set for himself way back when he
buggered Kant after his own, affirmative reading of Hume.
So—stepping back from Deleuze and recalling the whole story of post-
modernism as it is being told here—what is the significance of going
beyond Kantian conditions on the possibility to engage with the genesis of
the actual? It brings history (parole, performance) back into the picture,
first of all. It welcomes processes of actuality that modernists had banished
from their disciplinary compartments with their gestures of abstraction—
the mess that Saussure and Durkheim, Moore and Richards were deter-
mined to define out of consideration in their truly scientific objects of
study. But, with Deleuze and Guattari specifically in mind, it really comes
down to this: they alone, at that time and place, had the postmodern-ist
nerve to take it all on again. They were as ambitious as the nineteenth-­
century evolutionists (see above, Chap. 2.4), laboring to get modernity
back on track after the two revolutions had dashed Enlightenment hopes,
before the modernists decided to carve up reality into manageable slices.
This postmodern return to messy actuality did not result in a successful
science of everything either. But that was not a genuine “failure” just inso-
far as Deleuze’s project was not science—but metaphysics and art. The
modernist compartmental disciplines, especially in the harder sciences,
worked. Abstraction was successful. The formalized linguistics of Chomsky
and Searle explains language better than any vision of “intertextuality” or
“archewriting” or “logic of sense.” All this must be acknowledged. Then
the postmodern moment can be given its due—as something else entirely.
280   T. DE ZENGOTITA

It must also be acknowledged that when it comes to politics as evoked

in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, we enter very problematic terrain. The
basic “political strategy” seems to have been to intensify the schizophrenia
of dispersed desire that capitalism fosters and push it to some limit the
monster itself could not endure. No wonder the poor old Communist
Party looked so stodgy. But, while not a recognizably serious political
proposal, that prescription has a prophetic ring to it, especially given the
dominance now enjoyed by that ultimate schizoid/rhizomic mechanism:
the Internet, augmented by its own special kind of “surface effects,” the
so-called social media. The manifest consequence—politics as a field of
self-expression—seems to confirm, with ghastly accuracy, Deleuze and
Guattari’s overall vision of Western capitalism careening in every direction
toward its own demise. Schizophrenic flows of desire are multiplying and
ramifying, colliding and converging across a space of relentless representa-
tion and misrepresentation at such velocities and volumes that it can seem
futile to even try to disentangle reality itself from the Great Reality TV
Show our public life has become. Is there a positive side to all of this?
During the 1990s, a slew of techno “visionaries” imagined they were real-
izing 1960s values in a global cyber-village of emancipated and empow-
ered individuals perpetually creating and recreating community. But—as
many of those visionaries, sobering up at last, have lately been acknowl-
edging—things didn’t work out that way. A case in point: the nomad
future for 1968 “guerillas” that Deleuze and Guattari specifically envi-
sioned, even as the system was recuperating in an ascendant neo-­liberalism,
looks like another pipe dream now:

Could it be that at the moment the war machine ceases to exist, conquered
by the State, it displays to the utmost its irreducibility, that it scatters into
thinking, loving, dying, or creating machines that have at their disposal vital
or revolutionary powers capable of challenging the conquering State?
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 356)

Well, if they meant the powers of Amazon, Twitter, and Facebook,

maybe so. Or perhaps Wikileaks, Bitcoin, Alt-Right 4Chan, and Russian
troll farms would fill the bill?  Or perhaps the collective commitment of
autocratic populists and their followers to believe whatever suits their pur-
poses at any given moment? These are indeed “revolutionary powers” and
they are, as of this writing, proving quite capable of challenging the State.
   TEXTS AND BODIES    281

Coda: Becoming-sensation

I become in sensation, and something happens through sensation, one

through the other and one in the other. (Gilles Deleuze)

For Gilles Deleuze, at the end of the day, becoming was what mattered
and becoming-sensation was its purest form, for that led most surely to the
beyond-self.83 Becoming just is life—for people, for the ocean, for the
mountain, for the planet. If there is no discernible political program to be
found in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, it is because the whole idea of a
“program” was antithetical to becoming. That priority, which ultimately
makes it futile to try to found a politics on Deleuzean metaphysics, was
made perfectly clear by the man himself in an interview with Parnet (Deleuze
from A to Z 2012) that took place under the rubric “G is for Gauche
(Left)”: after mocking the new philosophers and various historians who
whine about revolutions not turning out well, he distinguishes between
“becoming-revolutionary” and whatever actually happens as a result. He
said that “’68 was a becoming-revolutionary without a revolutionary future.
People can always make fun of it after the fact, but there were phenomena
of pure becoming that took hold of people” and his face is aglow at the
thought of it all. “Precocious adolescent to the end of his days”—that’s how
I described him at the beginning of this account and I think it holds up well.
There he is in that interview, illness visibly upon him, his every gesture radi-
ating innocence of all responsibility—not “responsibility for this or that”
but responsibility itself, the very idea of it. The future of history is always up
for grabs in a Nietzschean cosmos and its artist/philosopher was not about
to cower under a political program for protection from its elements.
So look to Deleuze, as you would to any artist, for inspiration as a pri-
vate being and look elsewhere for your politics, serious business of another
order (but compare Rorty 1989, chap. 4, 73–95). Politics is like parent-
hood in a lot of ways, not least in this: responsibility cannot be avoided. On

83
 It must have seemed to Deleuze that in becoming-sensation he was healing the breach
created by Kant’s self-alienating “I think” (the first “difference” that fascinated him) just
insofar has he managed to be aware of becoming-sensation without really thinking about it.
With this, Deleuze thinks he is getting outside of “representations” through encounters with
“the being of the sensible.” All of which suggests that there is a practice associated with this
art project, just as there is with phenomenology or meditation. This practice doesn’t consist
of habits but of openness to all that isn’t habitual. To Artaud and to Bacon, to surges and
flows of intensities in general—as opposed to the objects we are conditioned to attend to. In
other words, to be a Deleuzean means cultivating a faculty for “thinking the impossible.”
282   T. DE ZENGOTITA

the other hand, as long as we are considering sensible advice from Rorty,
we are also obliged to make a space for experiments in our quest for a
vocabulary that works for our time—so why not this one? Create it and see
if it works. John Dewey welcomed that test. And this much must be said
for Deleuze and Guattari: they felt Nietzsche’s arrow pointing straight at
them and they responded with everything they had. So what if the fruit of
their collaboration turned out to be something more like one of Raymond
Roussel’s novels than a work of serious philosophy or a platform for a new
politics. Surely there is room in the Amazon warehouse for both?
So we turn to another leading light among the desirants, known (unlike
Deleuze) for his political activism; perhaps he can supply what was want-
ing in his friend’s efforts.

9.4   Michel Foucault (1926–1984)

Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy has been:
namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and
unconscious memoir. (Nietzsche [1886] 1966, 6)

One of the delightful ironies willy-nilly realized in the writing of this

book is anticipated here, in Nietzsche’s provocative observation. We have
it, that is, directly from their patron saint: the cohort of thinkers who
strained their intellectual powers to the breaking point in an effort to dis-
mantle or displace subjectivity—their own included—actually provides
ideal exemplars of Nietzsche’s claim. That holds, above all, for Michel
Foucault. And—for reasons to be discussed below—that circumstance
also  helps to explain why, of all the significant figures associated with
French theory, Foucault had the most enduring influence on anglophone
academics. His Nietzschean vision of history remains the most viable alter-
native to Marxism among intellectuals still committed to a materialist and
activist agenda. This is most obviously true wherever projects concerned
with identity politics and intersectionality are pursued, but his influence is
also apparent in recent work that has been more broadly influential—
Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia (Harvard 2012), for example, and the
journal History of the Present founded by Joan Scott. Other representative
examples include Timothy Mitchell’s Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-­
Politics, Modernity (UC 2002), Anne Stoler’s Carnal Knowledge and
Imperial Power (UC 2010), and Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos
(Zone Books 2015).
   TEXTS AND BODIES    283

This section aims to shed some light on the reasons for his abiding
influence, but the kind of interpretive scrutiny given to Deleuze and
Derrida will not be necessary. Foucault presents no comparable challenge
to our understanding. Instead, this section will try to recover something
of the evocative force of his example, the drama of his life and work. He
serves as an epitome.84

9.4.1  A Miserable Self

In RB by RB, Roland Barthes admitted the obvious in passing when he
noted the impact on his work of his life experience as the subject of multi-
ple societal exclusions. And Derrida, in personal rumination, pointed to a
source (in the usual sense) for his quasi-ontology of archewriting in a
description of his adolescent dream of a writing (in the usual sense) that
would evoke the “field of the mark” in its entirety, that would evoke all
possible meaningful experiences in their particularity in a “tracing” of all
the actual experiences of the author of that writing (a linguified version of
phenomenology’s claim that the life-worlds of de facto egos were captured,
in their essence, by the transcendental ego. But, by general consensus of his
biographers and friends, no partisan of the postmodern vendetta against
the modern subject was as obviously motivated by personal experience as
Michel Foucault. He himself once described his books as “fragments of an
autobiography” (Smart 1994, 239) and his most reliable biographer
reports that “When The History of Madness came out, everyone who knew
him saw immediately that it was connected to his personal history” (Eribon
1992, 27–29; see also Gutting 2013, 75–78). And Foucault himself told
Duccio Trombadori in a 1978 interview that “there is not a single book I
have written that does not grow, at least in part, out of a direct personal
experience” (in James Miller 1994, 31) and he insisted that “the idea of the
limit experience that routes the subject from himself, that’s what was
important to me in my reading of Nietzsche, of Bataille, of Blanchot, so
that no matter how boring or erudite my books, I was always considering
them as direct experiences aimed at routing me from myself, at preventing
me from the remaining the same” (in Santini 2002, 3).
Many radical artists and thinkers who shaped Western high culture since
the latter part of the nineteenth century were misfits from childhood—no
84
 “When Foucault died [in 1984], so did the incarnation of the political hopes and theo-
retical ambitions of an entire generation. He was neither the head of a school nor the guard-
ian of any disciplinary boundaries, but he was far more, the brilliant embodiment of his
period” (Dosse 1997, 388).
284   T. DE ZENGOTITA

surprise there, when you think about it, for many of them were fortunately
placed in society by birth, yet moved somehow to profound opposition.
And the authors of French theory were no exception, although little
“Jackie” Derrida seems to have been relatively content—plenty of friends,
loved his soccer and cinema, cared deeply for his father, tensions with his
mother eventually resolved (Peeters [2010] 2013, 22–34). And, indeed, it
is notable that the particular flavor of a bitterness rooted in personal pain
is largely missing from his work. But the rest of them did not have an easy
time of it, growing up—although Foucault was in a class all his own,
utterly wretched. He was tormented until near the end by a “self” he spent
his life looking for ways to escape. Like the others, he found consolation
in the exercise of his native intelligence in environments where academic
performance and status were universally respected. But even in those envi-
ronments Foucault suffered terribly.
After describing an “almost insane tension” at the École Normale
Superieure where “everyone felt he was risking his social and intellectual
existence” in the race “to be brilliant, to stand out … to play the part of
the exceptional individual, to strike a pose for future fame,” Didier Eribon
places Foucault specifically:

[He] soon withdrew to his solitude. … He subjected those he particularly

disliked to constant putdowns and laughing scorn. He gave them insulting
nicknames. … He was soon almost universally detested. His fellows thought
him half mad and passed around stories about his odd behavior. … One day
someone teaching at the ENS found him lying on the floor of the room
where he had just sliced up his chest with a razor. And when he attempted
suicide in in 1948, for most of his schoolmates the gesture simply confirmed
their belief that his psychological balance was, to say the least, fragile. In the
opinion of someone who knew him very well during this period, “all his life
he verged on madness.” (Eribon 1992, 26)

We get a vivid picture of a particular kind of unpopular boy—a brilliant

mind, a cutting wit, a mercurial temperament—utterly friendless. But all his
pride would permit him, by way of adapting, was to mask his lonely soul in
ever more elaborate displays of arrogance that only provoked more loathing
and rejection. After the cutting incident, he was placed in a room of his own
in the ENS infirmary—a confinement he welcomed and wished to extend.
In effect, he voluntarily incarcerated himself within a school that already
seemed like a prison long before he was first committed to a mental institu-
tion in 1949. He was destined to make more (apparent?) attempts on his
   TEXTS AND BODIES    285

own life as a young man and was obsessed as well with self-mutilation
(Macey 1995, 27–28). Psychiatric evaluations attributed all this to his com-
pulsive and conflicted sexual behavior—hooking up with strangers in the
gay underground at a time when the social taboo against “homosexuals”
was virulent, plus his indulgence in drugs, and other self-­destructive activi-
ties (Macey 1995, 30; Miller 1994, 55–56). For Michel Foucault, there was
nothing abstract about “transgression,” which is why Elisabeth Roudinesco
called him “The philosopher of the pathways of the night” (2010, 93).

9.4.2  Transgression, Salvation
for us, discontinuous beings that we are, death means continuity of being …
reproduction and death … both of these concepts are equally fascinating
and this fascination is the dominant element in eroticism … [as] individuals
who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, we
yearn for our lost continuity. … This nostalgia … is responsible for the three
forms of eroticism in man … physical, emotional and religious … with all of
them, the concern is to substitute for the individual isolated discontinuity a
feeling of profound continuity. (Georges Bataille [1962] 1986, 13–15)

From his early assault on Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon” as a design

for prisons, factories, and schools to his concluding critique of Freudian
psychoanalysis (the Priest’s confessional becomes the Analyst’s couch),
Foucault cherished the forbidden—and reading Bataille would only con-
firm what he already knew from personal experience: erotic transgression
was as close to the sacred as one could get in a world without God. But
Bataille—inspired, like Foucault, by Nietzsche85—would also explain what
this experienced fact implied for transgression itself, as an ethical form.
Foucault was never a phenomenologist or existentialist or a genuine
structuralist or even a committed Marxist, but he was bound in principle,
on the basis of his commitment to transgression, to the overarching aim of
the creators of theory:

Foucault paid homage to Blanchot in 1966 as the writer of an impersonal

literature with which he completely identified, along with the current of
structuralist thinking that defended literariness. “The breakthrough in the

85
 Bataille was indebted to many for inspiration and he acknowledged them frequently, but
he insisted that Nietzsche had the “decisive” impact upon him (Surya 2002, 52). And his
friend, Pierre Klossowski, also passed on to the creators of French theory a version of
Nietzsche that invited appropriation—especially in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1997).
286   T. DE ZENGOTITA

direction of a language in which the subject is excluded … is an experiment

that is taking place today in a number of different cultural sites.” (Dosse,
citing Foucault 1997, 207)

And—once again, as with the others—that core commitment was shaped

by early encounters with the artistic experiments of the radical modernists.
An intense affair with Jean Barraqué, the serialist composer, in 1952–1953
first inspired in him an interest in the avant-garde arts that would go way
beyond his lover’s musical experiments.86 Foucault was rereading Nietzsche
during this crucial period as well. He was also researching the Heideggerian
psychoanalyst, Ludwig Binswanger, and his patient—the famously articulate
Ellen West and her obsession with suicide. Didier Eribon locates the “gen-
esis” of Foucault’s life’s work in that research (1992, 47). Binswanger saw
West’s suicidal mission in Nietzschean terms: “Only in her decision for
death did she find herself and choose herself. The festival of death [a refer-
ence to a private celebration she held on the night she killed herself] was the
festival of the birth of her existence. But where the existence can exist only
by relinquishing life, there the existence is a tragic existence.” Foucault him-
self saw West as “caught between the wish to fly, to float in an ethereal
jubilation” by committing suicide, which would mean that “a totally free
existence could arise—if only for a moment—one that would no longer
know the weight of living but only that transparency where love is totalized
in the eternity of an instant” (in Miller 1994, 75).
Of lasting importance, still early in his career, was Foucault’s engage-
ment with Raymond Roussel (1877–1933). He delighted in the story of
how it came about; William Clark tells it this way:

In 1957, the young Michel Foucault noticed some faded yellow books in José
Corti’s famous Parisian book store and tentatively asked the grand old man
‘who was Raymond Roussel?’ Wearied by Foucault’s ignorance, Corti looked at
him with a ‘generous sort of pity’ and feeling a sense of loss sighed: ‘But after
all, Roussel …’ What Corti told him and what he found in the pages he raced
through mesmerized Foucault into paying for an expensive copy of ‘La Vue’
and (in two months) he wrote the darkly Romantic Death and the Labyrinth on
Roussel’s world. (Foucault cited in Clark’s “A Lovely Curiosity,” 2002)

A lovely little scene—also undeniably Romantic?

86
 Which appealed to Foucault because “his music … tears apart the knowledge of the
subject by rendering it foreign to itself” (Santini 2002).
   TEXTS AND BODIES    287

Roussel was a “dandy” who measured up to Baudelaire’s high expecta-

tions for that role and that appealed to Foucault as well: “dandyism is not
even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance … dandyism in
certain respects comes close to spirituality and to stoicism … [it] appears
especially … when democracy has not yet become all-powerful, and when
aristocracy is only partially weakened. … Dandyism is the last flicker of
heroism in decadent ages. … Dandyism is a setting sun; like the declining
star, it is magnificent, without heat and full of melancholy” (from “The
Painter of Modern Life” [1863] 1964). This irresistible (and, again, essen-
tially Romantic) image of the dandy would return to Foucault decades
later, when his attention turned to “techniques” of self-construction—but
what made the most significant impression on him at the time was Roussel’s
writing “procedure,” described posthumously in How I Wrote Certain of
my Books ([1935] 1975). Perhaps most oft-cited are stories that begin and
end with sentences that carry different meanings but differ by only a single
letter. One begins with “the white letters on the cushions of the old billiard
table” and ends with “the white man’s letters about the hordes of the old
plunderer”—which, in French, are distinguishable only by the “B” in “bil-
liard” and the “P” in “pillard” (plunderer). But that was just one of many
constraints Roussel imposed upon his work. No plausible narrative of the
conventional sort, involving recognizable characters and their doings,
could emerge from such techniques. And neither could anything like an
author’s “voice” expressing the author’s ideas and feelings—and that was,
of course, what most intrigued Foucault about the whole enterprise.
No surprise to discover that Foucault was also an admirer of Georges
Perec’s A Void (1969), a novel in which the letter “e” never appears.87
Foucault’s Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel was
published in 1963, and translated into English in 1986. Foucault described
it as “by far the book I wrote most easily, with the greatest pleasure” (“An
Interview with Michel Foucault by Charles Ruas” 2004, 186) and he
claimed to be glad that it was largely ignored, calling his relationship with
Roussel a “secret affair” and Roussel himself “my love for several sum-
mers” (in Gutting 2013, 7–10). Gutting understands the significance of
87
 Perec was acting on behalf of a “potential literature,” the cause of “The Oulipo
Society”—an entity within the “College de Pataphysics.” The writers and mathematicians
who devoted real time and energy to such exercises were both very serious and over-the-top
playful (see the term “ludicrous,” and its affinity with “ludic”). It’s hard to imagine “serious”
American intellectuals indulging in such shenanigans. Once again, we are confronted with
cultural difference that complicated the reception of French “theory” in anglophone
contexts.
288   T. DE ZENGOTITA

all this and goes to the heart of the matter when he foregrounds Roussel’s
strangely staged suicide (Hence, “death” in the book’s title) and Foucault’s
fascination with that staging.88 Gutting sums up: “We have no way of
knowing whether this focus on death—which continues throughout
Foucault’s writings—led, as Miller encourages us to speculate, to Foucault
deliberately putting himself and others at risk from AIDS. But there is no
doubt that his work shows a fascination with the loss of self brought both
by death and by its mirror in the linguistic formalism of writing such as
Roussel’s.”
Finally, and—with just that theme in mind—most importantly, there
was Georges Bataille. He is the most proximate and perhaps the most
scandalous representative of the artistic guild known as Poetes Maudits,
and for good reason. In prewar Paris, he had brought to life the legendary
violations of Lautreamont, Verlaine, and Rimbaud. In the 1950s, he still
walked among awe-struck artists and intellectuals of postwar Paris, a more
detached and philosophical expositor of doctrines he had once tried to
realize, back in the day, a day that still lived in the memories of friends and
associates, who were willing to tell tales (how tall?) of his—and their—for-
bidden doings. His personal charisma had, if anything, grown more
charged, though he always spoke gently and carried himself with a clerical
gravity perfectly suited to his reputation as the high priest of transgression
and reminiscent as well of the orthodox piety of his youth. But Georges
Bataille also reflected in writing on the ideas that drove him. Those
­reflections perpetuated his glamor and left a legacy that lived on in the
work of others, in the work of Michel Foucault in particular:

Perhaps the importance of sexuality in our culture derives from nothing else
than this correspondence which connects it to the death of God. … By
denying us the limit of the Limitless, the death of God leads to an experi-
ence in which nothing may again announce the exteriority of being, and
consequently to an experience which is interior and sovereign … such an
experience … discloses … the limitless range of the Limit, and the emptiness
of those excesses in which it spends itself and where it is found wanting …

88
 Says James Faubion in the Introduction to Death and the Labyrinth (XX): “Foucault’s
relationship to Roussel is noticeably protective … its most telling gesture is that of a hand—
or pen—raised against any and all of those roving psychologists who would … treat (and so
invalidate) his oeuvre as a mere catalogue of symptoms … [in his book] Foucault proposes
that Roussel’s suicide in Palermo is … a corporal demonstration of the imperative that the
oeuvre “must be set free from the person who wrote it” (156).
   TEXTS AND BODIES    289

the inner experience is throughout an experience of the impossible.

