Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida (review)

‘Use your transversal lube now!’ (p. 121). This compellingly eccentric and ‘ecstatically alive’ (p. 35) work is Reynolds’s fourth book on transversality. It contains five main chapters, each co-written by him and a collaborating friend, an Afterword by Gary Genosko, and a beguiling glossary of ‘transversal terms’ (pp. 272–89). There the unacquainted reader will learn that transversal theory strives ‘to engage everything conceivable’ and to conceptualize ‘subjectivity, experience, and events, along with their contexts and processes of inauguration and propagation, as productively and affirmatively as possible’ (p. 287). Transversal theory emerges out of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis, and the second chapter, which presents three readings of Rousseau’s hypochondria — psychoanalytic, schizoanalytic, and transversal — will be the most useful for intellectual genealogists. One question this chapter raises is precisely how far, and in what sense, transversal theory goes beyond psychoanalysis, for the terms in which the transversal reading of Rousseau’s hypochondria are couched are so very close to core psychoanalytic theorizations: ‘transversal theory can imagine an automatic or non-conscious defensive response in the form of fantastic somatic knowledge’ (p. 110). The studied scepticism throughout towards psychoanalysis seems informed by an entirely justified suspicion of its more manipulative and authoritarian forms, yet insufficiently to recognize the radical mobility (indeed the transversality?) of some anti- or extra-institutional psychoanalytic thinking (some Lacan, Bowie, Phillips). The first half of the third chapter, on transversal spatiality, first published in article form in 1999, re-examines De Certeau’s engagement with Foucault’s analysis of panopticism; given the prominence of the World Trade Center in De Certeau’s reading, the second half focuses, not inappropriately, on that lost object, and specifically on designs archived on CNN.com of proposals by ordinary folk for a commemorative memorial to stand in its place. The similarity that Reynolds and Fitzpatrick identify between many of these and the Burj al-Arab in Dubai, the ‘Tower of the Arabs’, ‘in an historical moment when anti-Arab sentiment was high in the United States’ (pp. 157–58), is, I suspect, ultimately less ironic, less revealing, and less resistant to explanation than they imply. Chapter 4 looks at children as transversal subjects chiefly through the story of Kaspar Hauser and the perverse playground of ‘Kasparspace’; how, I wonder, does ‘Kasparspace’ intersect with the playspaces and attendant subjectivities theorized by Donald Winnicott? The fifth chapter is concerned firstly and lastly with Montaigne and human rights. If comparisons can be invidious, the way this chapter rehearses some of the better-known aspects of Jacques Rancière’s political theorizing (pp. 214–18), only then to chuck it aside in favour of Luc Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology, is especially unfair and unhelpful (indeed untransversal?). Yet, in the main, Reynolds and his friends prove to be extremely accomplished ‘fugitive dealers’ (p. 109) in the highest of high theory; their approach seems intended to replicate the lucid, precise expansiveness of the 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine under the aegis of which this book is, it seems to this reviewer, rather coyly (p. 21), yet altogether appropriately, placed. A towering achievement and an amulet against aphanisis, destined to have theory-haters everywhere screaming for the thought-police.