Museum Pieces and Detachable Concepts

I suppose I came late to French theory, as most of us probably did. I was introduced to French theory in my undergrad cultural studies class; I’ll admit it was through Jean Baudrillard—to be sure a “museum piece representing some last avant guard from a bygone world.” In our moment, Baudrillard may be taken rather clownishly, but he thereby serves as a figure for theory’s current American reception more generally, or, at least for its reception by certain loud voices within American criticism. After Michaels and Knapp, Bloom and Fukuyama, after the solidification of the neo-Kantian (Arendt through Riesman to Rawls) alternative in American studies to oppose the continental Hegelio-Marxist tradition, not to mention the parallel trend in American studies to do a certain Marxism without Marxism (see Leo Marx, Amy Kaplan, and George Lipsitz in American Literary History, Spring 2005), the “detachable concepts” of French theory (detached from the genealogical mishmash of idealism, materialism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, etc.) are understandably open to charges of clownish irrelevance. While it’s tempting to sketch French theory as a straw man in the American academy, built up as a taxonomically unified foreign body to be knocked down according to the snobbish anti-intellectualism with which Edward Said charged Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow, I’ll turn to Cusset.

Cusset makes a persuasive case for the continued relevance of French Theory in his point that American academics dropped the theoretical ball right as their objects of criticism—Western imperialism, American neo-colonialism, etc.—came to life post-9/11 by further separating their work from reality (xii-iii). Baudrillard was one of those who did very quickly respond to 9/11 (in Le Monde, November 3, 2001), and in purely theoretical/philosophical terms which nonetheless had distinctly practical applications; he thus neatly anticipated and countered Stanley Fish’s non-response to 9/11 “Truth but no Consequences: Why Philosophy Doesn’t Matter” (in Critical Inquiry, Spring 2003). Fish claims that the thematic questions investigated by philosophy can be answered without all the abstraction and jargon, and so philosophy as a discipline doesn’t have any real, practical, purchase on experience outside of the academy. Fish and the other polemical forces (mis)represented here in my inexcusably simplified sketch of “the American response” to French theory are of course well addressed in Examined Life. Peter Singer’s main point, shared by Ronell and Nusbaum, is that philosophy demands we ask how to make academic studies relevant to contemporary issues. Singer’s philosophy and his life each exemplify a seriously practical application of ethics, and a commitment to a truth that indeed does have consequences. And Singer, Ronell, Appiah, et. al. are explicit that what Cusset calls “shattered certainties” do not prescribe a radical relativism—the clichéd charge against French theory. The form of the film itself enacts the process and tradition of both Angus’s “enlightenment” and the Enlightenment project as each thinker walks through a complicated environment, observing, collecting, discussing, critiquing, without ever closing off or totalizing anything.

My critical tradition is Hegelio-Marxist. Yet, interested precisely in those “academic market rules” and “detachable concepts” Cusset discusses (xi), I’d situate myself in the lineage of critical stances: an exercise in discerning which terminologies, tools, “museum pieces”, and attitudes or levels of personal investment are compatible and incompatible, (for example, a few years ago, I learned you cannot cite Deleuze and Guattari’s theories to support an argument for a Kojèvian account of identity, even if the citation comes from a Marxist). To recontextualize what’s been historically and territorially decontextualized, is consonant or reiterative of the dual US/French development in the first half of the last century: “of searching for new and similar theoretical tools, as against the political and disciplinary blockages of intellectual fields that [are] very different” and which “confront” “the urgency of a world in the process of being born” out of “shattered certainties” and obsolete political reflexes (Cusset 27).

Regarding the question of just where Canada fits into the American-French theory scene, I’m not sure. But perhaps it’s germane to mention that Examined Life was funded by practically every federal and provincial Canadian agency, while most of the philosophers are American. Perhaps the sexiness once claimed by French theory has been assimilated into a transnational US philosophy, and unsexy thinkers like, say, Charles Taylor are left to theorize another ambiguous site of French reception in (North) America.