(Foucault “Preface to Transgression” 1977, 31–32)89

The emptiness of excesses when there was nothing (else) to exceed

meant that (impossible) transgression of the self became the only sacred
gesture left to modernity. Yes, George Bataille ruminated obsessively
about “inner experience” but, unlike the phenomenologists and existen-
tialists, his interest in that inner experience was shaped by his desire to
escape it. What Bataille was looking for, when he looked inward, was (here
we go again) an “impersonal” inner experience ([1962] 1986, 29–35) and
this quest became Foucault’s as well.
Bataille taught Foucault that the death of God ended our experience of
the limitless exterior and made all experience subjective. And that meant
that we now live in, and with, that limit and no excess can really get past
it—hence, the experienced impossible, as Foucault puts it, lies in in the
impossible effort to breach just that limit. Impossible, yes but the whole
thrust of Bataille’s thought and practice tells us that he couldn’t live with-
out trying to get there. And neither could Foucault. But the truly pious
Bataille was the one for whom all those genitalia and anuses and wounds
were genuinely horrifying, as they were for the bourgeoisie he was repudi-
ating and escaping—and that’s why he was so fascinating to the mavens of
theory. They couldn’t actually feel that horror anymore, not really. For
them, sexuality was at least partly naturalized, as Foucault basically admits
in the first paragraph of his essay on Bataille and transgression. Does that
mean that Bataille, through transgressive acts, came closer to genuinely
impersonal experience than others could? Than Deleuze in delirium? Than
Guattari on mescaline? There is no answering that question. But it was the
case that those he inspired believed that Bataille knew the way, if anybody
did, to the “outside” of thought (see Foucault on Blanchot [1984] 1987).
How many times over the course of these explications have we encoun-
tered the lure of the “outside,” of “impersonal” experience in one form or
another? “Exteriority,” the “unthought,” the “aconceptual”—under
whatever rubric—the ubiquity and force of this imperative has all sorts of
implications, and we have considered some of them. But at the end of the
day it all comes down to an apparently desperate desire to be free of the

89
 It says a lot about Foucault’s reputation after the publication of his History of Madness in
1961 that this homage to Bataille was published in an issue of Critique, the journal he
founded immediately after WWII.
290   T. DE ZENGOTITA

self. One of the lasting puzzles, as already noted, that remains to be

resolved about the anglophone reception of French theory is this: how
was this desire to be free of the self so readily transmuted, in the discourse
of identity politics and intersectionality, to a quest for self, even a celebra-
tion of self?
The upshot: according to Bataille, authentic modern transgression
could only be transgression against the self and not as Breton and the rival
surrealists of the Rue Fontaine believed—the elevation or enhancement of
self. In Bataille’s view, Breton’s was an idealist, even moralistic, move-
ment; it turned surrealism into a cause and policed the ideology of its
members like a religious sect. Worst of all, it paraded an affinity with de
Sade, a mere libertine engaged in essentially bourgeois accumulations of
pleasure. Breton and his followers would never understand the sacrificial
(hence, sacred) nature of true debauchery, “the will to loss, to waste and
ruin.” They could not see that “the spirit of subversion is justified by noth-
ing but itself.” They served the “marvelous,” while Bataille was in pursuit
of the “monstrous” (Surya 2002, 75, 112, 121–127). Essential to Bataille’s
position were its roots in an orthodox piety to which he was attached in
his youth for nine intense years—attending seminary and seriously consid-
ering the priesthood. That meant that, for him, transgression (yes, against
himself) entailed an inversion of that piety—a new manifestation of the
sacred—that he felt more intensely and genuinely than anyone else
involved in these experiments with limits. And everyone knew it.
That was why he was the leader at Acephale—a secret society, closely
associated (at least at times) with his more public project, The College of
Sociology, an association which, more than any other, accounted for his
reputation:

Bataille’s final letter … noted, “the sacred, in my opinion, first and foremost
counters utility and those passions whose object conforms to reason … we
always find some prohibition forbidding behavior that is convulsive, foreign
to selfish calculation, and that originates in the animal world.” But this
debate inevitably hearkens back to the late 1930s, when Bataille was launch-
ing his secret society, Acephale, driven by the project of human sacrifice.…
[M]ore or less coextensive with the College of Sociology, Acephale (whose
metaphorical name, “headless,” had in mind both Nietzsche’s death of God
and “the headless crowd”) anarchically attacked any kind of hierarchical
system) … recent publication of Acephale’s internal documents illuminate
the group’s decision to go underground. … In 1974, Caillois further
explained, “Bataille believed that accomplishing a human sacrifice would be
an irreversible point. … It came close to happening. The victim had been
   TEXTS AND BODIES    291

found, it was the sacrificer who was missing. Bataille offered me the role.
Because I had written a panegyric about Saint-Just while still in high school,
he probably supposed that I had the latter’s inexorable character. Things
didn’t get beyond that. (Claudine Frank in The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger
Caillois Reader 2003, 27–30)

So  Foucault’s relationship to the avant-garde was unique. No one

would want to call the other contributors to French theory conventional
or normal—as we have seen—but Foucault was in a category all his own.
His quest for the dissolution of the subject went way beyond theory and
even politics, way beyond experiments with a-conceptual language and
essays on the death of the author. He sought dissolution in action, in his
life, and we sense that—of all those who sang the praises of Bataille—it was
Foucault who really felt the slippery slope of transgressive temptation
under his own feet.
The play of arbitrary constraints was what appealed most to Foucault in
the avant-garde arts, the more arbitrary the better—an echo of the plea-
sures of Sadomasochism, perhaps.90 In any case, a special kind of purity
and rigor attached to the theme of language under such conditions, a
purity and rigor that was not formal in the modernist, structuralist sense,
not a synchronic system of elements and rules that “explained” the given,
the ordinary, the regularities of language and culture. This was a perfor-
mative formality—lived out in a parole of the extraordinary. It was as if
breaching the constraints of normality in this way exposed those normal
constraints for what they were—ultimately just as arbitrary, but “natural-
ized” by habit. It bears repeating: Foucault’s interest in language was not
like that of the structuralists, he was not hearing the siren song of “gram-
mar.” The promise of dissolution of subjectivity on the level of theory was
what appealed to him and it mirrored his personal quest for dissolution in
his life. For him, philosophy’s phenomenological subject encountered its
own limit experience in language.91 Foucault, speaking here for the whole
postmodern cohort, describes the origin of their enterprise:

90
 James Miller may have gone too far in The Passion of Michel Foucault (1994). But we
need not agree with his reading completely to recognize some resonance of his sex life in his
work. A devotee of sado-masochism doesn’t just happen to name a book Discipline and
Punish—and, yes, “passion” in the title carries a Christ-on-the-cross connotation.
91
 Gary Gutting stressed the importance of this aspect of language for Foucault (2013,
5–18). If it weren’t for its subject obliterating effects (and the requirements of fashion), it is
not clear that Foucault would have engaged much with language, even in his “structuralist”
phase.
292   T. DE ZENGOTITA

the problem of language appeared, and it was clear that phenomenology was
no match for structural analysis … in which the subject (in the phenomeno-
logical sense) did not intervene to confer meaning. … Psychoanalysis—in
large part under the influence of Lacan—also raised a problem. … For the
unconscious could not feature in any discussion of a phenomenological
kind. (Foucault 1988, 21)92

9.4.3  The Works
This brings us to the works for which Foucault is known. A brief summary
of the principal stages in his development and the arguments that marked
them will suffice for present purposes. What is wanted is enough to estab-
lish the depth and extent of his influence in his own time and also to
account for the persistence of that influence in the anglophone academy:

I would really like to have slipped imperceptibly into this lecture … to be

enveloped in words, borne way beyond all possible beginnings. At the
moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long
preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its
cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking, in its interstices …
speech would proceed from me, while I stood in its path—a slender gap—
the point of it’s possible disappearance. Behind me, I should like to have
heard … the voice of Molloy: “I must go on; I can’t go on; I must go on; I
must say words as long as there are words, … until they say me.” (Foucault
“The Discourse on Language” [inaugural address upon his appointment to
the College de France in 1970]; in The Archaeology of Knowledge 1971, 215)

Sex is “not even the individual’s fundamental or primitive desire; the very
texture of its processes exists prior to the individuals. … If we wish to know
what we are, we must abandon what we imagine about our individuality, our
ego, our position as subject.” (Foucault, letter to Pierre Guyot in Macey
[1970] 1995, 255–56)

92
 Compare this with a more moderately framed dispute between anglophone philoso-
phers: “Searle’s central question [is] … ‘how do we get from the bits of paper to dollar bills?’
Now, this really is a question about ontology—about what it is for something to be money,
not just about what the intentional content of our mental states is when we interact with or
have thoughts about or use money. So it might seem obvious, as Searle suggests, that the
phenomenologists have no way of grappling with or even understanding this question”
(Kelly 2004, 9; italics mine). Kelly goes on to argue that it isn’t obvious!
   TEXTS AND BODIES    293

From a 1963 homage to Georges Bataille, to a defense of the succès de

scandale of 1970 (Eden, Eden, Eden by Pierre Guyot) to his inaugural lec-
ture at the College de France that same year—it could not be plainer: no
matter the venue, no matter the topic—it might be sexual violation or plain
old sex or the death of God or language in general, Foucault returned
again and again to the same old song, the song of a self that could not abide
the self it was doomed to be. Lee Braver argues cogently that the “main
target” of his genealogies and their “dismantling of realism” was actually
the subject (2007, 382). And that focus was what allowed Foucault to
adapt his discourse so deftly to the demands of the moment without appear-
ing too flagrantly attentive to fashion. Because it was true: whether he was
presuming, in 1961, to “speak for” madmen in confinement in the eigh-
teenth century or, in 1984, for an aesthetics of self-cultivation in ancient
Greece, Foucault always only really cared about one thing: alternative ways
of being a self, of being a person. So it seems that, because that theme really
was a constant in his work, Foucault actually did succeed in speaking for
others, for the generation that created and developed postmodern the-
ory—in France, first of all, but eventually in so very many other places as
well. Wherever this form of modern self-loathing took hold, not neccesarily
categorically but more insidiously, like what Americans know as “liberal
guilt”; he was the ideal representative of that loathing and the projects it
inspired. As Foucault himself recalled in an interview a few years before his
death: “We wanted a world and a society that were not only different but
that would be an alternate version of ourselves: we wanted to be completely
other in a completely different world” (in Gutting 2013, 33).
Hence, Foucault’s reputation as a trendsetter. It has been widely
remarked—sometimes admired, sometimes mocked (Dosse 1997,
389–390). After his “aesthetic phase,” when he wrote about Roussel and
Bataille, there was a well-timed structuralist phase, dating from Madness
and Civilization ([1961] 1964) to Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). That
earned him his place in the famous 1967 cartoon by Maurice Henry that
showed him addressing his fellow structuralists, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, and
Barthes—all of them in “native” garb, grass skirts, totemic adornments.
During that period, Foucault’s work pivoted around notions of the “epis-
teme” or “discursive formation,” a set of unconscious conceptual con-
straints on uses of language derived from the historical context but internal
to language in its essential operations. Hence, the structuralist label—and it
was, to that limited extent and for that limited period, deserved—though
Foucault repeatedly and justifiably resisted inclusion in the category. As
294   T. DE ZENGOTITA

has been noted, even during this structuralist phase, it was the trans-­
subjective aspect of the episteme that most interested Foucault. Like
Deleuze, he never showed a real interest in the explanatory formalisms
that preoccupied Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Kristeva and Sollers, Genette, and
the early Barthes and he went out of his way, as soon as circumstances
allowed, to distance himself from the “priority of the signifier” (see
O’Conner in Silverman 1997). This made it possible for Foucault to shift
his emphasis, more or less seamlessly, to overtly materialist and historical
processes without giving up his focus on discourse. With Discipline and
Punish (1975), Foucault consolidated the decisive  power/knowledge
phase of his work, explicitly post-Marxist but also definitively poststruc-
turalist, with its emphasis on Nietzschean genealogies (no telos, only
­contending forces) of discursive practices and the governance of human
bodies in institutional settings as the focus.93
But it was a much earlier book, The Order of Things (1966), written
when Structuralism was ascendant, in which Foucault gave the essential anti-
humanism of theory its most influential expression. He there announced that
the concept of “man,” constituted at a particular historical moment, as the
anchor for a particular episteme, was now in dissolution, thanks to
Structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. With a flourish, he concluded
that book by proclaiming that “man is in the process of perishing as the
being of language continues to shine ever brighter upon our horizon” and
may eventually be “erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea”
(1966, 385–387).94 But it was not really the generic “man” that Foucault

93
 Foucault was criticized for moving away from Marx as early as 1966  in The Order of
Things, and he was in a later context heard to say to a reporter who asked him about Marx
during a street demonstration, “I don’t want to hear that name any more.” But, in spite of
such rejections, the grip of conventional commitments was strong. As late as 1972, in con-
versation with Deleuze in a journal of the American new left, Foucault concluded (with
Deleuze shamelessly agreeing) by reassuring his audience that “Women, prisoners, con-
scripted soldiers, hospital patients, and homosexuals” who “have now begun a specific strug-
gle … naturally enter as allies of the proletariat. … They genuinely serve the cause of the
proletariat by fighting in those places they find themselves oppressed” (Deleuze and
Foucault 1973, Telos 16). Identity politics instead of socialism? Not to worry.
94
 Recognizing yet another barb, Sartre responded by calling Foucault “a positivist in
despair.” For Sartre, a superficial “objectivity” was the only conceivable alternative to the
philosophy of the subject in history. He never really understood the abstractions of
Structuralism—just as he couldn’t countenance the modernist retreat from lived experience
in general (See above on Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero [1953] 1984). Foucault had, rather
cruelly, identified the problem when he described the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960)
   TEXTS AND BODIES    295

was confronting as he wrote that sentence, so obviously relishing the

image—nor were his many readers so deeply moved at the simple prospect
of changing the subject from “man” to “language.” No, it was as vindi-
cated witnesses that they greeted the moment of pride-about-to-fall, it was
that moment of comeuppance they relished. They identified in that moment
with generations of victims of the arrogance of the capitalist West, with all
the people it had marginalized and exploited, with immiserated millions in
a world it had conquered, with the very world itself, plundered and
despoiled. He wrote, and they read, as agents of vengeance. That is why, in
Vincent Descombes’ words, “The end of man” became “the slogan of the
’60s” ([1979] 1980, 31).
But Foucault’s reputation reached its apogee in 1975 with Discipline
and Punish when he was hailed as a “new Marx” whose Nietzschean the-
ory of power would enable radical resistance to continue without out-
moded universal notions of humanity and agency that had been as essential
to the cause of liberalism as to the existential Marxism of Kojeve and
Sartre. Foucault’s dedication to the prisoners’ movement, in particular,
showed that the struggle could go on without the support of bogus “mas-
ter narratives” (Lyotard [1979] 1984) that had once seemed so essential
to modern political activism (Bourg 2007, 79–100). Discipline and Punish
was no longer just concerned with the “systematicity of discursive prac-
tices”; the focus had shifted to “power relations which govern nondiscur-
sive practices” as well (see Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983, 258). And that
shift was what brought his influence so powerfully to bear on a whole
range of political movements that were proliferating in the wake of the
collapse of those narratives, movements that did not have that much in
common with each other positively but whose partisans could all recog-
nize themselves as victims of institutionalized practices that excluded or
exploited them. “Power/knowledge,” and its descendent concept “bio-
power,” applied as obviously to the circumstances within which defenders
of animal rights took up their cause as it did for those who persisted in
struggles to organize labor—or seek access to public facilities for the dis-
abled or promote marriage equality. Activists for all these causes identified
with them at just the historical juncture when the notion of identity

as “a nineteenth-century man’s magnificent and pathetic attempt to think the 20th century”
(in Bourg 2007, 48). A perfect illustration of what Kojevian Marxism looked like to French
Nietzscheans of the 1960s. It was marred, above all, by the persistence of nineteenth-century
evolutionism’s telos.
296   T. DE ZENGOTITA

(hence, subjectivity) rose to prominence. There was no end to the utility

of Foucault’s gloss on Nietzsche’s ontology of “will to power” in that
context. If Foucault managed to pop up in the vanguard with every shift
in the wind of intellectual fashion, it was thanks to his gut-level under-
standing of how personal these culture wars, these power struggles, were.
You could feel it in his prose and see it in his bearing.
That focus on power may explain why there has not been as much
engagement with Foucault’s final project, the three volume History of
Sexuality ([1976] 1978; [1984a] 1985; [1984b] 1986), as there has been
with his more militant and materialist genealogies. He was, during the
same period, softening his attitude toward Kant and the Enlightenment,
recognizing in them something of a precedent for what he was doing in
this last project (“What is Enlightenment?” 1984b). He was making his
notorious “turn” toward ethics and a controversial “return” to the
­subject—starting with an appreciation of the Greeks and concluding with a
critique of psychoanalysis. Rabinow and Dreyfus describe the arc of empha-
sis that resulted for his life’s work very aptly: “he moves from a genealogy
of the modern individual as object to a genealogy of the modern individual
as subject” (in Schrift 1995, 49). And Gary Gutting unerringly identifies
the motive: “Foucault thinks he can find in the ancient world a model for
an ethics of self-creation that will be relatively independent of the power-
knowledge structures of our society” (Gutting 2013, 141–147).
Volume III was called The Care of the Self, and it was caring; the tone of
it—or parts of it, the affirmative parts—was new. When he was skewering
Christianity for an “idea of the self which one had to renounce because
clinging to the self was opposed to God’s will” and for covering over “the
aesthetics of existence” with the “problem of purity,” or when he was
lambasting psychoanalysis for turning the self into something that had to
be “deciphered,” the old Foucauldian outrage still dominated. But when
he invoked the Greeks as an example for our post-Christian age, when he
celebrated them for the “idea of a self which had to be created as a work
of art” and a “choice about existence made by the individual”—this was
not the Foucault his followers were accustomed to (Dreyfus and Rabinow
1983, 244–248). The ancient Greeks? The path back to them had been
clogged for decades by bourgeois academics in search of models; not
exactly an attack on the Western tradition. And individuals making choices?
What was that about?
A turn indeed! And the ongoing fusion of Foucault’s life and work
made it a particularly poignant one. For this was also when Foucault made
   TEXTS AND BODIES    297

public his discovery of friendship—which the Greeks he had studied held

in such high esteem. An interview he gave to Gai Pied in 1981 was called
“Friendship as a Way of Life”—and though it addressed general questions
in a reflective manner, it was impossible to miss how personal this topic
had become for Foucault. Only a few years before dying of AIDS in 1984,
he was realizing that he was loved and appreciated by many, and especially
by the few he knew intimately. The fragile, arrogant being who had com-
pulsively repelled all fellowship as a boy had eventually found friends—and
now he saw (had he always?) friendship as the  most valuable of human
relationships.95 Perhaps there was something a bit too gentle—too hope-
ful, too forgiving—in this iteration of Foucault? Perhaps he did not, in this
new guise, inspire the aggrieved as much as he once had?
There was much controversy about the extent and intent of this turn
and return.96 Gilles Deleuze, for example, broke with his longtime friend
and ally over this final phase of his thought—even though he had argued
that his later focus on the subject was consistent with his earlier work
(Deleuze [1986] 1988). What Deleuze could not abide was the banal
notion of “pleasure” (vol. II, The Use of Pleasure) being substituted for his
own “desire”—which was still too Lacanian for Foucault (see Sylvere
Lotringer’s “Introduction” to Baudrillard’s Forget Foucault 2007). But,
above all, he could not forgive the political consequences, the compromise
with bourgeois notions of ethics that the so-called new philosophers were
resurrecting and Foucault was actively supporting.
In general, while Foucault’s effort to thread the ethical needle by means
of a return (however qualified) to the subject as agent did not secure the
kind of influence on activist intellectuals that his earlier, more militantly
materialist notions had enjoyed—it was nevertheless consistent with his
history of jumping ahead of the bandwagon in his native France. Not only
did it converge in interesting ways with what Derrida, his old nemesis, was
doing—but it accommodated the rise to dominance of those “new phi-
losophers.” Ambitious young pretenders like Andre Glucksmann, Bernard-

95
 Foucault had not relinquished his critical stance entirely. The friendship he focused on
(though not exclusively) was friendship between gay men—an especially promising prospect
precisely because it had to be cultivated outside conventional parameters. A free creation,
then—just like the “techniques of the self” the Greeks had enjoyed.
96
 See, for example, Jurgen Habermas “Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present” in
Foucault: A Critical Reader, Oxford 1986; Christopher Norris “What is enlightenment?” in
The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Cambridge 1994; Paul Rabinow Ethics, Subjectivity
and Truth, The New Press 1997.
298   T. DE ZENGOTITA

Henri Levy, and Christian Jambet—originally inspired by the revelations

of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (1973)—followed up by affiliating
themselves with growing resistance among Eastern Europeans to Soviet
communism in the name of “human rights.” Like the generation they
sought to replace, once launched, they went all the way as fast as they
could. They ecstatically renounced their own recent ties to Marxism and
Maoism and repudiated the whole mindset of ’68, intellectual and politi-
cal. They looked instead to various forms of traditional humanism and
even, in some cases, to religion (see Bourg 2007, for the definitive account
of this development, which marked the abrupt decline of theory in France
in the early 1970s).
Deleuze was not the only one to recoil from this spectacle. Regis
Debray, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, Alain Badiou and other heirs of
Althusser were likewise adamant. But Foucault was determined to change
course again, for the last time. An ironic end to his life’s work: the thinker
of power and the “End of Man” was still opposing “power” as he used to
think of it—but now he was acting in the name of another kind of power,
the power of a certain subject, a subject dedicated to the aesthetics of its
life regarded as a work of art (Nietzsche still, always Nietzsche [see Thomas
Mann quote, above Chap. 6.3]). And as it turned out, this was a subject
perfectly suited to an emerging age of options for self-construction that
was then on the horizon, long before the first Facebook page entered the
digital ether. Looking back, it looks as if, once again, Foucault was ahead
of the curve.

9.4.4  Derrida Contra Foucault: The Metaphysics of Madness

In this section, substantive arguments involving Foucault will get more
attention than they have so far, not because of their difficulty but because
of the light they shed on some basic themes—to wit: (1) disputes in this
village of the French Intellectual Nobility, like disputes in any village, cut
deep and lasted long, (2) this dispute between Derrida and Foucault cap-
tures the essential difference between the “post-structuralism” of the tex-
tualistes and the desirants, the two main wings of the French theory
movement, and (3) that movement was nevertheless united around
its relentless opposition to the modern subject.
Derrida and Foucault came to grief early on over certain passages of
Descartes’ Meditations which allude briefly to madness and were used by
Foucault in Madness and Civilization ([1961] 1965) to buttress a larger
   TEXTS AND BODIES    299

point about Classical reason’s exclusion of its “other.” The dynamics of

the dispute are revealing on several levels. Derrida, a rising star and former
student of Foucault’s, in a paper delivered to an audience that included
Foucault (“Cogito and the History of Madness” [1967d] 2001), not only
showed that his master had badly misread the passage in question but that
he had done so because the book as a whole was sinning against the irre-
ducible otherness of madness by presuming to speak for it and/or assum-
ing it could speak—that is, by construing it as “rational” and therefore
reducing it to “the same” and so forth. A cardinal sin. Foucault remained
silent at the time but, in 1972 (nine years later), in the second edition of
the book, without explicitly making the connection, he conceded Derrida’s
main point while, at the same time, launching a counterattack on a super-
ficially related and less readily decidable topic. The grudge between them
lasted for decades, with Foucault famously trashing Derrida in later years
in publications aimed at American audiences for whom they were both
competing rather desperately after their hour had passed in France.
Foucault sent Derrida a copy of the second edition accompanied by a
note saying “Sorry to have answered you so late.” Its appendix contained
a ferocious response to Derrida’s 1963 paper in which he summed up his
view of Derrida’s whole project thusly:

I’m not going to say that there is a metaphysics, the metaphysics or its clo-
sure, concealed in this “textualization” of discursive practices. I’m going to
go much further. I am going to say that it is a minor pedagogy, one thor-
oughly historically determined, that manifests itself in a way that is highly
visible. This pedagogy teaches the pupil that there is nothing outside the
text. … This pedagogy gives the teachers voice that unlimited sovereignty
which allows it to repeat the text indefinitely. (Eribon 1992, 121)

Having broken with the “priority of the signifier” as the wheel of fash-
ion came around, Foucault could now advance a meta-response to Derrida
that seemed weighty enough to displace the relatively trivial issue of how
to interpret a few lines in Descartes’ text. In fact, he never satisfactorily
addressed Derrida’s reading of the relevant passage and no wonder, for
Derrida was transparently correct about the place of “madness” in
Descartes’ argument. That deserves to be emphasized, first of all:

it can no longer literally be said that the Cogito would escape madness
because … as Foucault says, “I who think, I cannot be mad”; the Cogito
escapes madness only because at its own moment, under its own authority
300   T. DE ZENGOTITA

… [it] … is irremediably on a plane with scepticism. Thought no longer

fears madness. … The certainty thus attained need not be sheltered from an
imprisoned madness, for it is attained and ascertained within madness itself.
It is valid even if I am mad. (Derrida 2001, 67)

Elsewhere, Derrida also demonstrates that the dismissive language

Descartes used in the Meditations was directed, not against madness per se,
but against madness as an example of the self-certainty of subjective experi-
ence. He was allowing that a reader might be more amenable to the argu-
ment if it were based on dreams rather than madness—but the philosophical
point was the same in both cases (Derrida 2001, 60–61). As any teacher of
modern philosophy can testify, most undergraduates are able to grasp the
significance of this parallel: insane or dreaming, no matter, I cannot doubt
that I am having the subjective experience I am having as I have it. So it
must have been obvious to any disinterested listener to the original presen-
tation that Foucault had fastened on the dismissive language to make a
general point about attitudes toward madness in the Classical age without
really considering the argument. That must have been very embarrassing
and, all other speculations aside for the moment, it seems a plausible expla-
nation for Foucault’s behavior at the time: he said nothing about Derrida’s
critique, and even wrote him a friendly letter upon the publication of
Writing and Difference in 1967, in which the paper appeared once again.
But “The Cogito and the History of Madness” did more than expose
Foucault’s sloppy reading. That didn’t really affect the general claim about
madness in the Classical age and wasn’t worth a whole paper on its own.
So Derrida set out to fry some bigger fish on that occasion as well—and
what he argued in the rest of the paper was more deeply revealing of
Foucault’s whole project. Derrida caught Foucault violating the ban of the
ultra-structuralists that was reinstated with even more vigor as they tried
to jettison the abstractions of Structuralism without lapsing back into phe-
nomenology or common sense. In effect Derrida reminded Foucault that
the ban on subject talk also prohibits naive (as opposed to artful/experi-
mental) references to the “pre-discursive” experience of a transcendental
subject and identifiable pre-discursive objects of that experience. If the
subject had to dissolve into language, if everything had to be always-
already interpreted, then there could never be any suggestion that the
subject somehow had access to experiences “prior to” (in any sense) con-
ceptualization (Compare Roudinesco 2010, 77).
   TEXTS AND BODIES    301

So, to the extent that Foucault—moved, as always, by his passionate

identification with normality’s victims—seemed sometimes to be trying to
speak for madness, to speak of a madness that could make sense of some
kind, to just that extent he was hypostatizing madness as something “in
itself,” a “natural” object or state. He was, in effect, treating madness as
something that subsisted beyond the language in which it was expressed or
represented. Recall that those terms were taboo because they implicate a
subject and the way Foucault was describing or speaking for madness was
naïve just to the extent that he did so in straightforward—commonsensical
and academic—language. There was no poetic effort, along lines pio-
neered by Kristeva or Deleuze, to force experimental distortions onto lan-
guage that might, for that reason, actually get at something like how
Antonin Artaud existed in the world when he was in the grips of a psy-
chotic break.
In any case, Foucault was obliged eventually to concede this cardinal
point; as he put it later in The Archeology of Knowledge,

Generally speaking, Madness and Civilization accorded far too great a place,
and a very enigmatic one, to what I called an “experiment,” thus showing
to what extent one was still close to admitting an anonymous and general
subject of experience. (1971, 16)97

Oh, “one was,” was one?

