Garry chipping in:

Like Imre, I look forward to our discussion of some of the issues raised in the blogs you wrote in response to the film and the book on French Theory.

With that in mind, I would like to try and briefly indicate where I stand in relation to Theory. Though I do not only read a lot of what passes for Theory but also make use of it in my work, I don’t actually consider myself a theorist. I think of myself (still) as a literary critic. These days, this is no doubt anachronistic. Indeed, how can it not be when distinguished intellectuals can be found referring to what-used-to-be-called literature? Well, too bad; I still think of myself as a literary critic, by which I mean as someone who is in the business of producing “readings,” readings of texts (these days, incidentally, of films as often as of books).

At the same time, I have for a long time been reading widely in what passes for Theory. It started, in a way, in the early 1980s, with the work of René Girard, whose book Deceit, Desire, and the Novel enabled me to see things in the novels I loved that I had never before noticed. It was Girard who started me thinking first about the workings of desire (both in and outside of literature) and then also (with his book Violence and the Sacred) about religion and the sacred. For a few years, it seemed to me that Girard had actually found the Key to all Mythologies and perhaps some part of me was searching for that key when I went on to read some of the French thinkers who had clearly influenced Girard (Durkheim, Bataille) and some of those who have been influenced by him (Kristeva). At any rate, my study of these writers meant that I was in a sense prepared, ready to be receptive, when the Turn to the Post-Secular (Derrida, Levinas) began to make waves in the late 1990s. And I should mention that in addition to this developing interest, I have an interest in Political Theory (mainly but not exclusively Leftist) that predates my discovery of Girard and continues to the present. I read contemporary writers like Ranciere, Agamben, Badiou, Butler and others in the hope that these radical thinkers will help me continue to grapple with the questions that seem to me most interesting, not the least important of which concerns the possibility of coming up with alternative and improved arrangements to the ones we now have. I will confess that this is part of what I understand to be entailed in living an examined life.

All of this reading in Theory (or what passes for it) provides me with many of the questions I find myself putting to the texts I’m reading, or viewing. But it is very important to me that I take my cue from the latter. If, for example, in my little book on Mike Leigh, I draw in my reading of Naked on Bataille and elsewhere in that book on trauma theory (Hal Foster, Walter Benjamin on Baudelaire), I hope and trust that it was the experience of watching and thinking about the films that led me to bring in the Theory.

I have, by the way, never been greatly interested in Literary Theory. It is, to repeat, literary criticism that has always interested me. (And so, yes, with reference to what-used-to-be-called literature, that’s what I myself still call it. It? A lot can hang on a word.)

See you all tomorrow.