French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intell ectual Life of the United States (review)

Artist and activist Jean-Jacques Lebel, who had imported beat poetry into France from the United States, once invited Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to a 1975 concert held in Massachusetts, where the two had the opportunity to meet Bob Dylan and Joan Baez backstage. Somewhat unimpressed with the two French philosophers, the folksingers had not bothered to read Anti-Oedipus, and likewise the two theorists were unfortunately not interested in smoking marijuana: an inadvertent misalignment of social interests, creating a somewhat awkward encounter for all parties involved. This anecdote of an ill-conceived compatibility epitomizes the spirit of comprehending the objectives of French theory and prompts an inevitable query: have we on the U.S. side of the Atlantic been able to come to terms with the French, their traditions of intellectual thought and their philosophical legacy?

Deleuze stated in Cinema I: The Movement Image that "Theory is itself a practice, no less than its object is . . . It is a conceptual practice, and it must judged in terms of the other practices with which it interacts" (in an epigraph before French Theory's preface), and if this inaugural quotation is an evocative portent, the book unfolds as a meta-narration of the historical misunderstandings, mistranslations and misappropriations that emerge from within the differing internal organizations of France and the United States, leading French theory into formidable political situations—involving Western capitalism, multiculturalism and post-colonialism, to list a few—and to all-star personalities such as Judith Butler, Edward Said and Frederic Jameson. "The still unidentified flying object" known as French theory, a general term applied by Cusset himself throughout the book, which refers to the body of works originating in the 1960s and 1970s by theorists ranging from Deleuze to Virilio, remains an influential and preeminent set of academic methodologies, and there has not been a single discipline or field, including art, cultural studies, film, gender studies, history or literature, that has remained untouched by its pedagogical impetus.

Densely written, highly informed and comprehensive in its scope, connecting theory to the far-flung reaches of politics and social action both inside and outside the university setting, Cusset's book, as translated from the original French, sets out in a cultivated, distinctive fashion to rediscover why American academics became so enamored with the ideas of Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and others such as Baudrillard. In his intricate descriptions of how these concepts were appropriated, skewed, then deployed in the service of politicized agendas that ranged from affirmative action to neoconservative crusades for counter-intelligentsia to deconstruction and postmodern architecture, the multifarious episodes and numerous examples are well-contextualized and historicized, expatiating how these reactionary thoughts were transmitted from French institutions and intellectual figures to those corresponding in the United States. What the French call "thought" is what Americans know as "theory," or so claims Sylvère Lotringer, who edited an older volume of articles with Sande Cohen, similarly entitled French Theory in America (2001), and views the first book of French theory as John Cage's For the Birds. For those not well versed in French philosophy, post-structuralism and Marxism, this book may prove to be a fairly difficult task, since Cusset assumes that the reader is familiar with the suppositions associated with Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze and is capable of seeing beyond the popularized associations of power, discipline, difference, and schizophrenia to some of the more sophisticated philosophical consequences of these arguments.

Three moments of cultural contact between France and the United States—the artistic and intellectual exiles who traveled from the U.S. between 1940 and 1945; the exportation of Surrealism, Sartrean existentialism and the ideas of the Annales group; and the October 1966 conference held at Johns Hopkins...