Sartre had been right. Foucault was indeed a “positivist” at heart, as
opposed to an existentialist or phenomenologist, let alone an artist-­
philosopher. He had followed in the footsteps of a beloved teacher—
Georges Canguilhem, a philosopher, medical doctor, and historian of
science. Years of experience in asylums and clinics, informed Canguilhem’s
path-breaking book The Normal and the Pathological (1943), had a deep
influence on most of the creators of French theory, who were generally
inclined to see in the institutional treatment of madness a figure of social
oppression more generally. Foucault’s work simply consolidated and
intensified a long-standing tendency among French intellectuals in this

97
 Lee Braver argues in A Thing of this World (2007) that Foucault believed there was
something like true madness that wasn’t being expressed by reason, but was nevertheless
there. The next section of Braver’s book is called “no remainder” and claims that, in The
Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault finally gets away from his residual realism (2007,
347–353). It also seems likely that he was simply embarrassed into taking a more categorical
position—and, in any case, it didn’t last.
302   T. DE ZENGOTITA

regard (see especially Elisabeth Roudinesco’s discussion of Canguilhelm in

Philosophy in Turbulent Times 2010). But, in Foucault’s case, this affilia-
tion determined his principal thematic interests and shaped his essentially
historical (as opposed to philosophical) approach and that helps to explain
why his work found a home in anglophone academic settings. In spite of
his baroque style and provocative overstatements, Foucault wanted to be
understood. If he was interested in an “outside” to thought, it was an
outside to some established discourse—not to thought per se. He was not
committed, as Deleuze and Derrida were, to forcing language to the limits
of conceptuality itself, to evoking “quasi-concepts” or sheer force in his
own writing.98

9.4.5  Coming to America
I think that if one wants to analyze the genealogy of the subject in Western
civilization, he has to take into account not only techniques of domination
but also techniques of the self … [which] … permit individuals to perform,
by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on
their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in
such a way that they transform themselves. (Foucault in Braver 2007, 406)

With this highly charged, though mildly—almost casually—phrased

amendment to his own life’s work, Foucault introduced a shift in its trajec-
tory that led Lee Braver to this conclusion: “What has changed in the move
from genealogy to ethics is that Foucault now sees the potential for partici-
pation in the process to be more than merely a sham, so that we might be
able to take a genuine ownership of the self that is constituted” (2007, 407;
italics mine). No phrasing could better capture the most basic reason for
Foucault’s lasting and broad-based appeal to anglophone academics and
activists, especially those invested in identity politics and intersectionality.
Foucault made their struggle for self-determination seem both possible and
worthwhile, in spite of his Nietzschean refusal to supply any kind of teleo-
logical crutch. At the same time, tough-minded activists were not being

98
 Too biased to be generally reliable, Ferry and Renault can nevertheless be specifically
insightful. See, for example, their account of what constituted the “unthought” at the
moment the “Classical” human sciences were being conceived according to Foucault in The
Order of Things. The objects and processes that came to constitute the subject matter of biol-
ogy, linguistics, and economics were not unthinkable, they just hadn’t been “thought”
(1990, 103–104).
   TEXTS AND BODIES    303

tempted by any kind of idealism—whether a venir or otherwise. Foucault’s

materialism, like Nietzsche’s before him, was categorical.
The “miserable self” who had been so genuinely miserable that he was
driven to look for succor wherever he could find it and, when a life of
transgression that was truly dangerous failed to supply the salvation
Bataille had seemed to promise, Foucault eventually settled for “genuine
ownership,” at least implicitly—a notion that the coming generation rep-
resenting themselves to themselves in an evermore intensely mediated
environment would find congenial, whether or not they were marginal-
ized, whether or not they were politically active. A new kind of self was on
offer—one that constructed its own way to freedom from interpellation by
the Big Other of social convention.
For reasons to be discussed in  Chapter 12, I think this observation
affords access to the logic inherent in the whole trajectory of Foucault’s
life and work, and indeed in the postmodern project as a whole. But, for
the moment, let it be enough to notice the appeal of that interpretation to
practitioners of identity politics, in the USA especially. “Genuine owner-
ship of the self” through self-construction sums it up perfectly, provided
only that we recognize that “self-construction” need not imply a work
that starts from scratch, from a blank slate, from a featureless lump of clay.
That is only one of several ways in which moderns have conceived of their
own becoming, the Classical empiricist/behaviorist way—and it has suf-
fered a loss of credibility in recent decades. No, implicit in the notion of
“constituted” that Braver rightly attributes to Foucault, is the possibility
and actuality of all sorts of sources and forces converging to shape the
individual self, the person. Some may be familial, cultural, others may be
biological—even innate: many gay and transgender people want to believe
they are becoming what they truly are, for example. What Foucault’s
“techniques of the self” provided was not absolute sovereignty but, in
Braver’s well-chosen words, “genuine ownership” and that—as anyone
who has ever worked with horses, for example, can tell you—is more a
matter of cultivating potential and guiding tendencies than of imposing or
implanting an arbitrary form. “Techniques of the self” are ethically and
aesthetically demanding precisely because they must take all those sources
and forces into account on an ongoing and open-ended basis. The “con-
stituted self” in a relation of genuine self-ownership is as much recogni-
tion as creation and the project never ends.
Another factor: anglophone critics of French theory were inclined to
make an exception of Foucault. Like John Searle, Noam Chomsky has had
304   T. DE ZENGOTITA

nothing but contempt for the French poststructuralists and for the impen-
etrable language of the so-called theory they exported to the anglophone
academy. He is convinced that the whole thing was a scam and—worse—
an excuse for a political passivity. But he was willing to concede a bit to
Foucault, reporting that “we even have a several-hour discussion … on
real issues, and using language that was perfectly comprehensible”
(http://mindfulpleasures.blogspot.com/2011/01/noam-chomsky-on-
derrida-foucault-lacan.html). And his response to Foucault’s work fell
short of blanket dismissal, though it was not exactly positive: “Some of
Foucault’s particular examples (say, about 18th century techniques of
punishment) look interesting, and worth investigating as to their accuracy.
… As to ‘posturing,’ a lot of it is that, in my opinion, though I don’t par-
ticularly blame Foucault for it: it’s such a deeply rooted part of the corrupt
intellectual culture of Paris that he fell into it pretty naturally, though to
his credit, he distanced himself from it” (see Wolters 2013).
Searle was even more forgiving of Foucault, saying that lumping him in
with Derrida was “very unfair to Foucault. He was a different caliber of
thinker altogether.” Searle’s more positive assessment may have had some-
thing to do with Foucault providing Searle with a meme-worthy quote
accusing Derrida of practicing a “terrorism of obscurantism” (in Searle
(Feb 2000)). That was welcome support for Searle in the contretemps
described earlier. Finally, and in spite of the extended attention Foucault
gave to some of the sciences in his early work, he was not singled out in
Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense, nor was he typically accused
of outright fraud by anglophone critics of French theory.
But there is a more specific reason, still having to do with language, for
his enduring influence. And once again, timing was key. Foucault’s critique
of power/knowledge was also a license for those who were seeking to craft
forms of power/knowledge to replace the conventional discourses and
institutional practices they were opposing. Foucault seemed to understand
that a political discourse that denied the existence of “facts” and “truths”
as they had once been naively understood was in danger of undermining
itself.

What I want to do … is … to work out an interpretation, a reading of a

certain reality, which might be such that, on the one hand, this interpreta-
tion could produce some of the effects of truth; and on the other hand these
effects of truth could become implements within possible struggles. (Foucault
Live 1996, 261)
   TEXTS AND BODIES    305

To an anglophone intellectual with broadly realist notions of what it

means to think and act responsibly in this precarious world, the very phrase
“effects of truth” might suggest a cynicism that—while foreign to
Foucault’s temperament—would nevertheless be consistent with the
Nietzschean nihilism that conditioned that choice of phrase. It suggests
more than rhetoric, maybe propaganda or, in another register, Stephen
Colbert’s “truthiness.” That association makes Foucault’s tone especially
problematic and so especially important to understand. He clearly finds
virtue in the phrasing. No doubt, the effects he has in mind were ulti-
mately actions, political actions, resistance. Is he conceding that people
need to believe in some “truth” if they are to be moved to act or is he
waffling on that? Richard Rorty came very close (here, as so often) to
agreement in substance with the more provocatively phrased claims of
theory—in this case, by debunking the notion of a “final vocabulary” and
urging us to settle for the best we can do under the circumstances. For a
pragmatist, truth is what works and what works could be said to have an
“effect of truth” and that would explain why certain vocabularies catch on
and become established. In any case, postmodernists of all persuasions had
to admit the fallibility of language, of knowledge, while at the same time
calling upon people to respond to what Foucault called the “intolerable”
in society. That is a profound problem for our politics—especially at a time
when the master of “effects of truth,” at least at the moment of this writ-
ing, is a certain Donald Trump.
Foucault’s way of transforming the subject into an effect in his genealo-
gies of power/knowledge paralleled Kristeva’s “subject in process,” but
with the emphasis on institutionalization instead of signification it had
more obvious political relevance. His depiction of regulatory practices in
clinics and prisons resonated immediately with people engaged in struggles
for recognition and resources in anglophone universities during the rise of
Gender Studies, African-American Studies, Queer Theory, Postcolonial
Studies, and so on. The daily experience of aspiring academics with iden-
tity and intersectional agendas—in department meetings, at conferences,
wine and cheese receptions, on panels and committees—just was power/
knowledge at work. Likewise the experience of success, the subtle changes
in tone and gesture once tenure is secured, tokens of deference shown to
the keynote speaker—and, on a larger scale, the gradual acceptance of
“politically correct” language and behavior in much of the culture, in spite
of furious (and recently resurgent) resistance. Postmodernism secured an
institutional presence in Anglo-American universities (as it did not in
306   T. DE ZENGOTITA

France) and had a broad, if shallower, influence on the whole society. And
the questions that arise as we assess the situation now include: has an inher-
ently oppositional postmodern moment been lapsing because its affirma-
tive claims have been so widely admitted, at least in certain quarters, in the
bicoastal precincts where cultural “elites” hold sway? Can Queer Theory,
for example, survive marriage equality? But, more urgently at the moment
of this writing, when so much that has been associated with the postmod-
ern is apparently now serving the interests of identity politics on the right—
a hoary old question must again be asked: what is to be done?

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 CHAPTER 10

The Anglophone Reception of French

Theory: Literary Criticism, Cultural Studies,
American Pragmatism, Identity Politics

this thing from France … for which one created the name and the concept
of “theory,” yet another purely American word and concept. (Derrida
2001)1

As the focus shifts to the reception of postmodern French thought abroad,

especially in the USA, it is important to register the implications of Derrida’s
attribution. What anglophone academics called “theory” was inspired by
certain French thinkers, some of whom we have just consulted at some
length. But it was a creature of its own designs—especially with respect to its
political applications. The underlying issue for this chapter is contained in
this question, often remarked but not, so far as I know, satisfactorily resolved:
why did academic postmodernism fade away so quickly and completely in
France and sustain itself so much longer in other countries, especially the
USA? That broad question is closely related to a more specific question,
already mentioned: how did the ultra-structuralist attack on or flight from
the subject in the French context get transformed into a politicized cele-
bration of or quest for the subject in anglophone contexts?
But first, some kind of framework for the multifarious process of
reception.

1
 See also Barsky on how “French theory may be primarily an American dream” in
SubStance #97: 8.

© The Author(s) 2019 313

T. de Zengotita, Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics,
Political Philosophy and Public Purpose,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90689-8_10
314   T. DE ZENGOTITA

The interested reader might profitably spend time Googling around

about French “pataphysics” (see Chap. 9, footnote 88, above)—a tradi-
tion of Pythonesque mockery of “scientificness” that stretches from Alfred
Jarry in the 1890s to Jean Baudrillard in the 1990s. The point being, once
again, that French intellectuals had been deeply engaged with avant-garde
non-sense—with Surrealist and Freudian and, in a word, anti-conceptual
cultural productions—for a long time. One struggles to imagine admira-
ble, but undeniably stodgy, figures like John Searle and Noam Chomsky
loosening up enough to get a belly laugh out of such high-jinks. Sylvere
Lotringer may have had his own reasons for emphasizing as strongly as he
did the affinities of theory and artistic experiment (2001, 123–162)—but
he knew what he was about when he organized his landmark “Schizo-­
Culture” conference/event/happening at Columbia in 1975 and designed
future issues of SemioTexte in its wake. He was thinking of John Cage,
William Burroughs, and Richard Foreman as suitable American counter-
parts to Deleuze and Guattari.
That says a lot, right there.
An indignant and bewildered Arthur Danto, who attended that confer-
ence, made much of the fact that the three translators often couldn’t agree
on what the French speakers were saying. He didn’t understand that
Lotringer’s enterprise sought, above all, “the permanent suspension of
representation” because of its taken-for-granted function—namely, “to
settle, answer, resolve and control the represented—the experiences of the
world put in their ‘right’ place … [or why] … Paul de Man, in agreement
with Deleuze over the terror exercised by order words that arrest, on the
spot, wayward and errant sense, would have said that the discourse
advanced by someone called Arthur Danto manifested the very terror it
objected to, even if mixed with erudition and genuine puzzlement”
(Lotringer 2001, 3, 5).
And so on—as with Lacan’s presentation at MIT, only this time more
transparently staged. Didn’t Danto wonder why the conference was cele-
brating something called “schizo-culture”?
So many earnest Americans, at least in the academy, never quite got
this aspect of the whole phenomenon of theory. Some on the still youthful
“new left” were bound to be  more in tune than Danto was—with the
spirit of the occasion, at least. And they were most likely Lotringer’s target
audience. At first, in the late 1960s, they made up a counter-cultural, rock-­
and-­roll, hippie, LSD, Woodstock Left that stood opposed in some ways
but blended in other ways with a more recognizably political Berkeley Barb
and SDS Left. Ken Kesey’s novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962),
   THE ANGLOPHONE RECEPTION OF FRENCH THEORY: LITERARY…    315

and Milos Forman’s film (1975) starring Jack Nicholson (who also
appeared with Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider (1969)) specifically shared
the attitude of the “anti-psychiatry” movement with which Foucault and
Guattari were affiliated. R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self (1960) was in many
a knapsack in the 1960s, along with Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional
Man and Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd. Many of these Americans
were already in the academy, as students. They were the ones at the barri-
cades at Columbia University in 1968, for example, and Kent State in
1970;  some among them—the most earnest among them, it must be
said—became academics and proponents of postmodernism, of “theory,”
as they grew older. Which, of course, they did; and in this simple fact lies
a lot of explanation: as the 1970s rolled on, agents of the counter-­culture,
diversifying now into identity groups as women and African-­Americans and
Gays and Lesbians laid claim to their places at the table, were taking posi-
tions of responsibility in “establishment” institutions. Naturally, they set
out to remake those institutions in their own image, to the degree possi-
ble, especially cultural institutions, especially universities—but also many
secondary schools, museums, libraries, publishing.
But even the 1960s people, at least the ones who chose academic
careers, even the ones who might have been in on an anarchic joke at a
Schizo-Culture conference, even they would eventually feel the heavy
hand of academic conformity upon them. Credentials, publications, posi-
tions—above all, the manners—became more and more important as time
went by and institutional life took hold.
Sum it up this way: if the editors of some Tel Quel-like equivalent of
SocialText got caught publishing Alan Sokal’s famous hoax paper, they
would have known better than to dilute their claims to revolutionary
panache by fulminating about violations of collegial trust and “inappropri-
ate” academic behavior—they would have said something like: “of course
we knew it wasn’t for real, but it was too clever to ignore: ‘Transgressing
the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum
Gravity.’ Perfect! Alfred Jarry would have loved it!”
But it didn’t happen that way. Over the years, those who learned their
“theory” second hand, from English translations of French texts and from
leading anglophone followers of the original creators, were bound to lean
too hard on jargon and lose the spirit of the original enterprise as the jargon
hardened into its own kind of doxa, just as Barthes foretold. At the same
time, however, they assumed control over substantial educational infra-
structure and resources, made fundamental administrative and curricular
decisions, and attracted and educated generations of students into seeing
316   T. DE ZENGOTITA

themselves and the world in something like the way they did; a better way.
So they were not selling out—they were doing what you had to do if you
really wanted change, displacing what Foucault would have called “intoler-
able discursive practices” with better ones.
The picture just painted, in the broadest brush strokes, does no more
than outline an extremely complicated process that looked very different in
different places and in different disciplines. What was common across the
board was the way in which whatever versions of “theory” were appropri-
ated in those contexts, they all served a “deconstructive” purpose, with that
word understood much more broadly now than Derrida intended. It came
to mean something like “dismantle or otherwise debunk the categories,
aims, methods, and institutional perogatives of established disciplines” by
showing how they imposed stabilizing assumptions and categorical con-
straints upon fluid realities that ought to be dealt with in more open-ended
and reflexive ways. That was especially apparent when those constraints
excluded whole groups of people from consideration, either as subjects of
study on their own terms or as participants in that study—that is, as scholars
in their own fields, defining those fields for themselves and their colleagues
and students. What had been set had to be unsettled and the authorities
who presided over what had been set would themselves, inevitably, be
unsettled; they would resist. Sometimes, in some places and disciplines, that
resistance frequently prevailed (cognitive psychology, economics). In other
places and disciplines, insurgent discourses succeeded in establishing them-
selves (anthropology, comparative literature).2 A complex process. We can
do no more here than sample some representative instances.

10.1   Literary Criticism

Let the focus be on the “Yale School,” perhaps the most influential center
for what was often called “high theory” in American postmodernism, typi-
cally by proponents of other forms of theory, usually more overtly ­political.
If fame (or notoriety) were the criterion, Paul de Man would be the obvi-
ous choice for detailed consideration—but he (his life and work) would
demand the kind of extended treatment already given to Derrida and
Deleuze and this chapter cannot spare the space that would require.
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 philoso-
phers and their new humanism.
   THE ANGLOPHONE RECEPTION OF FRENCH THEORY: LITERARY…    317

Attention will be given instead to J. Hillis Miller, who is in any case more
representative of the broad swath of academics in the humanities who
were moved to engage with “theory.” Some were inspired, others felt
obliged, still others were downright afraid of missing the coming wave.
Miller very definitely fell into the first category and so acted as a leader/
mediator for other, less certain, participants in the theory movement in
literary studies. He was very close to Derrida (who followed Miller to
Irvine) and his election to the presidency of the Modern Language
Association in 1986 caused one of those deeply serious, ultimately comic,
academic uproars (compare Rorty’s election to the same post in the
American Philosophical Association in 1979). It seemed to many immedi-
ately involved to mark the triumph of a “hermeneutical mafia” in the insti-
tutionalized humanities, when in fact the postmodern tide was at that
moment turning against “high theory” in favor of more broadly conceived
and politically vested fields like Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, and so
on (see especially H. Rapaport 2001). Opposition from the neo-Marxist
left was of course ongoing—perhaps most famously represented by Jurgen
Habermas (see The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 1987)—and, of
course, as already mentioned, by Fredric Jameson and David Harvey.
Miller began his career under the spell of modernist formalism (see
Chap. 3, above), and so, like most of his cohort at Yale and beyond, he saw
deconstruction as “a natural extension of the New Criticism” because of
its apparent focus on the workings of texts in the usual sense of that word.
Derrida, especially, was held responsible and came under attack for this
textual formalism from more political postmodern movements, in spite of
their shared opposition to closure and concern for “the other” (Rapaport
2001, XVIII, 59–60).3 Meanwhile, critics of deconstruction on the tradi-
tional left were inclined to a complementary gesture that could be just as
confusing. Gerald Graff, for example, in his influential critique Literature
Against Itself (1979), reprised Georg Lukacs’ attack on the modernist
retreat to form by indicting postmodern theory for fleeing “political real-
ity.” Like Christopher Lasch (The Culture of Narcissism 1979) and other
non-dogmatic Marxists, Graff was often lumped in with critics of
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 ref-
erents?”. 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.
318   T. DE ZENGOTITA

postmodernism on the right because of a shared disdain for more popular

expressions of rebellion against rational  norms (see Thomas DePietro’s
“The Socialist Imagination: Gerald Graff’s Defense of Reason” 1982).
Those popular expressions of rebellion (punk rock etc.) became the main
affirmative focus of the “Cultural Studies” curriculum as it rose to domi-
nance in the postmodern academy along with closely affiliated identity
politics initiatives. For neo-Marxists of all stripes, that whole develop-
ment  amounted to  an unthinking acceptance of commodification and
capitulation to a globally ascendant neo-liberalism.
Perhaps the most cogent and revealing moment, illustrating what was
fundamentally at stake for high theory and literary criticism before the tidal
wave of Cultural Studies swept over the academy, came with reactions to
Miller’s review of M.H. Abrams Natural Supernaturalism (1971)—espe-
cially in papers given at the 1976 MLA session on “The Limits of Pluralism.”
One of them, by Abrams himself—representing the establishment authori-
ties—was called “The Deconstructive Angel.” It was “the first widely read
assault on deconstruction” and it encouraged more critical reaction from
various quarters, while Miller’s reply to it set the standard for tactics the
deconstructionists would use to torment their opponents for years to come
(Rapaport 2001, 21–22). The personal animus that so obviously informed
Abrams’ critique allows us to understand why defenders of traditional
humanism felt so threatened by the rise of theory; as people (i.e., subjects)
who cared deeply for literature, they felt personally attacked and with good
reason. That’s the main point to bear in mind, looking back. Theory’s sub-
version of subjectivity as a critical theme was understood, and, correctly so,
as an effort to undermine the very being of people who understood them-
selves in a certain way, who identified as modern subjects and took pride in
the glories and burdens that attended that form of selfhood.
So, when Miller’s “The Critic as Host” was published in Deconstruction
and Criticism (1979)—a book that functioned (Geoffrey Hartmann’s
demurral notwithstanding) as the Yale School’s manifesto—the riposte he
offered Abrams was bound to offend: not only were Abrams and Miller
personally beside the point, so were all distinctions between people and
their productions, between authors and critics, and writers and readers, all,
all were effects of language, interchangeably hosts and parasites, links on a
chain or ring of ongoing signification with no origin or end. We have
already considered the notion of “intertextuality” and its effects in the
original formulations—no need to repeat the exposition here. What is
wanted now is an appreciation of how, for scholars like Abrams, that vision
was simply unbearable. The really interesting question for one who wants
   THE ANGLOPHONE RECEPTION OF FRENCH THEORY: LITERARY…    319

to get the story straight becomes this: why were most traditional human-
ists able to tolerate, and even embrace, modernist formalism but not
deconstruction?
And the answer is this: Hillis Miller was wrong. The account given
above of the essential difference between the “intentional fallacy” of mod-
ernism and the “death of the author” of postmodernism (see above, Chap.
9.1.2) shows us why. Deconstruction was not a “natural extension” of the
New Criticism. It was a radical refusal of formalism, of synchronic abstrac-
tion; it was a return to time and history—but a return that, as has been
shown, not only maintained but radicalized the ban on the subject. The
result was performance with no actor, parole with no speaker, meaning
with no intention, text with no author—that was the impossible anti-­
humanism of theory.
And that was the underlying reason, not always explicitly articulated,
that modernists in all the humanistic disciplines, however ready they might
have been to experiment with form in the spirit of Wimsatt and Beardsley,
instinctively resisted deconstruction and its affines. They rightly under-
stood that they were themselves—and not just the canonical texts they
cherished—the targets of theory.
To be sure, postmodern jargon could give the appearance of “abstrac-
tion” because it was so far removed from the concrete concerns of our
everyday lived experience as human subjects—but, if the word “abstrac-
tion” applies at all, it does so in a very different way. In fact, as we have
seen, French ultra-structuralism, in spite of some lingering structuralist
influence on its discourses, grew more and more overtly opposed to the
formalism upon which various manifestations of modernism had thrived,
Structuralism in particular. Barthes 2.0 looked back on the enterprises of
Barthes 1.0 with something approaching embarrassment. Nary a text of
Derrida’s displays a chart or formula. Levi-Strauss, on the other hand,
never made the turn Barthes took, never wavered from the formalist (sci-
entific) path as he oversaw the naturalization of his Structuralism into the
1990s (see Dosse 1997, chap. 37). “High theory” in the humanities was
doomed from the outset because of this fundamental misunderstanding
and its inevitable demise was hastened by an explosion of interest in another,
much more readily accessible, form of postmodernism—one in which the
everyday experience of human subjects of (almost) every description was
not just recognized but celebrated. From The Graduate (1967) to Thelma
and Louise (1992), from The Crying Game (1992) to Angels in America
(1991), from Mudbound (2017) to Black Panther (2018) to Everyperson’s
320   T. DE ZENGOTITA

Facebook page—the “cultural politics” once envisioned by Tel Quel became

a monster of mediated representation that would eventually threaten to
suck up the whole of the political into its bottomless craw. And “Cultural
Studies” was prepared to make the most of that moment.

10.2   Cultural Studies

A complete account of this sprawling movement cannot be attempted here.
But the comprehensive point that tells the tale as a whole is this: the term
“theory,” originally tied to post-structuralism’s impact on literary criticism
in elite enclaves like Yale, became a promiscuous bit of anglophone academic
slang as “Cultural Studies” became a “field” at once impossible to define and
pervasively influential. Associated in some settings with media ecology, in
other settings with comparative literature, in others with Postcolonial
Studies or American Studies—the list of interdisciplinary affiliations could
go on indefinitely and the list of international academic enterprises that
could be included under its umbrella is even more extensive.
So this section offers just a brief reminder of the underlying thrust of the
movement and the reason for the success of its various enterprises. The
“discipline” had a venerable genealogy. It was established under that rubric
at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham in 1964
under the influence of powerful work by British “cultural Marxists” like
E.P.  Thompson (The Making of the English Working Class 1963) and
Raymond Williams (Culture and Society [1958] 1983). But it was during
the stewardship of Stuart Hall, who was inspired by perhaps the most influ-
ential of the original cultural Marxists, Antonio Gramsci, that the Centre
produced its signature neo-Marxist accounts of cultural struggle during the
1970s. French theory found a home at Birmingham because Hall was com-
mitted to “situating Marx” in the context of an emerging identity politics
and theory offered just the resources he needed to do that. It is no exag-
geration to say that the narrative arc describing the rise and spread of
Cultural Studies might best be organized around this theme: Marxists
looking to escape the materialist reductions of party orthodoxy found ways
to accommodate, and eventually to join forces with, a rising tide of more
diverse forms of political activism—that is, of identity politics broadly con-
strued so as to include, not just political action to secure, say, gay rights in
workplace and residency, but events like Gay Pride parades and eventually
a whole range of popular culture manifestations of resistence to conven-
tional categories, ranging from Madonna to Grandmaster Flash to Ru Paul.
   THE ANGLOPHONE RECEPTION OF FRENCH THEORY: LITERARY…    321

The eventual outcome—the term that marks the necessary compro-

mise  in the unfolding of that narrative—was “intersectionality.” It may
sound odd to an older progressive, for whom economic justice is the prin-
cipal aim of activism on the left, to hear younger activists—who may still be
very concerned with economic justice (Bernie Sanders supporters)—to
hear them condemn some remark (say Obama’s “cling to their guns and
religion”) as “classist.” But that became a widely used term as the concept
of intersectionality gained adherents, and it is pronounced as if on a par
with “sexist” and “racist.” And the implications are interesting. It suggests
that the old Marxist priority placed on class has been undone and class has
no more purchase on political history than race or gender. It makes the
irrefutable argument that many people subjected to societal disadvantages
are subjected simultaneously to more than one and particularly compli-
cated political consequences can follow from that. It is no accident that the
Combahee River Collective, one of the earliest and most influential expo-
nents of intersectional politics, was made up of black feminists who offered
a powerful account of how, as women, their place in male-dominated black
activist organizations was problematic while being black left them margin-
alized in mainstream white-dominated feminist organizations. Finally, the
focus on nuances of identity that inevitably followed had another, more
comprehensive, consequence:  thanks to the ubiquity of representational
politics in this mediated age, “giving offense” became  as worthy of our
political attention (if not action) as redlining neighborhoods or sabotaging
medicaid.4 At the same time, the most comprehensive of all the condition-
ing factors made itself felt: what was left of the left’s fragile coalition could
not afford to leave anybody out and a­ cknowledging the reality of intersec-
tionality as determinants in people’s lives expresses that imperative.
After noting this compromise and its inclusive cultural consequences,
there is not much more that needs to be said here about Cultural Studies;
there are no conceptual difficulties to unpack. The main point of interest
for the telling of this tale of theory’s influence on the anglophone academy
is simply this: Cultural Studies owes its conception to critical theory at the
Frankfurt School, but the Frankfurt School was “scarcely acknowledged”
at Birmingham because it was “considered to be unduly pessimistic about
the prospect of social change” (Rojek 2007, 43). Yet again, that theme:
the continental taste for epic visions of humanity’s tragic destiny just
4
 Which is not to say that these suggestions are entirely mistaken. Trump supporters rou-
tinely cite excessive political correctness and the disdain of “elites” for “people like me” as
motivating factors in their politics.
322   T. DE ZENGOTITA

didn’t suit the temperament of anglophone intellectuals otherwise inspired

by the subtleties of social/cultural critique that the continentals had con-
sistently cultivated since the days of Rousseau and Herder. And, again, the
inevitable split with the economic determinism of orthodox or “vulgar”
Marxism was carried out precisely through that emphasis on culture. The
story of “History” as told by a supposedly “scientific socialism” before
WW1 hadn’t met its own test. History itself had strayed from the original
script. And it was obvious to those not blinded by dogma that cultural and
psychological entities and forces had to be accepted as real political factors
with their own kind of leverage on events.
So it is understandable that, unlike more traditional Marxists during the
rise of neo-liberalism and the ascent of Reagan and Thatcher, promoters of
Cultural Studies were neither daunted nor confused. Socialism remained the
goal for Hall and his colleagues and some of their progeny—but they adapted
to the times. They argued that the people were not just passive victims of the
culture industry but also producers of cultural “resistance.” In effect and by
way of summary, Cultural Studies articulated an academic and activist pro-
gram that would discover liberation and empowerment in, say, The Village
People’s 1978 gay anthem “Y.M.C.A.” or Cindy Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna
Have Fun” on her 1983 She’s So Unusual album or the rap group PKO’s
(Pounds, Kilos, Ounces) 1992 hit single “Shoot the Police.” The result was
an inevitable shift in focus as more or less anything of interest in popular
culture became legitimate grist for the Cultural Studies mill. Thus defined—
or undefined—Cultural Studies joined forces with various “interdisciplinary”
initiatives and maintained a widespread and lasting influence on several gen-
erations of post-1960s university graduates who, for the most part, cared less
and less for socialism as time went by. But they were, as already mentioned,
also moving on to careers in cultural institutions, especially the academy,
where postmodernism was establishing itself in bricks and mortar and bud-
gets, with resources and responsibilities to manage. Nothing like that 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.
Whatever else might be said of the rise of Cultural Studies, one thing is
for sure: as a recruitment tool for getting students interested, it was a win-
ner.5 And the way it converged, almost to the point of unity, with curricular

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.
   THE ANGLOPHONE RECEPTION OF FRENCH THEORY: LITERARY…    323

strategies devoted to identity, made its ascendancy in the academy all the
more inevitable and its susceptibility to appropriation by skillful marketers
all the more apparent. Students could always find something to “identify
with” in that environment; Hillis Miller and high theory never had a chance.

10.3   American Pragmatism: Richard Rorty

(1931–2007)
What I find most striking about my 1965 essay is how seriously I took the
phenomenon of the linguistic turn, how portentous it then seemed to me. I
am startled, embarrassed, and amused. (Richard Rorty, in the 1992 edition,
commenting on his original introduction to The Linguistic Turn (1968))

Rorty often taught by example—and the lesson of this little confession

from the later edition of The Linguistic Turn was one he insisted upon
most urgently: guard against enthusiasm, especially in politics, but also in
philosophy. That posture made it possible for him to give serious attention
to modes and genres of thought that departed in significant ways from the
conventional wisdom of his time and place. Just as William James, repre-
senting American pragmatism in its original form, found much to value in
his correspondence with Edmund Husserl (and vice versa), so Richard
Rorty would discover in continental philosophy’s latest turn much that
would prove useful to him as he designed and executed his postphilo-
sophical project. And, since that project involved more substantial
­conceptual challenges than most other anglophone enterprises undertaken
in the name of postmodernism, this section will give it more extended
attention.

10.3.1  The Pragmatist Shrugs

Richard Rorty was the most broadly influential American postmodern phi-
losopher for several reasons. First, he had proved himself in the analytic
arena in the early stages of his career (when the linguistic turn seemed so
portentous to him) and so could not be dismissed out of hand by his col-
leagues; he could talk the talk, do the math. And he had read and seemed
to understand the leading continental writers his anglophone colleagues
could not abide. A unique brace of qualifications. Alan Sokal’s hoax would
never have slipped by Rorty—unless he happened to vet it while half
324   T. DE ZENGOTITA

asleep, which he often seemed to be, so tiresome (said his manner) had the
same old analytic back and forth become.6
That world-weary air is essential to understanding Rorty’s influence. It
was a significant aspect of the way he dramatized the moment of moving
on, of leaving the “Plato–Kant canon” behind. Deflating quips directed at
the pretensions of philosophers were cast in tones suggesting that the war
was actually over—the old guard just hadn’t realized it yet.
Strong in learning, buttressed by a sturdy New Deal liberalism rooted in
childhood experience of Communist cant, Rorty was not threatened by
exotic continental formulations in philosophical critique or in politics. He
was not driven to blanket dismissal out of provincial rigidity or fear of ideo-
logical intoxication. He could spend the night with Heidegger and return
to Dewey in the morning, his original commitment intact. The doctrines of
pragmatism were like vaccinations against excesses of all kinds and they
allowed him to proceed indulgently to an assessment of the works of all his
fellows, however alien they might at first appear. His glowing accounts of
Derrida, for example, showed no trace of contamination by the jargon.7 He
left that sort of (possibly craven?) mimicry to lesser lights. He was as lucid
in discussion of de Man as of Quine, and that weighed heavily at implicit
levels of professional reception, where so much j­ockeying for academic
prestige takes place. See—he was saying sotto voce as he explained the con-
tinentals in plain old American English—that wasn’t so hard, was it? Which
suggested in turn: what is your problem, what are you afraid of? Could it
be the dawning realization that, yes, even linguistic philosophy in the twen-
tieth century is a historical formation, a fallible exercise of our finite pow-
ers, bound like all such exercises to fade away when its time is past? (And
after all that crowing! See Schlick quote above, Chap. 5.1).
Like Clifford Geertz in anthropology, Rorty managed to frame the
debates he took part in, political as well as intellectual, so that people who
still believed in Truth or Being or History (“Something Very Large,” as he
liked to put it) ended up looking immature—at best.
Rorty was cool.
But his impact was hot.8 He infuriated those to whom he condescended
because he proposed their overcoming, not by way of argument, but in an
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
   THE ANGLOPHONE RECEPTION OF FRENCH THEORY: LITERARY…    325

emerging culture which would simply have no place for their idea of phi-
losophy. That claim was so capacious that it could not be countered by
argument either. Rorty’s vision suspended internal questions of validity in
the very act of turning “philosophy” into an object of anthropological/
historical speculation. And the general mood in intellectual circles in the
1980s and 1990s worked very much in Rorty’s favor. You didn’t have to
read Baudrillard to notice what was becoming of world culture and to
sense that it did not bode well for the Plato–Kant canon.
Rorty—a small “p” patriot, who took the trouble to write a book
designed for the general reader (Achieving Our Country 1998)—con-
stantly found ways to stress the “Americanness” of pragmatism, going
back to Peirce, James, and especially Dewey. Significantly, that emphasis
on Dewey can be maintained thanks to a substantial overlap between prag-
matism and phenomenology—the same debt to and rejection of Hegel,
the same convergence with Nietzsche and, above all, the determination to
philosophize about experience as it actually is, about life as it actually goes
on. William James’ foundational “stream of consciousness” descriptions
were regarded by leaders of the phenomenological movement in Germany
as a significant contribution to their research (Gobar 1970).
But, as striking as that common ground in content may be, the contrast
in attitude is even more so. There was something very American—down to
earth, suspicious of the highfalutin’—about the pragmatists from the
beginning (Charles Peirce was perhaps an exception). The way Hegel’s
influence on Dewey persisted—though shorn of metaphysical preten-
sions—is mirrored today by Robert Brandom (Rorty’s student) in his
ongoing efforts to provide a more complete and explicit pragmatist reading
of Hegel (see Good 2006). So, given the pivotal role that phenomenology
played in shaping French theory, it is not surprising to find that an American
pragmatist as broadly educated as Richard Rorty could read through the
jargon, tease out the essentials, and, at the same time, elude the humiliation
of conversion. That latter saving grace, however, may have been owed as
much to his more immediate professional engagements with the philo-
sophical tradition he was abandoning and criticizing. Rorty praised Derrida
for “doing something else,” but he himself remained largely focused on
undoing the canon and discomfiting his analytic rivals—though he eventu-
ally ventured into discussions of literature and, especially, politics.

that many never forgave. An epic uproar ensued over which Rorty presided with characteris-
tic 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.
326   T. DE ZENGOTITA

10.3.2  Intimate Enemies
Rorty’s millennial musings on the fate of philosophy were launched in
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). There he took on the image
of mind as an internal “mirror of nature” that twentieth-century philoso-
phers inherited from seventeenth-century epistemology—and from Kant,
who positioned that mirror as “ground” for other departments of knowl-
edge and activity. From Rorty’s point of view, that image of mind—the
very one that was the initial focus of this book—was Descartes’ “inven-
tion,” an artificial “coalescence of beliefs and sensations into Lockean
ideas.” Rorty professed surprise that Descartes could “convince himself
that something which included both pains and mathematical knowledge
was ‘a complete thing,’” and did so in a way that “captured Europe’s
imagination” (136, 56, 223).
Actually, the account given in the first chapter of this book suggests an
explanation—and does so in precisely the cultural/contextual terms Rorty
recommended but did not actually deploy.9 Take, for example, the corre-
spondence between the situation of the cogito and the position of the believ-
ing Protestant in relation to God and the world as outlined in Chap. 2.10
Modern subjectivity would have emerged even if Descartes, a sickly boy
during his school days, had passed away in his dormitory at Le Havre. He
may have articulated that development with inspiring clarity for his fel-
lows in the Republic of Letters (thus “grasping the age in thought”), but
he did not invent it. Heidegger and, in his own way, Derrida may be the
only significant post-Hegelians who truly believe that the categories of
metaphysics determine the categories of the general culture and the way in
which history unfolds.
But Rorty, at this point in his career, was too wedded to his intimate
enemy to give serious attention to cultural context—though his postphilo-
sophical program would increasingly call for just that. He wasn’t really
addressing Locke and Kant in their time and place at all; he was using them
to argue with his contemporaries about the “privileges” of sense data and
propositional correspondence. Because Rorty represents the most credible
and enduring “postmodern” position in the anglophone academy, it might
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!”
   THE ANGLOPHONE RECEPTION OF FRENCH THEORY: LITERARY…    327

be helpful to show just how and why he fell short of his own intentions in
this inaugural work, conditioned as it was by his close involvement with the
academic philosophers with whom he was arguing.
Rorty wanted to expose the cogito—the mind as the subjective “mirror”
of an objective nature—as a cultural-historical formation, because he
wanted to undermine its claims to privileged knowledge in philosophy, a
much narrower aim than his continental counterparts entertained. He
rightly argued that “as soon as it is admitted that empirical considerations
(e.g. the discovery that there are spots on the moon, the discovery that the
Etats-General would not go home) incited but did not require ‘conceptual
change’ (e.g. a different concept of the heavens or of the state), the divi-
sion of labor between the philosopher and the historian no longer made
sense” (272). But he did not take up an extended study of that culture-­
historical incitement. I am not saying Rorty should have written a differ-
ent book—but I do want to show how his historically oriented argument
against foundational explanation was allowed to escape his larger claim
that ideas are justified just insofar as they work. Rorty forgot, or had not
yet encountered, a teaching of Nietzsche that the poststructuralists learned
so well—if you just invert the binary instead of surpassing it, you actually
preserve it.
Rorty began by indicting Locke for confusing explanation and justifica-
tion in his account of mind, a confusion which led, in ways the book as a
whole describes, to philosophy’s grandiose claims for foundational episte-
mology, for absolute and objective “truth.” At the same time, Rorty was
arguing in general that context and outcome is what justifies beliefs and
that (short, perhaps, of syllogism) more or less justified (as opposed to
“true”) is all that knowledge can hope to be. But in ascribing to the view
that truth is a compliment we extend to beliefs that pay off in one way or
another, Rorty opened himself up to this question: in its context, wasn’t
the mirror of nature in fact justified as epistemology precisely because it was
“confused” with explanation in a particular way? How could anyone claim-
ing that the division of labor between historian and philosopher no longer
makes sense and that “cultural anthropology (in a large sense which
includes intellectual history) is all we need” (381), justify calling other
ways of construing the world “confused”—if it can be shown that they
“pay off”? How could Rorty maintain his postphilosophical commitment
to edification and the invention of vocabularies that work and condemn
the naturalism and psychologism in Locke’s philosophy? There can be no
doubt that it paid off, for centuries.
328   T. DE ZENGOTITA

If we try to make out what Rorty meant when he granted that empiri-
cists “were doubtless right in commending Galileo for preferring his eyes
to his Aristotle, but this epistemological judgment has no particular con-
nection with their theory of perception” (246), the word “particular”
jumps out. It carries the whole burden of his argument. He was trying to
leave room for the Galilean context as an incitement to a philosophical
account of perception and belief while closing off the possibility that such
a context might justify the philosophy in some sense other than the one to
which he himself subscribes. But why? It was, as we have just seen, justified
in that sense! But it was not justified in the sense to which his twentieth-­
century interlocutors subscribe—that is, as the correspondence of
­transparent propositions to objective reality—and Rorty was actually talk-
ing to them.11
The case is even clearer when the Locke’s “moral science of man” is cast
in terms we would recognize as moral today. The whole Lockean project
of progressive remedy, of curing natural history, depended on an analysis
of how the mind, and the rest of nature, worked. Consider the most fun-
damental case, in its Lockean origins. The “divine rights” of patriarchal
monarchs were explained away (like “goblins and sprites”) and self-­
government by free and rational individuals was justified by a “science of
man” grounded on evidence of divine design in nature, an inbuilt right-­
way-­to-work. As a matter of anthropological cultural-historical fact
(Rorty’s “all we need”), modern humanity granted itself civil rights on
that basis. Modernity discovered, beneath the appearances of inherited
station (and later race and sex) the common sense and reason with which
each individual is endowed by Nature and the Maker, and so on—the
language runs clear from Descartes to Jefferson and Danton to civil rights
movements of the twentieth century. Is Rorty saying that our beliefs about
our rights are not justified by those explanations of our nature? He is, and
rightly so, if “justified” means something like “logically derived from.”
But he’s ignoring how the beliefs were, in fact, justified by those explana-
tions for the looser reason to which he himself subscribes: namely, in the
context of modernity’s social practices, this vocabulary paid off. Can Rorty
say, well, you can pretend to use, or mistakenly believe that you are using,
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.”
   THE ANGLOPHONE RECEPTION OF FRENCH THEORY: LITERARY…    329

explanations about how the mind works to justify moral and epistemologi-
cal beliefs but you really aren’t justifying them?
The only way Rorty might say such a thing is by dealing with Locke and
Descartes as contemporaries—and that is essentially what he did. He
would not, I think, have denied that Locke was justified in believing what
he did by virtue of explanations of human nature if those explanations are
taken as constituents in just another set of social practices. But Rorty, in this
case only, did not so take them. He took them at face value—as absolute
claims to knowledge that satisfy “the urge to see social practices of justifi-
cation as more than just such practices” (1979, 390). But that urge ought
not be ascribed to Locke but to Carnap and Moore. For Locke, it was
God’s practices that were “more”—not his own.
But when it comes to present-day politics, Rorty’s opposition to abso-
lute justification serves him well—and would do the same for all of us if we
could cauterize the thrills of righteous indignation that are coursing through
our body politic in all directions like Deleuzean schizo pulsions on digital
steroids. It may be true, as well as witty, to say that “the problem with
pragmatism is that it doesn’t work”—and, to my mind at least, Rorty’s
manifestly well-intentioned Achieving our Country (1998) is a case in
point. In that book, he tries to persuade his fellow citizens that they are
capable of political action without metaphysically secure foundations to
convince them of the rightness of their cause. He tries to persuade them
that, like certain elite intellectuals—the “liberal ironists” he celebrates in
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989)—they can be politically commit-
ted without being transcendentally motivated, that they can admit to an
inherent fallibility in their perceptions and vocabularies and still march and
organize and vote. But what was most noticeably missing from Achieving
our Country, in spite of its heartfelt appeal, was the one thing that actually,
in fact, does motivate people in general to take such action: inspiration
(etymologically: “immediate influence of God or a god”).
That limitation is regrettable but not unbreachable. There are, in fact,
some people—usually highly educated people—who become liberal
ironists and can, like Rorty himself, find inspiration in words like these:

Berlin ended his essay by quoting Joseph Schumpeter, who said, “To realise
the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly
is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.” Berlin comments, “to
demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need;
but to allow it to determine one’s practice is a symptom of an equally deep,
and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity.” (Rorty 1989, 46)
330   T. DE ZENGOTITA

The question that seems to me most pressing at this historical moment

is this: can people come to see the wisdom of these admonitions in suffi-
cient numbers to undertake a transformation of our civic discourse that
could catch on and take hold and effect rational political change in the
Age of the Tweet and the Selfie?

10.4   Identity Politics

French theory was a natural resource for any insurgent academic enter-
prise organized around “identity.” People in all walks of life were putting
race, gender, and sexual orientation at the top of the political agenda dur-
ing this period, of course, but so broad-based were these projects and so
various and intersectional their constituencies, that it is difficult to gener-
alize about them, beyond the focus on identity itself. Postmodern under-
takings in the academy took account of this larger context, of course, but
they were often specifically conditioned by theory and the affiliations and
divisions it engendered. To take an outstanding case in point, we consider
Gender Studies as theorized and practiced by Judith Butler.

10.4.1  Gender Studies: Judith Butler (1956–)

There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender … identity is
performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its
results. (Judith Butler Gender Trouble [1990] 2008, 34)

Judith Butler’s most influential idea has been that gender—including

normative heterosexual gender—is not a given state, or a settled construc-
tion, but an ongoing performance.12 Butler flirted at first with theatrical
performance, but that implies a subject—someone putting on the show—
and as a committed poststructuralist she could not countenance that. But
her insistence on subjectless performativity provoked intense opposition
from feminist, gay, and transgender activists who saw themselves as strug-
gling for recognition as subjects. Speaking as a lesbian, Butler had set out
to caution her feminist colleagues against essentialist thinking in the het-
erosexual context. She wound up producing a founding text for Queer
Theory with immediate relevance for Postcolonial Studies and Critical Race
Theory as well. Judith Butler’s work has been uniquely implicated in vari-
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?
   THE ANGLOPHONE RECEPTION OF FRENCH THEORY: LITERARY…    331

ous forms of identity politics in the American academy, all of which con-
verged on undermining conventional modern selves and inviting whoever
felt moved to become, through performance, something “other” to just go
ahead and do it.
Gender Trouble (1990) was a huge success in the academy and in the
culture more generally. One reason, so obvious that it can escape notice, is
that the book dealt with arcane poststructuralist notions of socially deter-
mined identity, yes—but it did so in relation to “sex,” perhaps the most
engaging of all topics, especially for young people. And besides—since the
rise of the women’s and gay rights movements in the late 1960s, who wasn’t
having trouble with gender? But the book also gave Butler an opportunity
to exercise her remarkable talent for writing in a register that managed to
synthesize the academic and the vernacular. She fluently deployed the latest
slang and commented knowingly on goings-on in what had been—and, for
some people, still were—“underground” venues, wreathed in the glamor of
taboo. You just knew she knew what she was talking about there. At the
same time, she imported a battery of notions from yet another glamorous
venue, from the haunts of the intellectual avant-garde in Paris—and you
just knew she knew what she was talking about there too. The result was
that young people, struggling to make sense of both French theory and
their own sex lives, were doubly rewarded. Gender Trouble probably
helped more people get at least some sense of how to talk postmodern than
all the little Oxford and Routledge introductory paperbacks combined.
One example: because she was never far removed (in Gender Trouble)
from concrete experiences of sexuality and gender performance, young
Americans of a certain class, engaged since grammar school and Sesame
Street with debunking stereotypes, were quick to catch on to what she
meant by the “heterosexual matrix.” They readily assimilated it to the
familiar idea that “society” imposes categories on you and that you are
entitled to object to that. And that’s not a bad reading, for starters; it
provides enough insight to sustain a term paper on Foucault’s discursive
practices and, with a little massaging, could take on his idea of power/
knowledge as well.13
Almost as important to the book’s popularity, I think, was the way
Butler lightened the burden of hopeless subjection in which the French
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.
332   T. DE ZENGOTITA

originators of this discourse on subject formation so often seemed to take

perverse delight. In Butler’s version, a generous dose of American
­optimism discovered possibilities for self-emancipation in “subversive per-
formativity.” Cultural Studies at Birmingham had steered clear of Adorno’s
pessimism and Judith Butler chose a similar route through the texts of
Lacan and the ultra-structuralists he inspired. The iterability and citation-
ality of Derrida’s “unmoored signifiers” showed the way. For Butler, the
implication of those elusive quasi-concepts was very concrete: the implica-
tion was that, say, people wearing “inappropriate” clothes and displaying
norm-defying behavior might be shocking, but with sufficient repetition
they could shift social expectations. And people actually practicing forms
of identity politics in popular culture caught on right away, of course.
From working class fans of Madonna to somewhat more sophisticated fans
of  k.d. lang and Lady Gaga—and  not forgetting pierced and tattooed
freaks and thugged-out rappers in the streets and, nowadays, including
also everyone on Facebook and Twitter: performed identity became the
American way of postmodernism and Judith Butler “theorized” it all,
while it was happening. And, of course, with the rise of Trump and his
followers, it continues to happen—though the trajectories of inception
and reception, in this latter case, have been rather different. But no one
who has ever watched a Trump rally can fail to notice that performed
identity is the whole point those rallies and, to some undeterminable
extent, of the whole Trump phenomenon.
Butler’s first book, Subjects of Desire (1987), was a study of the legacy
of Kojeve’s Hegel in France—a pivotal point, as noted above at the begin-
ning of Part IV, in the story of the rise of postmodern theory. In her
account of gender, Butler was able to channel major French thinkers
whose ideas were shaped by critiques of Kojeve’s humanist/existential
Marxism for a very simple reason: she had paid her dues and had immersed
herself in the history and context that alone makes it possible to get a
handle on what French theorists were up to. Foucault’s “subject of regula-
tory practices,” especially, is everywhere in evidence and almost as ubiqui-
tous is the Lacanian subject, the false unity of the ego forever subjected to
the “symbolic order.” Kristeva’s “subject in process,” already evocative of
ongoing performance and always embodied, was also at work—although
Kristeva’s particular formulation came in for sustained criticism from
Butler. Some of the specifics of her critique will shed a revealing light on
the anglophone reception of French theory more generally.
   THE ANGLOPHONE RECEPTION OF FRENCH THEORY: LITERARY…    333

10.4.2  Butler’s Kristeva
Kristeva accepts the assumption that culture is equivalent to the symbolic,
but the symbolic is fully subsumed under the “Law of the Father…” the
only modes of non-psychotic activity are those which participate in the sym-
bolic. … Her strategic task is not to replace the symbolic with the semiotic
nor to establish the semiotic as a rival cultural possibility, but rather to vali-
date those experiences within the symbolic that permit a manifestation of
the borders which divide the symbolic from the semiotic. (Butler 1989a,
110; italics mine)

Of the many American critics of Kristeva’s views on gender, Judith

Butler was especially qualified to understand her phenomenologically
inflected account of subject formation. Her easy familiarity with the
Lacanian topography (“law of the father,” etc.) out of which Kristeva
carved out her would-be science of “semanalysis” (see above, Chap. 7.3)
shows as much. She had immersed herself in continental philosophy going
back to her thesis on Hegel, for which she prepared at Heidelberg
University, and, as a practitioner of postmodern theory herself, she had a
better understanding of what Kristeva took for granted than more tradi-
tional liberal or radical feminists in anglophone universities. For Butler,
the generally recognized problem of her “essentialism” was better under-
stood as a kind of category mistake in Kristeva’s theoretical apparatus. Her
basic distinction between the semiotic (the womb, the maternal body, the
all-enveloping embrace of sheer sensation, motion, rhythm; the chora) and
the symbolic (culture, language) led to a lapse from a cardinal rule of the
postmodern language game as Butler conceived it: a ban on referencing
the pre-discursive. Pre-discursive means “before,” as in before the acquisi-
tion of language, but it includes anything that falls outside of language—
anything that can’t be known by a speaking subject, hence the close
connection to the ban on subject talk itself14:

It is unclear whether the primary relationship to the maternal body which

both Kristeva and Lacan appear to accept is a viable construct and whether it
is even a knowable experience, according to either of their linguistic theories.
The multiple drives that characterize the semiotic constitute a pre-discursive
libidinal economy. (Butler 1989a, 105; italics mine)

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 speak-
ing. 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.
334   T. DE ZENGOTITA

We have already noted the significant role the idea of the pre-discursive
played in the theoretical work of the most difficult of the ultra-­structuralists,
Deleuze and Derrida. And, yes, Derrida was given to denying the possibil-
ity of talking about the pre-discursive—the phrase itself says as much!
And, yes, the crimes committed by the metaphysics he was deconstructing
were typically carried out in language claiming to refer to the pre-­discursive
(presence, etc.). But that reading, while valid up to a point, misses the
characteristic Derridean ambivalence about the metaphysical project
itself—the aim of the project was, for him, not the same as its execution in
specific terms and that aim was close to his heart, always. It misses, that is,
the importance of his “aconceptual concepts” and the “quasi-­transcendental
ontology” they made possible (see above, Chap. 8.2). A deeper reading of
Derrida shows an underlying obsession with finding some access to what
Butler dismissed out of hand because it wasn’t “even a knowable experi-
ence.” The lead quote for the section on Derrida in this book foregrounds
that fact (“I am profoundly convinced, against Wittgenstein … that, what
we cannot speak about we must (not) pass over in silence” (see above,
Chap. 9.2). And of course Deleuze made no bones about it at all: every
important philosophical move he made, from the subjectless “transcen-
dental empiricism” of his Hume studies to becoming-other through sheer
sensation in radical art works, was motivated by his desire to escape lin-
guistic containers that (mis)represented the seething molecular as stable
molarity.
But that longing for an “outside” that haunted so many of the creators
of French theory did not seem to take hold of Butler, at least not during
the Gender Trouble period. For that reason, I believe, she misread the dis-
tinction between Kristeva’s semiotic and symbolic—she missed the unrep-
resentable way in which the “boundary” between them fused as much as
separated the respective processes. Pam Morris attributes Butler’s misread-
ing to this oversight as well:

According to Butler, Kristeva inscribes the maternal body with “a set of

meanings that are prior to culture itself. … [Kristeva’s] naturalistic descrip-
tions of the maternal body effectively reify motherhood. … However, this
cogent deconstruction of what Butler takes to be Kristeva’s theory repro-
duces the common tendency to identify her work uncritically with that of
Lacan and perceive the relation between the semiotic and the symbolic in
terms of stark binary opposition quite absent from Kristeva’s own formula-
tion.” (Morris 1992, 28)
   THE ANGLOPHONE RECEPTION OF FRENCH THEORY: LITERARY…    335

Morris goes on to recommend a corrective to Butler’s imposition in

this way:

The prevailing popular misconceptions of [Kristeva’s work] as dependent

upon notions of the instinctual and pre-social can best be overcome and its
political import brought into clearer focus by a return to her earliest writing.
In particular it needs to be re-emphasized that the first influence upon
Kristeva was not Lacan and psychoanalysis, but Bakhtin with his insistence
upon the subject in history. (29)

Morris then reminds us that Kristeva had also been consulting with
Emile Benveniste on subject-transcending discourse theory, looking for a
synthesis with Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical account of texts. This was when
she was presenting her intertextuality “gadget” at Barthes’ seminar at
EPHE (see above, Chap. 7.3)—the whole function of the gadget being to
neutralize the subject as agent in the writing and reading process and, in
so doing, to collapse the distinction itself, to make reading and writing
aspects of each other. Yet another category defying merger. Morris flags
down a number of other leading notions in Kristeva’s work, all of which
reflect a consistent effort to blend distinctions into process—and finally,
after describing Kristeva’s key concept of a “threshold site,”15 Morris
concludes:

nor as is so often claimed, does [Kristeva] oppose the symbolic with a pre-­
cultural archaism. For her, all speaking subjects and their discourse, the
semiotic disposition as well as the symbolic, are always already implicated in
history. … The child enters the world as the site of polymorphous instinctual
drives but these are always already implicated with the social; even in the
womb the child hears and responds to the mother’s voice. (32)

In a nutshell, Butler simply did not contend with a crucial notion

Kristeva developed in Revolution in Poetic Language (1984), the notion of
“signifiAnce”—a coinage that rightly brings Derrida’s differAnce to mind,
especially when you consider its function in the discourse:

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 expul-
sion, birth, sex and death, pain and laughter.”
336   T. DE ZENGOTITA

What we call a signifiance, then, is precisely this unlimited and unbounded

generating process, this unceasing operation of the drives toward, in, and
through language; toward, in, and through the exchange system and its pro-
tagonists—the subject and his institutions. This heterogeneous process, neither
anarchic, fragmented foundation, nor schizophrenic blockage, is a structuring
and de-structuring practice, a passage to the outer boundaries of the subject
and society. Then—and only then—can it be jouissance and revolution. (The
Portable Kristeva 2002, 31; italics mine)

These are not the “drives” of Freud—not even of Lacan’s Freud. As the
italicized language makes clear, these are Nietzschean forces as Deleuze
and Guattari deployed them in Anti-Oedipus (1972). The whole point
was to see “desire” as permeating the entire natural and social order, seam-
lessly implicated in the motions of weather and of machinery in factories
and cars on the street—as well as the embraces of maternal fluids and tis-
sues enveloping a spastic, babbling infant. That book, let it be recalled,
was a sensation among intellectuals in Paris and it is unthinkable that, in
1974, conceiving her semiotic and her chora, that Kristeva could have
escaped the influence of this most radical of all visions of “desire,” a vision
in which all stasis melted into process eventually and at some level.
If you pass over Kristeva’s persistent efforts to highlight the fusional
dimension that process brings to categories in motion, then it is possible
to read the distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic the way
Butler does. That fusional dimension is itself, admittedly, unintelligible—
that is, as it were, the whole point of becoming as opposed to being, the
very occasion of the crime against empirical reality that concepts, by their
nature, commit (See Kojeve and Nietzsche  references throughout this
book). But for Butler, who has dismissed the pre-discursive because it isn’t
“even a knowable experience”, Kristeva’s reach inevitably falls outside her
ken and we are left with the two levels of language—interacting however
you like—but distinctly themselves throughout. Kristeva’s examples of
how, in poetry and baby talk and psychotic discourse, the semiotic can
“erupt into” or “disrupt” or otherwise make itself “manifest” at the level
of the symbolic—to Butler, such examples all look like interactions (per-
haps breaches or incursions) between two terms that remain what they
are. Hence, descriptions like this one, cited above: “the only modes of
non-psychotic activity are those which participate in the symbolic to some
extent … [and so] validate those experiences within the symbolic that
   THE ANGLOPHONE RECEPTION OF FRENCH THEORY: LITERARY…    337

permit a manifestation of the borders which divide the symbolic from the
semiotic” (Italics mine). When, of course, the whole point for Kristeva is
that they don’t simply divide, they blend and fuse.
Imagine a poet engaged in the passionate repetitive chanting of a refrain
or a baby and mother engaged in reciprocal and simultaneous cooing of
the sweetness-recognizing syllable “Awwww ….” For Kristeva there’s a
blend, like Russian dressing; for Butler, there’s catsup mixed with mayon-
naise. I can see it both ways, so why not live and let live?
Politics.
Judith Butler’s problem with Kristeva’s pre-discursive semiotic had lit-
tle to do with the organization of the human psyche or the nature of lan-
guage. She was not that interested in purely intellectual issues.  Here is
what she really didn’t like about Kristeva’s pre-discursive:

By relegating the source of subversion [of the symbolic by the semiotic] to

a site outside of culture itself, Kristeva appears to foreclose the possibility of
subversion as an effective or realizable cultural practice. (1989a, 112)

And the possibility of that cultural practice trumps all other consider-
ations—for Butler is, first and foremost, an artful polemicist serving a
noble cause and she has arrived to spread the good word. We can fix this
situation, if we just act (perform) in it:

on my reading, the repression of the feminine does not require that the
agency of repression and the object of repression be ontologically distinct.
… If subversion as possible, it will be a subversion from within the terms of
the law [i.e. the symbolic], through the possibilities that emerge when the
law turns against itself and spawns unexpected permutations of itself. The
culturally constructed body will then be liberated, not to its “natural” past
nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities.
(1989a, 117)

In spite of her sophisticated grasp of French theory, in the end Butler’s

path converged with that of Kristeva’s more positivist critics: conceptual
decisions at the level of theory were driven by the political preferences of
a theorist looking, not for truth, but for efficacy. And not only were they so
driven, but rightfully so! For what else did we learn from Foucault on
“power/knowledge” and “effects of truth,” if not that?
338   T. DE ZENGOTITA

10.4.3  Butler at the Barricades
But in this book we are interested in actual truth—albeit with a small “t,”
the kind of truth we expect from friends when important matters are
before us. To conclude, then, with an attempt at a just placement of Judith
Butler in the theory firmament at this stage in her career: she was on the
conservative end of the spectrum, a Foucauldian materialist but not really
an ultra-structuralist, not really looking to think the impossible or other-
wise access or even privilege what lies beyond thought and language.
Conventional thought and language in the pre-postmodern era—that she
was out to transgress and disrupt at every turn. Those were boundaries she
was eager to violate but not, like Derrida or Deleuze, the very boundaries
of conceptuality per se, of language itself. At that point, Butler shows her-
self to be a more conventional—even American—philosopher, not a
French experimentalist looking for what is truly other to all of us as speak-
ing and thinking beings. She implied as much herself, in her 1999 preface
to Gender Trouble, which reflected almost ten years of engagement with a
host of critics and admirers since its original publication:

Gender trouble is rooted in “French theory,” which is itself a curious

American construction. Only in the United States are so many disparate
theories joined together as if they form some kind of unity. … I mention
this to underscore that the apparent Francocentrism of the text is at a sig-
nificant distance from France and from the life of theory in France. …
Indeed, the intellectual promiscuity of the text marks it precisely as
American. ([1999] 2008, x)

Another manifestation of the strength of her political commitment:

Judith Butler was always ready to police discourse for violations of an
institutionalized postmodernism if they threatened a consensus of which
she approved for political reasons. Her critique of Kristeva was a case in
point. Similarly, in “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions”
(1989a, b), five years after his death, Butler took the master to task for
making the same basic error Derrida had nailed him for 25 years earlier—
a variation, in fact, of the one Kristeva had fallen into. It seems Foucault
had frequently deployed the metaphor of “inscribing” significant items
(postures, clothing, expressions, ill-health) on “bodies” and that his lan-
guage often implied that “the body” existed “pre-discursively” (i.e., prior
   THE ANGLOPHONE RECEPTION OF FRENCH THEORY: LITERARY…    339

to interpretation in language or culture).16 And that was, as everyone in

Butler’s milieu by that time took for granted, a major faux-pas. It was
nothing less than a lapse into subject/object realism of some kind—
whether phenomenological, empirical, or merely commonsensical. But,
in any case, a lapse that the ban on subject talk was designed to prevent.
But the tone was more telling. Butler brought an official, almost routine,
“check-your-­papers” tone to this essay. One feels that she was reciting
from a list of regulations imposing in-group prohibitions against using
categories and distinctions that claim reference to the pre-discursive, to
“nature,” or indeed anything metaphysically inclusive of particulars—
transcendental “single drama” history was another favorite target.
Barthes, with his enduring resistance to doxa, no matter what its prov-
enance, looks especially prophetic from this angle (see above, Chap. 9.1).
But, in a recent interview, Butler herself provides a practical example of
the linguistic risk-taking she originally advocated as she describes an
encounter with a kid in Berkeley who leaned out of the window and asked
her whether she was a lesbian. Butler replied in the affirmative, noting that
her interlocutory, who clearly meant the question as an insult, was taken
aback by her proud appropriation of the term. “It was a very powerful
thing to do,” she explains: “it wasn’t that I authored that term: I received
the term and gave it back; I replayed it, reiterated. … It’s as if my inter-
rogator were saying, ‘hey, what do we do with the word lesbian? Show me
how we use it?’ And I said, ‘yeah, let’s use it this way!’ Or it’s as if the
interrogator hanging out the window were saying, ‘hey, do you think the
word lesbian can only be used in a derogatory way on the street?’ And I
said ‘no, it can be claimed on the street! Come join me!’ We were having
a negotiation” (in Salih 2002, 114).
That took courage—and Butler has always shown that, modeled
that, for all the people to whom and for whom she has spoken over the
years.
It was perhaps a by-product, but very useful—a great convenience for
opponents of all things bourgeois, for hardened left-wing activists or a

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.
340   T. DE ZENGOTITA

lifelong Nietzschean elitists or—as with most of the thinkers we have con-
sulted here—a strange combination of both: the ban on subject talk made
it possible for many of these radicals to avoid looking too closely at their
own motives for abandoning their class destiny and aligning themselves
with workers, third-world peasants, and eventually with other exploited
and marginalized groups as well. For them, it would never do to speak of
anything so sentimental and ideal as “compassion” or “a sense of justice”
or “human rights,” those conventional sources of inspiration for reform,
smugly handing down their help to “those in need” from the center and
on high. But in the mid 1970s, the so-called new philosophers (Andre
Glucksmann, Bernard Henri-Levy, Christian Jambet, Guy Lardreau et al.),
reacting as disillusioned Maoists to Solzhenitsyn’s revelations in The Gulag
Archipelago (1973) and to the heroism of other dissenters in the
Communist world, fostered a turn to “ethics” and made concepts like
“justice” and “human rights” viable again (see especially Julian Bourg’s
From Revolution to Ethics; May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought
(2007)). It was that turn—happening, once again, with astonishing
speed—that principally (along with the centralized French educational
system) accounts for the abrupt demise in France of what the anglophone
academy would call “theory” and which some would practice diligently
for decades to come.
Foucault, with his uncanny ability to catch the next wave, was affiliated
with that turn by the early 1980s, as we have seen (it cemented his
estrangement from Deleuze, who liked to refer to the new philosophers
as “TV buffoons”). So it is worth reflecting a bit on Foucault’s earlier
preference for the word “intolerable” to explain why he spent precious
time and energy organizing on behalf of prisoners or the Iranian revolu-
tion or whatever it might be. Like Rorty’s “cruelty,” the word tries to
shift agency over to circumstances that are “intolerable” or “cruel” with-
out quite succeeding in masking the fact that someone, some human sub-
ject, is feeling and judging the situation and, in common sense (hence
forbidden) terms, being moved to action. In any case, and by way of
summarizing an obvious but, I think, decisive point—this straight-up
observation: one of the best ways to rescue the common sense view of
human motivation in ethics and politics is to invoke the example of so
many of these radical activists themselves. The straight white men among
them were, for the most part, bourgeois intellectuals who chose to deny
in theory or ideology ­motivations they manifestly served in practice. They
dedicated great chunks of their lives to causes that did not serve their
   THE ANGLOPHONE RECEPTION OF FRENCH THEORY: LITERARY…    341

material interests—but instead served ideals and values that have been
motivating modernizing progressives since the eighteenth century.
Another case of intellectuals caught up in a “great silliness,” no doubt;
but, as in MacIntyre’s case (see above Chap. 3.2.2), with the possibility of
a new humanism on the horizon, there is much to be learned from it.
Since the first Romantics set out to vanquish modern subjectivity, it has
been like some vampire, reviving again and again no matter how many
stakes are driven through its heart. And it managed to do that for the obvi-
ous reason that the social-historical world has remained essentially modern
through all the intellectual changes and, with subjectivity understood as
being-in-the-world, its persistence was inevitable. Nietzsche thought he
had bested Cartesian metaphysics in its Kantian guise, but Heidegger
showed that he remained in thrall to a vision of individual centrality and
agency. Heidegger, in turn, believed he had dismantled subjectivity as sub-
stance once and for all—returned it to the world as the very meaning of
the world’s Being. But Derrida smoked out that self-same subject in
Heidegger, caught it gazing into the mirror of presence. And Derrida
himself? Like many in his cohort, he took out what looked to be a fail-safe
insurance policy, one that implicitly admitted the impossibility of success
for his project in his social-historical context. He smothered the subject/
object distinction in a wholesale destabilization of all the binary concepts
(ideal/material, culture/nature, internal/external) associated with
Western metaphysics while admitting at the same time that one couldn’t
actually function without those binaries for the foreseeable future, perni-
cious though they might be. Free at last?

References
Abrams, M.H. 1971. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in
Romantic Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Bourg, Julian. 2007. From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary
French Thought. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.
Butler, Judith. 1987. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in 20th-Century
France. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 1989a. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva. Hypatia 3 (3): 104–118.
———. 1989b. Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions. The Journal of
Philosophy 86 (11): 601–607.
———. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:
Routledge.
342   T. DE ZENGOTITA

de Zengotita, Thomas. 1984. The Functional Reduction of Kinship in the Social

Thought of John Locke. In Functionalism Historicized: Essays on British Social
Anthropology, ed. George W.  Stocking Jr., 10–30. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. (1995) 2001. Immanence: A Life. In Pure Immanence: Essays on
a Life. Trans. Anne Boyman. New York: Zone Books.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1972) 2009. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R.  Lane.
New York: Penguin Classics.
Deleuze from A to Z. 2012. Directed by Pierre-André Boutang. Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e). DVD.
DePietro, Thomas. 1982. The Socialist Imagination: Gerald Graff’s Defense of
Reason. The Centennial Review 26 (4): 375–387.
Derrida, Jacques. (1966) 2001. Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the
Human Sciences. In Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London:
Routledge.
Dosse, Francois. 1997. The History of Structuralism: Volume 2: The Sign Sets, 1967–
Present. Trans. Deborah Glassman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Gobar, Ash. 1970. The Phenomenology of William James. Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society 114 (4): 294–309.
Good, James A. 2006. A Search for Unity in Diversity: The “Permanent Hegelian
Deposit” in the Philosophy of John Dewey. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Graff, Gerald. (1979) 1986. Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern
Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kristeva, Julia. 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller.
New York: Columbia Press.
———. 2002. Intimate Revolt: And, the Future of Revolt. Trans. Janine Herman.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Lasch, Christopher. (1979) 1991. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an
Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Lotringer, Sylvere. 2001. Doing Theory. In French Theory in America, ed. Sylvère
Lotringer and Sande Cohen, 125–162. New York: Routledge.
Miller, J. Hillis. 1979. The Critic as Host. In Deconstruction and Criticism, ed.
Harold Bloom, Paul De Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey H.  Hartman, and
J. Hillis Miller. New York: Continuum.
Morris, Pam. 1992. Re-routing Kristeva: From Pessimism to Parody. Textual
Practice 6 (1): 31–46.
Rapaport, Herman. 2001. The Theory Mess: Deconstruction in Eclipse. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Rojek, Chris. 2007. Cultural Studies. Cambridge: Polity Press.
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Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
———. 1989. Solidarity or Objectivity. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1998. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century
America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Salih, Sara. 2002. Judith Butler. London: Routledge.
Thompson, Edward Palmer. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class.
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd.
Williams, Raymond. (1958) 1983. Culture and Society: 1780–1950. New  York:
Columbia University Press.
 CHAPTER 11

Before the Annunciation Came the Virtual

Man is the being whose project is to be God. (Sartre 1957)

Sartre here sums up the story of modernity as it has been told in this book
and, if only by implication, the argument that followed from it. The gist is
this: as modernity took hold of nature and history, the status of Maker fell
more and more to those who actually fashioned the settings that consti-
tuted people’s lives. As we became the self-conscious makers of our
being—of our skills, careers, moods, appearance, health, sexual perfor-
mance, “life-styles”—proprietorial entitlement followed in accordance
with modern “natural law.” But what now and what next?
Most strikingly, this: the convergence of digital and biotechnologies
means that the enterprise of self- and world-making is becoming more
literal. Virtual environments, avatars, chimeras, clones, and proliferating
prosthetic enhancements of all kinds promise liberation from all catego-
ries, including those we are born into. Some apparently qualified people
expect liberation from embodiment itself.1 And the fact that quadriplegics
with their brains wired into computers can control the movement of a cur-
sor with their thoughts makes that expectation rational in principle, at
least. What that fact says is that the code doesn’t care what the platform is

1
 Ray Kurzweil and Larry Page (co-founder of Google) are only the most prominent fig-
ures seriously preparing for a time in the near future when it will be possible to “upload” (or
“download”?) a mind/brain onto a computer.

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346   T. DE ZENGOTITA

made of—carbon or silicon, it doesn’t matter; the message, the informa-

tion, remains. Brain science, computer science, genetics—they are all code
sciences—+/−, on/off, information sciences—and whatever may or may
not actually prove feasible in the future, this much is clear: what we have
now is just the beginning.
The outline of a thesis emerges: aiming to displace and dissolve the
modern subject and its enterprises, postmodern theory actually articulated
its fulfillment. In effect, postmodernists embraced the conditions of life in
a Nietzschean world that the modernists were forced to accept. In trying
to “think the impossible,” the most radical among them were attempting
a much more comprehensive escape from The Prison House of Language
than Fredric Jameson had in mind. He just wanted to jettison modernist
formalism and the obsessive focus on language and signs and return to
clear descriptions of social and political relations and historical events.
They were flirting with moving beyond language altogether. But for the
discourses of postmodernism that gained traction and held on—Foucault,
Rorty, Butler—the effect was closer to what Jameson was hoping for.
Returning to the world, to history, from the heights of modernist abstrac-
tion, we find modernity’s original project on the horizon once again—but
in a radically new form. In what follows, I offer an outline for a theory of
“theory.” This discussion will depart from the protocol followed so far,
ignoring authorial intent for the sake of a conclusion.
Three quotes provide a platform. In the first, John Locke, inspired by
microscopes and telescopes and prevalent “corpuscular” theories of
nature’s “substance,” wonders if, higher on the great chain of being,
angels with adjustable eyeballs can see both the middle-size furniture of
human  experience and the minutest particles, the ones Galileo credited
for causing heat. And he goes a tentative step further, musing for just a
moment on “how much would that man exceed all others in knowledge
… who could so fit his eyes to all sorts of objects, as to see when he pleased
the figure and motion of the minute particles in the blood.” But he steps
back quickly to affirm that “God has no doubt made them [our organs] so
as is best for us in our present condition” ([1689] 1996, II, xxiii, 12–13).
The pious Locke was not as bold in expressing the aspirations that drove
his thinking as Descartes had been—but when he allowed himself to
indulge in “extravagant conjecture,” the underlying logic was clear.
   BEFORE THE ANNUNCIATION CAME THE VIRTUAL    347

In effect, Locke imagined cyborgs. More recently, someone undertook

to do the same—more systematically and for a very different, fundamen-
tally opposed, purpose—but it led, as if by some necessity, back to
modernity’s genesis moment. In A Cyborg Manifesto (1991), Donna
­
Haraway ultimately described her icon of postmodern category violation
this way: it was the “apocalyptic telos of the West’s escalating dominations
of abstract individuation, an ultimate self, untied at last from all depen-
dency, a man in space” (152). In other words, she realized that somehow—
at the very limit of what escape from “natural” categories would bring—was
the cogito moment. And a very particular, not so regularly featured moment
of that moment: its sheer inception, as it appeared to Descartes before he
recovered the external world and consolidated his dualism, the moment
when he mused thusly: “if I were independent of all other existence, and
were myself the author of my being. … I would lack no perfection; for I
should have given myself all those perfections of which I have some idea,
and I should thus be God” (Descartes 3rd Meditation [1641] 1968).
I argue in conclusion that postmodern theorists who insisted upon sub-
jectivity’s decentered and fragmented subjectedness were actually protesting
an ideology that took the modern (bourgeois) simulacrum of liberty for
true freedom. In their hearts, they wanted real freedom, embodied and
social, not merely subjective—an updated version of Hegel’s “positive
freedom.”2 What would such freedom look like? Would it not consist, not
merely in the right, but in the means to do what you want to do and be
what you want to be in a society of the equivalently entitled in a world of
our/their own making? Today it is possible to wonder (but how seriously?):
could virtual selves in virtual worlds realize the modern project after all?
Quite apart from staggering practical questions of actualization—the logic
that entails this possibility seems to hold. Here is that logic, step by step:

1. It seems that, if all objects of consciousness, of intentionality in the

experienced world, are actually “writing-signs,” then the cogito is
dissolved. Mentality has no internal place apart, and mind and world
are united as the play of signification—disseminated and dispersed,
the subject’s autonomous unity undone.
2
 At the end of Subjects of Desire (1987), Judith Butler rightly asks if French theory man-
aged to escape Hegel after all. She echoed Foucault concluding his inaugural address at the
College de France: “We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is pos-
sibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting
for us” (“Discourse on Language” 1971, 235). See the last paragraph of this chapter for my
own experience of this Hegelian effect.
348   T. DE ZENGOTITA

2. If the cogito were primordially constituted by dualism, by the split

between mind and world, this would follow. But it was not. There
was no dualism at the cogito’s original moment—and no subjective
unity either.
3. Before the announcement, “I think therefore I am” posits a sub-
stantive self, I am—like the dreamer or the hallucinator—dispersed
in the flow of consciousness, without beginning or end. There is no
outside world to unify myself in relation to. If one enters fully into
this scene of contingent flow, as Hume did in his critique of the
Cartesian subject, one can make a comparison Hume could not:
somehow, Descartes imagined virtual reality.3
4. Back when Structuralism held sway, the “arbitrary” relation of signi-
fier to signified was axiomatic. But with the collapse of the sign into
temporality, the notion “arbitrary” was replaced by notions that
foregrounded the liberated signifier in terms like “iterability” and
“play” and “writing.”
5. Had the concept of arbitrary been retained, its classic venue—the
individual will—could have been restored along with the subject’s
very element, temporality. What post-structuralism calls the “pro-
cess of signification”—the associations, reiterations, and differences
that arise in and around whatever one attends to—all that “play”
would then have appeared as the subject’s arbitrary choices. No
wonder subject talk was banned.
6. Protected by this prohibition, the cogito ascended incognito to the
godhood it was aiming for all along. Now anything could mean
“whatever you want”—but that odious expression was, in effect,
transmuted into the passive-voiced “whatever occurs to you” as a
“site” of forces and discourses. From the modern vantage point, it
looks like the postmodern subject is exercising its will arbitrarily and
calling it the play of the sign to which it is subjected.

The “arbitrariness” of Structuralism’s sign may be the most suggestive and

productive feature of modernist theories of language. It is essential to all

3
 “I will suppose … that some malignant demon, who is at once exceedingly potent and
deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive me; I will suppose that the sky, the air, the
earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all external things, are nothing better than the illusions of
dreams. … I will consider myself as without hands, eyes, flesh, blood, or any of the senses,
and as falsely believing that I am possessed of these” (1975 (1641), 100).
   BEFORE THE ANNUNCIATION CAME THE VIRTUAL    349

correspondence theories of meaning in the analytic tradition—including

Wittgenstein’s terminal names in the Tractatus (his insistence on “shared
form” at the propositional/factual level retains “resemblance”—but only
by sheer force, since there are no examples of atomic facts and proposi-
tions). A theorist’s stipulation was sufficient to guarantee meaning in the
abstract synchronic. And, with history no longer a Whig narrative, the
early modern idea of stipulation (which featured arbitrariness of the will)
lost the transparency it had when a convention of language inventors was
posited at the moment of emergence from the state of nature. Now the
arbitrariness—if it refers to origins at all—is opaque in principle because
the ways meaning actually gets established are so convoluted and obscure
that the notion merges with the idea of accident. As every family with its
own little slang can tell you, myriad are the ways of language innovation
and the role of accident is central. Only a story can account for each case.
That fusion would merge with the “accidental” quality of unconscious
“creation” (“choices” in a new sense), depth psychology being equally
opaque—until new sciences like psychoanalysis and Structuralism come
along to “stipulate” in a methodologically transparent way (at a conven-
tion of science inventors!) what opaque representations at the level of lived
experience “really” are.
A profound philosophical insight was at the root of this substitutional
maneuver—though innocent of responsibility for it, as a maneuver. That
insight can be found in Wittgenstein and Ryle and Derrida and many oth-
ers, going back—as so many skeptical insights do—to Hume. It is a genu-
ine clarification of the phenomenology of consciousness, this noticing that
we are more patients of our thoughts than agents. And, yes, that does
undermine the dualistic cogito, in its subsequent unity, over and against
the outside world, after God leveraged it out of solipsism, after the cogito
began to think of itself as the agent of its thoughts just as it was agent of
its deeds. But this insight doesn’t overcome the cogito in its essence; on the
contrary, it is the cogito in its originary state. The arbitrary will of Descartes’
cogito in its virtual world has, in effect, been reinscribed in theory as the
play of signs in a habitus that has, as a matter of fact, become more and
more virtualized. The closer the world gets to being WorldWorld (com-
pare SeaWorld, DisneyWorld), the closer a technologically enhanced sub-
ject, understood now as Being-in-WorldWorld, comes to realizing its
original aim: to be “Lord and Master of Nature” as Descartes put it in the
sixth discourse—although, to be sure, a second nature of the cogito’s own
making is now at issue.
350   T. DE ZENGOTITA

The emergence of virtual realities as we know them today, in myriad

and hybrid forms, was inarguably the context that conditioned the emer-
gence of postmodernism. The center did not hold—but not because
Derrida et  al. tricked a bunch of American patsies into joining a pomo
“cargo cult” (Lilla 2015). It was new technologies of representation trans-
forming lives into representations of lives that eroded the center—Derrida
just articulated the historical moment, as philosophers do. Virtual realities
have a particular feel to them which they share with postmodern creations,
the prose of theory very much included. It’s that anime feel, the whoosh
and ping, the perpetual motion that seeks what’s next before what is can
settle or be grasped—the aura, in short, of surface, as in surf.4 And that
aura oozed off the screens into theme parks and malls and oozed out of
them into restored and “historic” neighborhoods and towns. A virtual
world is a world of representations that represent nothing but themselves
and all of them are perpetually soliciting attention, addressing or express-
ing “me.” It seems that Descartes, already credited with so much proph-
ecy, was, in his solipsism, present at this creation as well.
It is tempting to bring this to dialectical closure—to claim that a subla-
tion of Hegelian proportions has been described and that the post-­
postmodern has announced itself. But here, as so often, I am grateful to
Rorty (whom I nevertheless resent for refusing to honor, as Wittgenstein
did, the metaphysical impulse). Still, his example serves. Some restraint
may be in order. Perhaps the conclusion should be cast in the form of
questions? Is the immanent possibility of the virtualization of ex-istence
the apotheosis of Heideggerian enframing? Is world history mocking the
modern subject’s desire to be God by showing that simulacra are all it can
create? Or is something else entirely in the offing—some Deleuzean nov-
elty on the nether side of the threshold upon which we now stand?

References
Butler, Judith. 1987. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in 20th-Century
France. New York: Columbia University Press.
Descartes, Rene. 1968. The Discourse on Method (1637) and the Meditations
(1641). Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics.

4
 Compare Fredric Jameson on “pastiche” and “surface” in The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (1991).
   BEFORE THE ANNUNCIATION CAME THE VIRTUAL    351

Foucault, Michel. 1971. The Discourse on Language. In The Archaeology of

Knowledge. New York: Pantheon.
Haraway, Donna. (1985) 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto. In Simians, Cyborgs and
Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.
Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Lilla, Mark. 2015. The Strangely Conservative French. Review of How the French
Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People by Sudhir Hazareesingh.
New York Review of Books 62, 16.
Locke, John. (1689) 1996. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
Abridged and ed. Kenneth P.  Winkler. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing
Company.
 CHAPTER 12

Conclusion: Toward a New Humanism

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk. (Hegel)

With something like posthumanism on the horizon,1 it makes a certain

sense to ask if it might now be possible for humanism to fulfill itself, to
approach the universality that was its ideal. This conclusion will challenge
the coming generation to rethink the philosophical canon, the cultural-­
historical record, and the anthropological archive with this possibility in
mind. A description of how a truly inclusive humanism might get under
way can be found in my “Common Ground” (Harper’s Magazine 2003),
“Ethics and the Limits of Evolutionary Psychology” (The Hedgehog Review
2013), and Towards a New Foundation for Human Rights (forthcoming
from Stanford University Press)—as well as in this book’s effort to give a
fair account of the works and lives of the people it discussed.
The postmodern moment, for all of its excesses and shortcomings, has
been a necessary one—that is the first message of this book. The autono-
mous modern subject never existed. It was never free from the forms of
embodiment it sought to escape or control. And it was never in charge.
Since—pick your historical trauma: the French Revolution, WWI?—it has

1
 Besides speculative ideas about the “coming singularity” (Kurzweil 2005), more serious
academic accounts include Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999); Francis Fukuyama’s The Posthuman Future
(2005); and Cary Wolfe’s What is Posthumanism? (2010).

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354   T. DE ZENGOTITA

been more like a hapless passenger on a runaway train masquerading as the

engineer, pulling levers with shifting linkages, pushing buttons with ran-
dom functions, barking orders to a spastic crew, suppressing dread with
assertions of authority. That subject had to be exposed in its essential
dependence, as consciousness, on how life-worlds are arranged and how
human ventures unfold in ways only narrative can reveal.
And, finally, modernity’s universal humanism was only ever an ideal that
all too often functioned as a lie. That lie had to be exposed, and it had to be
exposed by people who were excluded or exploited by institutions that
claimed to represent that ideal. That has been the practical aspect of this
moment’s necessity. And if those who flourished in those institutions were
discomfited, that too was necessary, no matter how innocent of intentional
complicity they may have been personally, no matter how messy the process,
no matter what curricular foolishness ensued. A small price to pay for his-
torical change in the direction of justice—as history’s bloody record shows.
But even though it often functioned as a lie, the concept and project of
universal humanism is as close to truth as we abandoned mortals can hope
to get in this indifferent world.2 That is the second message of this book.
I differ from most critics of postmodernism, right and left, in that I
acknowledge the ethical necessity of the disruption it brought—from
which it follows that only by working with and through the disruption can
we hope to revive the cause of human progress, framed in terms more
suited to the world we live in now. To those on the right and the left still
insisting on the viability of whatever current in the flow of Western thought
they still believe in, I say—if your tradition is alive it will produce, not just
custodians, but creators.
All of us, all human beings, were thrown into situations we did not
choose and came to consciousness in accordance with our circumstances.
A few of us have been exposed—by sheer accident, all undeserving—to
resources that allow us to have some sense of humanity’s situation as a
whole, a sense of the place of our species in time and space, a sense of the
diversity of peoples and ways of life, and a sense of the contingency and
fragility of it all—all this beauty, all this fury, for what? What are we to
make of it and how should we live, before we die?

2
 Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth “All the elements of a solution to the great
problems of humanity have, at different times, existed in European thought. But Europeans
have not carried out in practice the mission which fell to them” ([1961] 2004, 237). He was
giving up on Europe in that book—but he recognized the essential problem nevertheless.
   CONCLUSION: TOWARD A NEW HUMANISM    355

And here those questions are addressed—it must be admitted—to the

educated few. It is, in fact, up to the educated few to take responsibility for
creating the vocabularies that will express anew the values of universal
humanism, casting them into idioms adequate to humanity’s diversity and
to this historical moment. If this looks like a call for reviving Kant’s idea of
an enlightened vanguard, so be it.3 But notice this difference: the educated
few to whom this call is addressed are to be found today across the globe, in
almost every nation, claiming almost every identity, speaking almost every
language. That’s a big difference.  And it is this cohort—and only this
cohort—that might commit itself in an effective way to Peter Singer’s
“expanding circle of moral concern” that now looks like the world’s only
hope for rising above the provincial madness that has descended upon us
all. It remains to be seen if they will accept the responsibility (able-to-
respond) for meeting this challenge that, in fact, only they have.
In search of a hopeful conclusion, in the midst of the crazy confusion
that reigns in the Age of Trump and his ilk at the time of this writing, we
might begin here, with this uncomfortable irony: who now carries the
banner of transgression? Who is upending norms? Who is disrupting con-
ventional procedures and expectations? Not what’s left of the left.4 But
Hegel was not the only one to discover, in ironic reversals of this sort, the
motor of social change. The Frankfurt School may have refused his meta-
physics, but dialectic still seemed to them to propel historical develop-
ments. So, yes, it now seems apparent that the expressive identity politics
of our mediated age has entered a baroque period. When fat acceptance
activists can plausibly justify their efforts to put “person of size” alongside
“person of color” in the intersectional political matrix because, undeni-
ably, obesity is a physical, material condition and obese people are sub-
jected to discrimination in the workplace, then our concept of “political”
3
 Some will find this focus on the human misguided, an ethical capitulation—a betrayal of
nature and other forms of life. That concern deserves serious consideration (see Towards a
New Foundation for Human Rights, forthcoming from Stanford University Press). In a nut-
shell, though, it comes down to this for me: are we willing to accept the special responsibility
that evidently attaches to being human? We are writing and reading books like this, not
whales. That’s just a fact and it holds even if—and I am seriously willing to entertain this
possibility—whales are as, or even more, worthy of existence than we.
4
 I remember when I first heard that Trump wasn’t taking his daily security brief from the
CIA seriously, I caught myself tut-tutting like a stereotypical schoolmarm in a 1940s movie—
me, a veteran of the 1960s. A weird situation. I felt the same when I heard Ralph Nader say,
after Trump’s election, that our only hope lay with the professional bureaucracy continuing
to do its job.
356   T. DE ZENGOTITA

needs rethinking. But when more or less everything exists as representa-

tion, on all sides of our cultural politics, then controversies over oppressive
political correctness, condescending journalists, self-righteous celebrities,
kneeling football players, ante-bellum statuary, micro-aggression, fat
shaming, and transgender bathroom access typically loom larger than the
material well-being of millions of people for whom physical survival is a
daily challenge.
A word at this juncture about what I mean by “loom larger.” I don’t
mean that if you asked identity politics activists what was more important,
millions of starving children in distant lands exploited by global capitalism
and its local allies or the latest lurid revelations of sexual harassment or
police violence closer to home, they would typically say their concerns
were more important. I do mean that if we had an ergometer that mea-
sured how much time and energy goes into feeling outraged and posting
and tweeting and demonstrating about identity politics issues as compared
to depredations of global capital the results would—well, they would show
what I mean by “loom larger.”
Confronted with this spectacle, old-fashioned progressives committed
to ideals of economic justice and the welfare of the planet cannot help but
be discouraged. When our attention is held hostage to hyper-­dramatic but
narrowly focused “issues” like police killings or school shootings or sexual
harassment, then the dramatic demands of movements anchored to reality
performance are served, not only on mainstream news and website plat-
forms, but on cell phone snapshots and videos of participants and wit-
nesses who live their lives on social media. On the other hand, if—as seems
possible as of this writing—these identity-driven mass performances
should gain sufficient traction in old-fashioned reality to inspire, say, a
really significant increase in voter turnout among minority voters and
18-year-olds in years to come in the USA, that would be a hopeful sign
indeed. Perhaps Facebook activism and Twitter-driven pop-up demonstra-
tions are merging somehow with organization on the ground and pro-
gressives will launch campaigns at, say, the state assembly level where
religious fundamentalists and Tea Party activists have been gerrymander-
ing districts for decades. The contours of this hybrid form of public life
are, after all, only beginning to take shape and it may be that fears of mass
abduction by simulation will prove to be premature. Or perhaps not. The
wheel, as the man said, is still in spin.
But it is obvious now that Donald Trump—like Ronald Reagan before
him, though in a different register—has been all about identity politics and
the intractable allegiance of his “base” will (or did?) last only so long as
   CONCLUSION: TOWARD A NEW HUMANISM    357

he continues (or continued?) to give their grievances  public expression.

Grievance over what? Over not mattering, over a lack of representation—not
“representation” as in legislatures and state houses, but “representation” as
in “there I am, on the public screen, for all to attend to, getting my due.”
And, just as surely, the rise of “autocratic populism” from Hungary to Turkey
to India reflects the same identity dynamic. And the Taliban and ISIS, per-
forming their atrocities for curated websites—that is identity politics too. So
is China’s image of itself—much ballyhooed as “resurgent nationalism,” but
better understood as another carefully curated, ongoing-in-real-time, repre-
sentation of people to themselves on the ubiquitous screens that constitute
the political venue in a mediated age (see de Zengotita 2006).
So this is the situation to which serious intellectuals committed to dis-
closing truth as well as taking a stand must turn their attention. It is their
duty. But that means much more than updating McLuhan and Baudrillard
and thinking of creative ways to engage the apathetic masses with more
effective media. It means, on the contrary, stepping way back from this
situation. It means trying to place it in historical and anthropological con-
text. It means creating new master narratives, stories that can tell us who
we are today, in this context, but also, and at the same time, who we are
in general. The human condition itself must be addressed once again if we
are to comprehend the mediated fragmentation that is engulfing all of us
now.5 And we would be best served if everyone involved were to suspend
for the nonce their entrenched assumptions about how it all works and
make a serious effort to start from scratch—to ask anew: who are we?
What manner of creature is this?
The moment is right for this revival. The personal testimonies of people
invested in identity politics are shot through with references to what remains,
in spite of intersectional complexities, the fundamental injustice inherent in
stereotypes—namely, the devaluation of the unique human beings subjected
to them. A simple sense of fairness, responsive to that injustice, still moti-
vates activism and the young, especially, are ready for an intellectual and
political enterprise that embraces difference while reaching for universal
understanding of what it is to simply be human—with all the tensions that
aspiration entails. Consider this little gem, with its Hegelian echoes, from an

5
 Husserl thought that Being and Time, in rejecting the transcendental ego and focusing
on average everydayness, had lapsed into mere anthropology (compare “psychologism” as
the modernist philosopher’s epithet). And creators of French theory dismissed all phenom-
enology—indeed, any discourse that privileged the subject and its object world as “anthro-
pology” (Kant, e.g., modern humanism in general). See Gutting (2013, 39–42). The shoe
fits, and I wear it comfortably.
358   T. DE ZENGOTITA

account of an “LGBTQIA” student conference on sexual identity at the

University of Pennsylvania. Many in that audience surely knew that “human-
ism” was not to be countenanced, that it names a Eurocentric normative
program. But, for a moment, for some reason, they forgot:

At one point, Santiago, a curly-haired freshman from Colombia, stood before

the crowd. … “Why do only certain letters get to be in the full acronym?” he
asked. Then he rattled off a list of gender identities. … “We have our lesbi-
ans, our gays,” he said, before adding, “bisexual, transsexual, queer, homo-
sexual, asexual.” He took a breath and continued. “Pansexual. Omnisexual.
Trisexual. Agender. Bi-gender. Third gender. Transgender. Transvestite.
Intersexual. Two-spirit. Hijra. Polyamorous.” By now, the list had turned
into free verse. He ended: “Undecided. Questioning. Other. Human.”
The room burst into applause. (Michael Schulman in New York Times, 10
January 2013)

As the list approaches a level of granularity suggesting complete indi-

vidualization, a condition in which each person’s sexual/gender identity
might be entitled to its own rubric, Santiago finds himself shifting to the
most general descriptors, culminating in “human.” A genuinely dialectical
moment that reflects a core connection that has been in play from the
beginning of the humanist venture: humanity in general and unique indi-
viduals are two sides of the same coin. It is this aspect of identity politics,
the devolution to the personal, especially as expressed in a media-saturated
popular culture inextricably bound up with commercial advertising, that
led so many critics on the traditional left to see in it simply a manifestation
of an ascendant neo-liberalism.

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 Author Index1

A Banfield, Anne, 96n3

Abrams, M. H., 32, 318 Baring, Edward, 205
Adorno, Theodor W., 15, 20, 34, 35, Barraque, Jean, 286
43n21, 92, 92n1, 98n7, 99, 122, Barsky, Robert F., 313n1
127–135, 132n5, 135n7, 137, 156, Barthes, Roland, 88, 99, 141, 152n3,
186, 194, 220, 251n58, 254, 332 157, 160n10, 163, 164, 166,
Allen, Graham, 186, 200 170, 171, 176, 183–204, 185n3,
Althaus, Horst, 41 187n6, 188n7, 196n10, 200n14,
Aristotle, 21, 81, 82, 84, 236, 265, 328 246, 261, 283, 293, 294,
Arnold, Matthew, 2, 84 295n94, 315, 319, 339
Aronowitz, Stanley, 135 Barzun, Jacques, 7, 25n8, 59
Arp, Jean, 57 Bataille, Georges, 28, 110, 138, 141,
Artaud, Antonin, 141, 158, 173, 158, 283, 285, 286n85,
205n16, 253, 282n83, 301 288–291, 290n89, 293, 303
Austin, J. L., 205, 214–218, 217n31, Baudelaire, Charles, 69, 287
220–224, 220n33, 226, 229, Baudrillard, Jean, 297, 298, 314,
233, 236n48, 237 325, 357
Beardsley, Monroe Curtis, 62, 197, 319
Beaulieu, Alain, 253
B Beckett, Samuel, 72, 128, 141
Bacon, Francis, 256, 282n83 Benjamin, Walter, 132n5, 158
Bahktin, Mikhail, 208 Bentham, Jeremy, 38, 285

1
 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s) 2019 377

T. de Zengotita, Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics,
Political Philosophy and Public Purpose,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90689-8
378   AUTHOR INDEX

Benveniste, Emile, 170, 187n6, 208 Corti, Jose, 286

Bergson, Henri, 96, 238, 244, 257, Cusset, Francois, 98n6
259, 260n68
Berlin, Isaiah, 41, 43, 329
Bernstein, J.M., 132 D
Binswanger, Ludwig, 286 Dada, 57, 59, 69, 161, 188n7,
Boer, Roland, 151 201, 231
Bogue, Ronald, 238, 258, 274 Danto, Arthur, 314, 328
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 41, 44, 45 Darwin, Charles, 37, 43n21, 122
Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel, 137 Davidson, Donald, 214, 215, 324n6
Bordo, Susan, 165n15 De Beistegui, Miguel, 250
Boundas, Constantin, 243 De Gaulle, Charles, 154, 163, 272n76
Bourdieu, Pierre, 152n3, 182, 298 DeLanda, Manuel, 277
Bourg, Julian, 139n2, 161, 164, 275, Deleuze, Gilles, 34, 97n4, 98, 104,
295, 296n94, 298 117, 121, 123–125, 123n6, 138,
Bowden, Sean, 263, 264, 268 140, 141, 142n6, 152, 153,
Braidotti, Rosi, 277 156n8, 158, 168, 169, 170n20,
Braudel, Fernand, 27 173, 175, 181, 182, 189n8, 195,
Braver, Lee, 35, 36, 293, 302, 211n25, 237–282, 289, 294,
302n97, 303 295n93, 297, 298, 301, 302,
Breckman, Warren, 1 314, 316, 328n11, 334, 336,
Breton, André, 63, 138, 141, 338, 339n16, 340
162, 290 DePietro, Thomas, 318
Bricmont, Jean, 238, 304 Derrida, Jacques, 2, 5, 14n2, 17,
Buck-Morss, Susan, 133 33–35, 58, 88, 93, 95, 97–99,
Burke, Edmund, 8 98n6, 104, 115, 122, 122n4,
Bury, J. B., 37n12 131n4, 138, 141, 144, 148,
Butler, Judith, 2, 99, 174, 186, 152n3, 153, 157, 158, 162,
330–341, 346, 347n2 163n12, 164, 167, 168, 170n21,
171, 176, 181, 182, 184, 187,
189n8, 194, 195, 197, 198, 201,
C 204–237, 237n49, 237n50, 239,
Cahoone, Lawrence E., 64, 141 246–248, 252, 254, 261, 267,
Canguilhem, Georges, 93, 301, 302 283, 284, 297–300, 302, 304,
Champagne, Roland A., 161 313, 316, 317, 317n3, 319,
Chomsky, Noam, 109, 140, 166, 214, 324–326, 324n7, 332, 334, 335,
237n48, 279, 303, 314 338, 341, 349, 350
Cixous, Helene, 174, 181 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 75, 83,
Clark, William, 286 104–106
Colebrook, Claire, 246, 253, Descartes, Rene, 8, 12–23, 20n7, 35,
264n72, 267 36, 58, 75, 76, 91, 97, 213, 273,
Conrad, Joseph, 50 274n79, 298–300, 326, 328,
Copernicus, 12 329, 346–350
   AUTHOR INDEX 
   379

Descombes, Vincent, 138, 209n22, 295n93, 295n94, 298n95, 315,

270, 295 316, 331, 331n13, 332, 337,
Dewey, John, 144n7, 234, 282, 338, 339n16, 340, 346, 347n2
324, 325 Francis, Mark, 48, 50
de Zengotita, Thomas, 165, 357 Frank, Claudine, 291
Dosse, Francois, 148, 149n2, 155, Frank, Thomas, 194n9
157, 160n10, 162, 166, 170, Frege, Gotlob, 102, 103
171, 183, 184, 194–197, Freud, Sigmund, 117–119, 132, 142,
196n10, 205n16, 214, 237, 240, 148, 150, 152, 153, 173,
241, 284n84, 286, 293, 319 226n40, 275, 336
Dreyfus, Hubert, 216n29, 295, 296
Duchamp, Marcel, 62, 72
Dunn, John, 23 G
Durkheim, Emile, 16, 73–88, 92, 261, Galilei, Galileo, 12–21
274n79, 279 Garver, Newton, 213n27
Gay, Peter, 26, 27, 29
George, Stefan, 74, 106, 141, 172
E Gillispie, Charles Coulston, 43n21
Elias, Norbert, 27 Gobar, Ash, 325
Eliot, T.S., 62, 63, 66, 67, 134, 186, Good, James A., 325
198 Gordon, Peter Eli, 205n15
Engels, Friedrich, 43n20 Graff, Gerald, 205n15, 236n48, 317
Eribon, Didier, 182, 283, 284, Gramsci, Antonio, 159, 320
286, 299 Greenberg, Clement, 73
Green, F., 31
Greif, Mark, 111n9
F Grosz, Elizabeth, 257
Fanon, Frantz, 354n2 Guattari, Félix, 104, 118, 123–125,
Ferretter, Luke, 151 140, 153, 240, 250, 254–256,
Ferry, Luc, 222n34, 303n98 259, 259n67, 261, 269–280,
Fish, Stanley, 1 282, 289, 314, 315, 336
Flaubert, Gustave, 61, 63, 66, 159 Gutting, Gary, 98n8, 139n2, 141,
Foucault, Michel, 15, 17, 20, 35, 88, 152n3, 153, 225, 283, 287, 288,
93, 101n1, 104, 123, 123n6, 292n91, 293, 296, 357n5
124, 125n9, 131n3, 148, 149n2,
152n3, 157, 164, 166, 167,
170n20, 175, 176, 181n1, 182, H
189n8, 199, 202, 204, 220, Habermas, Jurgen, 127, 298n96, 317
237–239, 264, 266, 267, Haraway, Donna, 347
267n74, 273, 275, 276, 276n80, Harding, Sandra, 165n15
282–306, 284n84, 287n86, Harvey, David, 3, 21, 116, 317
289n88, 290n89, 292n91, Heckman, John, 241
380   AUTHOR INDEX

Hegel, Georg W. F., 5n4, 20, 32, Johnson, Samuel, 28n9, 30, 31
34–50, 49n27, 57, 75, 97, 98, Joyce, James, 61, 63, 66, 141, 143,
102, 120, 122, 137–139, 139n4, 205n16, 233, 233n46, 237
169, 183, 217, 220, 233, 241, Judt, Tony, 187
245, 247, 250, 273, 325, 332,
333, 347n2, 355
Heidegger, Martin, 20, 93, 94, 96–98, K
122, 122n4, 124, 130, 137, 139, Kandinsky, Wassily, 62, 72, 73, 161,
152, 152n3, 156, 174, 208, 198
213n27, 228, 236n48, 241, Kant, Immanuel, 30n10, 34–36, 49,
241n53, 244n54, 248n55, 81, 121, 122n4, 220, 243,
252n60, 262n69, 324, 326, 341 272n77, 279, 282n83, 296, 326,
Hobsbawm, Erik J., 27 355, 357n5
Horkheimer, Max, 20, 34, 92, 92n1, Karl, Frederick Robert, 57
129, 130 Kauppi, Niilo, 124n7, 156, 164, 165,
Houdebine, Jean-Louis, 175, 207 170, 182, 183, 271
Houghton, Walter E., 40n16 Kelly, Sean, 134n6, 293n92
Howe, Irving, 7 Keynes, Maynard, 82
Hughes, Joe, 241, 246, 249, Klossowski, Pierre, 240, 286n85
253, 264n72 Kojeve, Alexandre, 97, 137–139,
Hume, David, 28n9, 34, 104, 196, 139n2, 143, 151, 183, 193, 295,
242–245, 254, 279, 334, 332, 336
348, 349 Kristeva, Julia, 87n13, 138, 140–142,
Husserl, Edmund, 20, 35, 43n21, 77, 153, 158, 159–160n10, 161,
91–93, 92n1, 95–97, 96n3, 119, 162, 165–177, 183, 184, 187n6,
130, 132n5, 138, 168n16, 205, 194, 199, 229n42, 272, 294,
208, 210–213, 224, 229, 301, 332–338
229n43, 234, 241, 248n55, Kritzman, Lawrence D, 169
323, 357n5 Kuehn, Manfred, 35
Hyppolite, Jean, 241 Kurzweil, Ray, 19, 345n1, 353n1

I L
Irigaray, Luce, 174 Lacan, Jacques, 117, 124, 138, 139,
142, 147–155, 167, 168, 173,
181, 192, 270, 271, 292–294,
J 314, 332–334, 336
Jameson, Fredric, 155, 239n52, 317, Landow, George P., 172
346, 350n4 Lasch, Christopher, 317
James, William, 209n23, 323, 325 Latour, Bruno, 20, 278n82
Jarry, Alfred, 69n8, 141, 314, 315 Lawlor, Leonard, 97n4, 246,
Jefferson, Thomas, 8, 34–35, 58, 328 264n72, 265
   AUTHOR INDEX 
   381

Le Corbusier, 64, 70, 72 Marx, Karl, 6n5, 19, 21, 25, 37,
Lehmann, William C., 28 43n20, 99, 113, 115–125, 132,
Leston, Robert, 261 138, 142, 148–151, 149n2, 155,
Levinas, Emmanuel, 18, 226n40 199, 204, 205, 241, 250, 274,
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 99, 101, 275, 295, 295n93, 320
106–112, 117, 138, 140, 157, Marx-Scouras, Danielle, 99, 149,
169, 185, 192, 212, 293, 156n7, 157–160, 164, 167,
294, 319 175, 186n5
Lilla, Mark, 161, 350 Massumi, Brian, 246, 256, 263n71,
Literature (literary), 141 264n72
Locke, John, 11, 12n1, 13, 21–25, 33, Mathy, Jean-Philippe, 98n6, 124n7
36, 49, 57, 58, 326–329, 326n9, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 93, 134n6,
346, 347 138, 151, 174
Longenbach, James, 63n5 Merquior, José Guilherme, 99n9
Lotringer, Sylvere, 314 Micale, Mark, 86n12
Lowenthal, Leo, 127, 128 Miller, Henry, 270
Lowith, Karl, 42, 42n18, 44, 44n23 Miller, James, 283, 285, 286, 288,
Lukács, Georg, 129, 317 292n90
Lyotard, Jean-François, 34, 139, Miller, J. Hillis, 317–319, 323
142n6, 181, 275, 276n80, 295 Moi, Toril, 173
Montefiore, Alan, 147
Moore, G. E., 73–88, 92, 261,
M 279, 329
McAfee, Noelle, 169 Morris, Pam, 334, 335
Macdonald, Iain, 139n4 Mossner, Ernest Campbell, 28n9
Macey, David, 131n3, 285, 292 Muller-Doohm, Stefan, 127, 128n1,
Machery, Pierre, 148, 152 129, 134, 135
MacIntyre, Alasdair, 23, 82, 83,
130n2, 341
Macpherson, Crawford Brough, 12n1 N
Maher, Chauncey, 209n24 Newton, Isaac, 12, 21, 29, 36, 44, 97
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 71, 141, 143, Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 19,
158, 205n16 34–36, 40, 57, 58, 62, 63, 64n6,
Malthus, Thomas, 37, 38 98n8, 113, 115–125, 130, 132,
Mann, Thomas, 120, 298 137, 138, 141–144, 144n7, 148,
Manuel, Frank, 37n12 150, 155, 156, 166, 196, 217,
Mao Tse-tung (Maoism), 159, 160, 220, 226n40, 234, 237, 240,
160n10, 163 242–245, 250, 252, 253n62, 255,
Marcuse, Herbert, 315 256, 258, 259, 262, 282, 283,
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 65, 66, 285, 286, 286n85, 290, 296,
69–71, 69n8 298, 303, 325, 327, 336, 341
Maritain, Jacques, 17n3 Nisbet, Robert, 37n12
382   AUTHOR INDEX

O Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 150, 162, 285,

Oliver, Kelly, 165 300, 302
Ong, Walter, 252n59 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 32–34, 46,
Orr, Mary, 172 107, 151, 212, 322
Ottinger, Didier, 69, 71 Roussel, Raymond, 141, 282,
286–288, 289n88, 293
Ruas, Charles, 287
P Rudé, George F. E., 31
Page, Larry, 19, 345n1 Russell, Bertrand, 102
Parnet, Claire, 156n8, 239, 240, 253, Ryle, Gilbert, 4n2, 93, 349
255, 281, 328n11
Patton, Paul, 239
Peeters, Benoit, 204–206, 206n16, S
226, 284 Safranski, Rüdiger, 64n6, 120, 120n2
Perec, Georges, 287, 288n87 Saint-Simon, 44
Piaget, Jean, 118n1 Salih, Sara, 339
Pickering, Mary, 45 Santini, Sylvano, 283, 287n86
Plato, 44, 81, 96, 169n18, 208, 222, Sartre, Jean-Paul, 36, 97, 97n5,
234, 236, 251, 259, 265 131n3, 138–140, 147, 151, 157,
Pound, Ezra, 63n5, 76 159, 185, 186, 186n5, 193, 199,
Protevi, John, 239, 246, 264n72, 276 220, 240, 241, 272n76, 295,
Proust, Marcel, 60, 61, 67, 95, 96, 295n94, 301, 345–350
141, 203, 204, 256, 259 Sauvagnargues, Anne, 242
Schlick, Moritz, 102, 102n2, 324
Schoenberg, Arnold, 64, 127,
R 133, 134
Rabinow, Paul, 295, 296, 298n96 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 40, 73,
Rapaport, Herman, 148, 213n27, 120, 129
317, 318 Schrift, Alan, 123–125, 124n7,
Reagan, Ronald, 322, 356 139n2, 171, 182n2,
Reich, Wilhelm, 272 296, 331n13
Reid, Thomasm, 50n28 Schulman, Michael, 358
Renault, Alain, 303n98 Searle, John R., 5, 204, 205,
Richards, Ivor Armstrong, 73–88, 92, 214–217, 215n28, 216n29,
118, 121, 132, 279 216n30, 217n31, 219–222,
Ricoeur, Paul, 181n1 220n33, 224, 227, 229, 230,
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 164, 186 232–237, 261, 279, 293n92,
Roffe, Jon, 268 303, 304, 314
Rojek, Chris, 321 Sellars, Wilfrid, 209n24, 215
Rorty, Richard, 101, 133, 213n27, Sennett, Richard, 29
281, 282, 305, 317, 323–330, Shelley, Mary, 39n13
340, 346, 350 Shelley, Percy B., 277
   AUTHOR INDEX 
   383

Silverman, Hugh J., 294 Trump, Donald, 2, 202, 305, 321n4,

Sjoholm, Cecilia, 162 332, 355, 355n4, 356
Smart, Barry, 283 Turkle, Sherry, 141, 153, 154
Smith, Adam, 21, 34, 57, 66
Smith, Daniel W., 244–246, 251, 252,
264n72, 276 V
Sokal, Alan D., 238, 304, 315, 323 Van Gogh, Vincent, 245, 256
Sollers, Philippe, 142, 149, 157–165, Voltaire, 28, 31, 34
157n9, 160n10, 162n12, 176, von Hofmannsthal, Hugo, 252
183, 294
Solzhenitsyn, Alexsandr, 175, 298, 340
Sontag, Susan, 3, 184 W
Spencer, Herbert, 36–50, 40n15, Wagner, Richard, 120, 121, 133
40n16, 57, 75, 78, 81, 81n10, Walpole, Horace, 31, 32
82, 115, 120, 122, 217 Weber, Marianne, 74
Spinoza, Benedictus, 48, 123, 244, Weber, Max, 16, 21, 59, 73–75
249, 252–282, 252n61, Wernick, Andrew, 44, 44n23, 45
258n65, 262n69, 263n70, West, Ellen, 286
264n72 Whitney, Lois, 29
Spivak, Gayatri, 143–144 Willey, Basil, 27
Stagoll, Cliff, 260n68, 265 Williams, James, 242, 249
Stalin (Stalinism), 129, 154, 174 Williams, Raymond, 32, 320
Stanislavski, Constantin, 64 Wimsatt, William K., Jr., 62, 197, 319
Starr, Peter, 140n5, 155n5 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 5, 59, 80,
Staten, Henry, 213n27 101–104, 163, 170n20, 196,
Steiner, George, 3, 58, 64, 204, 208n20, 209n23, 213,
71, 253n62 213n27, 215, 217, 221, 222,
Strauss, David Friedrich, 39n14 226, 226n39, 227, 230n44, 267,
Surya, Michael, 286n85, 290 334, 349, 350
Wolters, Eugene, 304
Woolf, Virginia, 38, 65–68, 82, 96n3
T Wright, Frank Lloyd, 61n3
Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe, 31
Taylor, Charles, 32
Thompson, Edward Palmer, 320 Z
Thompson, Michael, 135 Zangouei, Javad, 233n46
Tournier, Michel, 240, 241 Zizek, Slavoj, 264, 272n77
 Subject Index1

A American Philosophical Association,

Absolute, 3, 18, 36, 50, 66, 69, 70, 317, 324n8
103, 144, 151, 161, 196n10, Analogy, 4, 4n2, 11, 15, 24, 40, 67,
205, 208n21, 211, 219, 224, 93, 134, 135, 168, 247, 258
226, 229, 233, 236n48, 270, Anglophone, 3, 123, 137, 141–143,
303, 316n2, 322, 327, 329 147, 150, 153, 155, 171–174,
Abstraction, 33, 34, 42, 46, 60, 62, 176, 182, 186, 193, 197, 204,
67–69, 73, 83, 84, 88, 91, 96, 205n15, 215, 227, 235, 277,
103, 106, 109, 131n3, 138–140, 282, 288n87, 290, 292, 293n92,
155, 157, 169, 208, 211n25, 302–305, 313–341
216–221, 223, 233, 234, 250, Anguish, 33, 154, 184, 188, 193,
251n58, 261, 279, 295n94, 254, 261
300, 319, 346 Anthropology, 7, 88, 99, 107–109,
Acephale, 290 108n6, 110n7, 117, 140, 192,
A-conceptual (aconceptual), 235, 289, 277, 324, 327, 357n5
291, 334 Apollo, 121
Actualization, 231, 232, 254, 258, Arbitrary, 106, 161, 291, 303,
260–263, 279, 347 348, 349
African-American studies, 305 Arborescent, 248
AIDS, 288, 297 Archewriting, 212, 283
Alterity, 196n10, 218, 230 Argument of the device, 59
Amazon, 280, 282 Assemblage, 272–274, 276

1
 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s) 2019 385

T. de Zengotita, Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics,
Political Philosophy and Public Purpose,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90689-8
386   SUBJECT INDEX

A-subjective, 244, 254 Chance, 15, 57, 202, 244, 245, 254,
Auto-affection, 211 259, 262, 323
Avant-garde, 1, 3, 28, 65, 66, 69, China, 28, 115, 123, 159, 160,
110, 141, 149, 154, 161, 162, 160n10, 174–176, 196, 357
164, 175, 176, 186, 187, 203, Chora, 169, 173, 333, 336
286, 291, 314, 331 Christianity, 41, 42, 44n23, 49,
Average everydayness, 63, 96, 241, 296
152n3, 357n5 Class, 27–29, 35, 82, 115, 116, 158,
196, 225, 240, 284, 321, 331, 340
Classical, 15, 23, 31, 76, 96, 116,
B 133, 148, 152n3, 157, 183, 184,
Bayreuth, 120, 121 230n45, 248–250, 299, 300,
Becoming, 44, 84, 96, 143, 150, 159, 303, 303n98
176n23, 177, 188n7, 189, Clone, 345
196n10, 201, 225, 228, 230, Cluny, 171
238, 244, 245, 247, 251, 260n68, Code, 76, 83, 96, 99, 104–107, 111,
261–263, 265, 270, 274, 276, 140, 149, 157, 168, 169, 176,
278, 281, 303, 325, 336, 345 187, 189n8, 190, 191, 195,
Being and Time, 93, 230n44, 357n5 203, 208, 214, 228, 229, 259,
Being-in-the-World, 5, 58, 59n1, 345, 346
93–95, 97, 104, 341 Cogito, 18, 23, 35, 58, 60, 97, 98,
Bill of Rights, 24 130, 140, 165, 211–213,
Binary/binaries, 111n9, 192, 225, 213n27, 248n55, 273, 299, 327,
230, 269, 327, 334, 341 347–349
Bloomsbury, 66, 82 College de France, 181, 182, 292,
Bourgeois, 5, 6, 24, 27, 35, 58, 82, 293, 347n2
116, 121, 125, 128, 130, 131, The College of Sociology, 290
134, 141, 148–150, 155, 156n8, Commodity fetishism, 130, 135n7
163, 176, 185, 196, 200, 202, Communism/communist/communist
221, 240, 290, 296, 297, 339, party, 25, 47, 99, 116, 125, 129,
340, 347 130, 140, 150, 152, 154, 159,
Bugger, 123n6, 242, 256, 266, 279 160, 160n11, 163, 171, 175,
273, 280, 298, 324, 340
Convention (conventional), 19, 32,
C 64–66, 77, 99, 129, 130, 137,
Canon, 1, 2, 209, 324, 325, 353 149, 150, 152, 156n8, 161, 166,
Capital, 24, 115, 164, 171, 182, 167, 168n17, 182, 183, 186,
186, 274 194, 195, 202, 204, 219n32,
Catholic, 21, 27, 28, 45, 148, 150, 222, 223, 225, 238, 250, 255,
151, 163n13, 203 268, 273, 287, 291, 295n93,
Centre for Contemporary Cultural 298n95, 303, 304, 318, 323,
Studies, 320 331, 338, 340, 349, 355
   SUBJECT INDEX 
   387

Cultural politics, 99, 149, 160, 196, E

199, 275, 320, 356 École Normale Superieure (ENS),
Cyborg, 124, 347 148, 171, 182, 206, 284
École pratique des hautes études
(EPHE), 138, 170, 170n19, 171,
D 183, 184, 194, 335
Dandy (Dandyism), 287 Economics, 13, 21, 316
Dasein, 59n1, 93, 130, 152, 152n3, Effect, 3, 7, 19, 21–23, 27, 35, 62,
206, 228, 262n69 63, 71, 72, 79, 93, 99, 109, 111,
Declaration of the Rights of Man, 138, 147, 158, 160, 163,
13, 24 165n14, 170, 171, 173, 174,
Deconstruction, 1, 65, 162n12, 184, 186, 187, 190–192, 199,
170n20, 181, 201, 205, 206n18, 200, 202, 206, 208, 210, 213,
208, 209, 211, 212, 214, 214, 217, 221–223, 226, 228,
215n28, 218, 225, 226, 235, 229, 233, 240, 243, 252n59,
317–319, 317n3, 334 254, 256–269, 271–274, 278,
Deleuze Dictionary, 246, 253, 280, 284, 292n91, 300, 301,
259n68, 265 304, 305, 317n3, 318, 322, 330,
Delirium, 244 333n14, 346–349, 347n2
Desire, 2, 7, 16, 32, 50, 61, 98, 99, Effects of truth, 304, 305, 337
118, 123–125, 141, 152–154, Egg, 258, 258n66, 259, 261
167–169, 200, 204, 226, 243, Ego Psychology, 150, 173
272–274, 280, 289, 290, 292, Empiricism, 25, 35, 75, 242–245,
297, 334, 336, 350 254, 257, 334
Desiring machine, 124, 273, 274 End of Man, 192, 295, 298
Diachronic, 37, 83 Enlightenment, 15, 21, 26–30, 32–35,
Dialectic, 32, 34, 36, 41–43, 42n17, 37, 38, 40, 74, 97, 104, 127,
45, 47, 67, 69, 71, 98, 139, 169, 187, 223, 274n79, 279, 296
274, 355 Essentialism, 98, 174, 333
DifferAnce, 34, 197, 206, 210, 335 Ethics, 3, 5, 79, 80, 81n10, 224, 257,
Digital, 3, 172, 277, 298, 329, 345 296, 297, 302, 340
Dionysus, 121, 244 Ethnicity, 88
Discursive practices, 124, 149n2, Event, 8, 15, 20, 21, 41, 61, 69, 71,
152n3, 166, 174, 230, 275, 276, 79, 85, 87, 96, 98, 106, 120–122,
294, 295, 299, 316, 331 138, 142, 142n6, 155, 157–159,
Dissemination, 197, 206, 232 165, 169, 171, 172, 187, 196,
DNA, 111, 259 200, 208, 210, 212, 219, 220,
Doxa, 84, 152n3, 185, 185n3, 185n4, 223, 228, 231–233, 235,
186, 192, 200–203, 253, 264, 246–248, 250, 253, 256–269,
277, 315, 339 271, 275, 314, 320, 322, 346
Dualism, 21, 35, 97, 98, 165n15, Evolutionism, 36–50, 74, 118,
181, 208, 274n79, 347, 348 122, 296n94
388   SUBJECT INDEX

Existentialism/existential, 69, 93, 140, 203, 205, 206, 214, 241n53,

150, 151, 241n53, 245, 295, 332 274, 293, 297–299, 306, 313,
Expression, 5, 6, 23, 24, 42n19, 316n2, 322, 332, 338, 340
43n22, 44, 49, 62, 69, 71, 92, Frankenstein, 39n13
93, 96, 102, 109, 111, 112, 121, Frankfurt School, 116, 128–130,
125, 127, 138, 160n10, 164, 131n3, 137, 193, 223, 237n48,
166, 172, 183, 196n10, 198, 321, 355
199, 207, 208, 208n20, French Communist Party (PCF),
211–214, 217, 220, 231, 250, 116, 148–150, 158–160,
251, 256–269, 271, 275, 277, 163n13, 175
294, 318, 330, 338, 348, 357 French Revolution, 21, 28, 41, 353
Exteriority, 196, 288, 289 Friendship, 115, 297, 298n95
Functionalism, 60, 82
Futurism, 69, 70
F
Facebook, 164, 280, 298, 320, 332
Fashion, 31–33, 50, 73, 76, 77, 151, G
162, 170, 183, 192, 203, Gender, 124n8, 165, 174, 305, 317,
238n50, 240, 292n91, 293, 296, 321, 330–333, 358
299, 316n2, 322, 345 Genealogy, 40, 122, 275, 293, 294,
Feeling, 17, 31, 32, 40, 43, 49, 50, 296, 302, 305, 320
58, 61, 62, 65, 77, 79, 87, 95, Gene/genome, 22, 258, 260
131, 138, 197–200, 202, 203, General text, 152n3, 206, 229,
213, 221, 238, 248, 254, 233, 317n3
285–287 Genius, 33, 61, 70, 71, 164
Final vocabulary, 305 Germany, 34, 47n25, 325
Finnegans Wake, 72, 205, 233, 237 God, 11, 16, 18, 21–25, 29, 38,
Forces/noun, 19, 27, 28n9, 39, 40, 41n17, 42, 42n19, 43n22, 44,
45, 50, 57, 70, 81, 88, 98, 99, 48, 57, 59–61, 71, 72, 87, 91,
118–122, 120n3, 130–132, 140, 119, 120, 144n7, 169, 176, 194,
154, 158, 167, 169, 172, 184, 196, 249, 252–282, 285,
202, 235, 237, 243, 249n56, 288–290, 293, 296, 326,
253, 254, 258, 260–263, 265, 329, 345–350
266n73, 268, 271, 273, 274, Google, 345n1
277n81, 294, 303, 320, Grammar, 72, 83, 96, 102, 104–107,
322, 336, 348 109, 111, 124, 138, 157, 182,
France, 15, 25, 27, 28, 28n9, 36, 41, 187, 190, 191, 195, 205, 208,
44n23, 45, 46n24, 75, 105, 210, 213, 214, 228, 231–234,
124n7, 131n3, 137, 138, 140n5, 291, 331
141, 154, 156, 161, 170n19, Greece/Greek, 41, 173, 185n3, 293,
171, 175, 176, 187, 189, 193, 296, 297, 298n95
   SUBJECT INDEX 
   389

H 171, 182, 183, 187, 193, 196,

Hippie, 264n72, 314 197, 199, 201, 203, 234, 240,
Humanism, 3, 6, 32, 98, 99, 111n9, 249, 272, 275, 282, 284,
139, 140, 143, 148, 165n14, 288, 288n87, 296–298,
189, 192, 193, 241, 241n53, 301, 304, 305, 322, 324,
298, 316n2, 318, 322, 341, 325, 327, 329, 331, 336,
353–358 338, 340, 341, 357
Humanities, 1–3, 5, 6, 11, 25, 26, 30, Intensity, 156, 182, 229n42, 258n66,
44–46, 48, 58, 60, 74, 75, 78, 259, 265, 278, 282n83
87, 88, 106, 107, 127, 152, 157, Intention, 5, 22, 29, 59, 62, 134, 138,
164, 173, 205, 295, 317, 319, 141, 151, 195, 197, 210, 213,
321, 328, 354, 354n2, 355 220–222, 229n43, 231, 236n48,
Human rights, 298, 340 278, 319, 327
Human sacrifice, 290 Internet, 198n11, 276, 278, 280
Interpellation, 2, 124, 150, 303
Intertextuality, 161, 170–172, 183,
I 193–199, 279, 318, 335
Idealism, 35, 42n18, 96, 122n4, 130, Iterability, 197, 215, 218–220, 225,
131, 131n4, 207, 209, 211n25, 227, 228, 230, 232–237,
222, 241, 247, 303 332, 348
Ideal type, 1–8
Identity, 2, 98, 112, 116, 123, 124,
132n5, 139, 149, 219, 234, 247, L
254, 277n81, 290, 295, 295n93, Langue, 60, 83, 105, 138, 140, 187,
302, 303, 305, 306, 313–341, 190, 191, 206, 208, 210, 234
355–358 Les Temps Modernes, 156, 156n7
Ideology, 45, 130, 149, 149n2, 151, Liberal (liberalism), 23, 224, 295,
156, 160, 176, 185, 189, 191, 324, 329, 333
195, 290, 340, 347 Libertine, 290
Imago, 150, 152 Life-style, 27, 345
Immanence, 32, 87n13, 249, Line-of-flight, 239–245, 248,
256–260 251n58, 254n64
Incest taboo, 109, 111n9, 117 Literature (literary), 43n20, 58, 61,
Incorporeal, 266, 267n74, 268 62, 71, 72, 74, 85, 96, 156n7,
Industrial revolution, 12, 27, 36, 39 156n8, 161–163, 175, 176, 183,
Intellectual, 2n1, 3, 6, 8, 25, 28, 35, 185, 186, 191, 193, 195, 199,
37, 60, 75, 97, 107, 110, 115, 206n16, 206n18, 212n26, 216,
116, 122, 125n9, 128, 129, 141, 228, 253n62, 256, 268, 285,
147, 149, 151, 153, 155, 156, 288n87, 313–341
156n7, 156n8, 159, 160n10, Logocentrism, 162
162, 163, 165, 165n14, 170, Lucretius, 262
390   SUBJECT INDEX

M Naturalistic fallacy, 80–82

Madness, 120, 245, 298–302 Nature, 4, 11–13, 15, 18, 19, 21–25,
Maker, the, 11, 22–25, 35, 36, 46, 27, 29, 31, 33, 33n11, 35, 36,
328, 345 39, 42n19, 43, 46, 47, 48n26,
Manners, 6, 12n1, 23, 26, 27, 31, 33, 49, 50, 50n28, 57, 58, 60, 63,
65, 71, 76, 132, 154, 170, 190, 65, 74, 76, 78, 80, 82, 85, 87,
192, 217n31, 225, 237, 249, 97, 106, 108, 110, 119, 134,
264, 297, 315, 324, 325n8, 357 143, 144n7, 154, 161, 173–175,
Master narrative, 116, 139, 295, 357 182, 191, 192, 194, 196, 203,
Materialism, 25, 49, 121, 125, 128, 212, 217, 220, 224, 225, 230,
131, 131n4, 149, 151, 152, 161, 242, 243, 255–257, 258n65,
165, 171, 205, 207, 224, 259, 262n69, 269, 273, 290,
267n74, 303 327–329, 336, 337, 339, 341,
Math, 141, 249, 256, 278, 323 346, 349, 355n3
Medicine, 4, 19, 22, 23 Neo-marxism, 317, 318, 320
Metaphysics, 13, 18, 93, 97, 122, New philosophers, 175, 281, 297,
152n3, 208, 211n25, 212, 222, 316n2, 322, 340
236, 237n48, 238, 239, 242, New wave, 163, 187
249, 255, 256, 260, 262, 264, New World, 12
267n74, 269, 278, 279, 281, Normative, 6, 330, 358
298–302, 326, 334, 341, 355 Nouveau Roman (new novel),
Mimesis, 134 163, 186, 195
Mirroring, 25, 154
Modernism, 3, 12, 39, 58, 59, 61,
65–67, 69, 71, 73, 74, 102, O
104, 105, 108, 131n3, 156, Oedipus (Oedipal), 117, 118, 152,
187, 216, 319 239, 271, 272
Modern Language Association, 317 Origin, 3, 33, 60, 77, 80, 87, 121,
Molar/molecular, 259, 263, 265, 268, 170, 185n4, 187, 197, 198, 201,
271, 273, 274, 334 203, 208, 208n21, 246, 254,
Monad, 246, 257 254n63, 291, 318, 328, 349
Moral science, 21, 328 Oulipo Society, 288n87
Morphogenesis, 258–260, 279 Overcoming (sublation), 2
Multiplicity, 197, 244, 246–248,
260, 274
P
Painting, 3, 63, 67, 68, 72, 73, 185,
N 237, 250, 256, 263n70
Narrative, 1–8, 12, 39, 42n18, 60, Panopticon, 285
92, 116, 121, 122, 125, 139, Panpsychism, 253n63, 276, 277, 279
142, 200, 287, 295, 320, 349, Pantheism, 256, 257, 276
354, 357 Paradox, 34, 42n17, 221
   SUBJECT INDEX 
   391

Parole, 60, 106, 140, 187, 191, 206, Presence, 13, 49, 59, 67, 95, 104,
208, 210, 213, 234, 264n72, 142, 153, 168, 176n23, 205,
279, 291, 319 208–214, 227, 305, 334, 341
Pataphysics, 69n8, 314 Progress, 11, 21–27, 30, 35, 37,
Phenomenology, 1–8, 32, 60, 91–99, 37n12, 47, 58, 59, 61, 78, 87,
111n9, 119, 130, 134n6, 135, 122, 127, 221, 354
138, 140, 142, 168n16, 172, Propositions, 75, 102, 103, 209n24,
174, 205, 206, 208–212, 221, 217, 227, 248, 266–268, 328, 349
228, 233, 241, 241n53, 245, Protestant, 12, 23, 28, 42n18, 326
248n55, 252–282, 292, 300, Psychology, 4, 60, 64, 74, 76–78, 80,
325, 349, 357n5 85, 86, 92, 117, 118, 118n1,
Philosophical Investigations, 104, 151, 153, 197, 198, 218n31,
208n20, 213n27, 230n44 242, 316, 349
Phonologocentrism, 211–212 Pulsion, 98, 167, 204, 270, 273, 329
Physics, 3, 19, 20n7, 45, 107, 118,
121, 217, 249
Political correctness, 277n81, Q
321n4, 356 Quantum theory, 255
Politics, 1–3, 5, 6, 13, 21, 24, 25, 27, Queer theory, 1, 124, 305, 306, 330
31, 35, 38, 44n23, 88, 99, 116,
124, 128, 135, 142, 147, 149,
154, 156, 157, 159–164, R
166, 173–177, 196, 199, 202, Race, 98, 182, 284, 321, 328, 330
214, 215, 224, 236, 275, Recuperation, 154, 272
277n81, 280–282, 290, 291, Repetition, 133, 215, 218, 219, 230,
295n93, 302, 303, 305, 306, 234, 247, 253, 332
313–341, 355–357 Representation (by language), 42, 58,
Positivism (positivist), 44n23, 45–47, 77, 118, 158, 199, 207, 233,
48n26, 87n13, 98, 102, 111, 247, 250, 251, 251n58, 264,
131, 141, 174, 204, 220, 264, 267, 268, 280, 282n83, 314,
277, 301, 337 320, 349, 350, 356, 357
Postcolonial studies, 305, 330 Resemblance, 106, 242, 243, 247,
Posthumanism (Posthuman), 277, 353 251, 268, 349
Post-structuralism, 5, 68, 97, 105, Rhizome, 246, 248, 264
106, 150, 153, 157, 171, 193, Romanticism, 32, 33n11, 34, 40,
197, 208, 210, 234, 238n50, 120, 220
298, 320
Power/knowledge, 124, 202, 294,
295, 304, 305, 331, 337 S
Pragmatism, 32, 313–341 Schizophrenia (schizoid),
Pre-discursive, 300, 333, 333n14, 261, 269–282
334, 336, 337, 339 Schrodinger’s cat, 249, 252
392   SUBJECT INDEX

Science, 3, 4, 5n3, 13, 14, 18–20, 25, Spectator, 29

36, 38, 40, 42, 43n21, 45, 46, Speech act, 205, 214, 216n30, 217,
46n24, 48, 48n26, 49, 49n27, 218, 221–224, 229, 232, 235
60, 67, 74–76, 78–80, 83, 85, Spirit, 4, 13, 30n10, 33, 33n11,
87, 91–93, 97, 102, 102n2, 107, 41–44, 42n18, 43n22, 44n23,
110, 118, 131, 132, 139n2, 141, 48, 65, 70, 115, 142, 147, 155,
151, 152, 184, 185, 187, 189, 184, 211, 262, 264, 270, 278,
192, 194, 196, 199, 207, 216, 290, 314, 315, 319
217, 223, 237n48, 238, 249, Stipulation (stipulate), 96, 168, 208,
251, 255–257, 260–262, 278, 213, 267, 349
279, 301, 303n98, 304, 328, Structuralism, 34, 65, 83, 97, 99, 101,
333, 346, 349 106, 107, 108n6, 110, 138, 140,
Science fiction, 249, 278 142, 148, 149, 149n2, 151, 153,
Sciences de l’homme, 99, 140 155, 157, 159, 162, 169, 170,
Scotland, 28, 30, 46n24 183–194, 196, 205, 206, 208,
SDS, 314 210, 229n42, 238n50, 239n52,
Semantics, 105, 188n7, 201, 217, 222 241n53, 245, 294, 295n94, 300,
Semi-concepts, 220, 226, 227, 319, 348, 349
235, 248 Stutter, 253, 254
Semiotic, 140, 168, 169, 173, Subject-in-process, 167, 305, 332
199, 333–337 Symbolic, 42, 124, 140, 149, 150,
Sexual orientation, 330 152, 152n3, 153, 162, 164, 168,
Shaman, 111, 134 169, 173, 199n12, 202, 332–337
Signified, 106, 162, 168, 188–190, Synchronic, 12, 36, 38, 78, 83, 99,
195, 203, 205, 208, 210, 213, 104, 106, 168, 169, 187, 189n8,
214, 227, 251, 348 205, 208, 217, 291, 319, 349
Signifier, 2, 106, 152, 160, 162, 168,
189, 190, 195, 205, 208n21,
210, 211, 213, 251, 294, T
299, 332, 348 Technology, 3, 6, 20, 25, 26,
Simulacrum, 251, 252, 347 29, 35, 39, 59, 97, 116,
Site, 36, 98, 172, 233, 286, 335, 220, 277, 350
335n15, 337, 348 Teleology (telos), 39, 116, 122, 125,
Soccer, 125, 172, 284 218, 229n43, 236n48, 241, 294,
Social fact, 12, 75–79 296n94, 347
Socialism, 116, 123, 174, 176, 200, Tel Quel, 141, 142, 149, 155–165,
295n93, 322 170, 175, 176, 183, 187, 193,
Social media, 280, 356 196, 199, 204, 207, 275,
Sociology, 45, 46, 48n26, 74, 75, 77, 315, 320
78, 83 Territorialized/deterritorialized,
Socrates, 2n1, 212, 237n49, 251 248, 269
   SUBJECT INDEX 
   393

Theory, 1, 23, 59n2, 65, 92, 101, V

116, 127–135, 137, 147, 184, Value judgment, 73, 79
313–341, 346, 357n5 Vanguard, 29, 71, 116, 296, 355
Third Republic, 28, 156n8 Vienna Circle, 102, 103, 217
Trace, 151, 198, 206, 208n21, 210, Virtuality (virtual), 12, 119, 166, 252,
212, 214–228, 228n41, 233, 259–264, 260n68, 262n69,
240, 324 264n72, 279, 345–350
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Virtual reality, 12, 348, 350
102, 217
Transcendental, 35, 36, 71, 76, 91,
92, 96, 119, 138, 165, 169, 198, W
205, 206, 208, 213, 214, 225, Will to power, 40, 119, 120, 120n3,
227, 229, 242–245, 254, 278, 123, 124, 272, 296
300, 324n7, 334, 339, 357n5 Woodstock, 314
Transcendental signified, 208, 213, Worldhood, 59, 59n1, 75
214, 227 “Writing” (écriture), 14n2, 35, 68, 70,
Transgression, 88, 200, 250, 285–292, 71, 88, 113, 120, 140, 141,
303, 355 157n9, 158, 159, 161, 162,
Twitter, 164, 280, 332 165–167, 169, 170, 170n19,
Type/token, 234 170n21, 172, 174, 182, 183,
186, 192–200, 203, 204, 206,
207, 210, 212, 218–220,
U 227–234, 252, 260, 261, 269,
Ultra-structuralism, 157, 159, 175, 272, 276n80, 282, 283, 287,
183, 187, 193, 245, 319 288, 302, 305, 331, 333n14,
Unconscious, 3, 58–60, 63, 107, 118, 335, 348, 355, 355n3, 356
119, 124, 132, 149, 150, 152,
173, 174, 198, 275, 282, 292,
293, 349 Y
University at Vincennes, Yale School, 316, 318
142n6, 154, 250 YouTube, 278