Getting Off the Subject: Iconoclasm, Queer Sexuality, and the Celebrity Intellectual

GETTING OFF THE SUBJECT Iconoclasm, Queer Sexuality and the Celebrity Intellectual Richard Burt REVENGE OF THE NERD INTELLECTUALS fter he was released from a mental hospital in 1983 (having been put there for murdering his wife), the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser would sometimes go for walks. As Douglas Johnson relates in his introduction to Althusser's posthumously published autobiography, The FutureLasts a Long Time: "In his despair he would walk the streets of northern Paris, a shabby, ageing figure, and would startle passers-by as he shouted 'Je suis le grand Althusser.' He was always in and out of hospitals. It was in one of them . . . that he died of a heart attack on October 22nd, 1990. He was 72." Althusser's autobiography is the most recent in a series of major intellectual cause cddbres, following quickly as it does upon posthumously written biographies of Michel Foucault and Paul de Man. Their publication (and in Althusser's case, translation into English) has coincided with the controversy over political correctness, a series of pedagogical sex scandals, the emergence of the celebrity intellectual, and the dominance of personal and autobiographical cultural criticism. This convergence raises questions about literary theorists' libidinal investments in theory, about the ways in which theory plays out in relation not only to the production of yet more theorized critical practices inside the university but to fantasies about the performance of what might be considered "undertheorized" intellectual practices outside it as well. At issue, I want to suggest, is how academic autonomy is exercised and regulated, and how personal, subjective, autobiographical criticism and pedagogy can be, the degree to which critical selfreflection requires embodying the critic and teacher, and if so, how. Althusser is for me a useful way into thinking about academic autonomy and autocriticism for several reasons. First, he deconstructs a number of oppositions on which academic legitimation tends to turn: between tabloid journalism and criticism; between the public intellectual and the celebrity intellectual; between fame or publicity and celebrity; between an earlier genuine public sphere and more recent corporatized simulation of it; between strong European theory and weak American domestications of it; between mere anecdotal dismissal of theory and serious engagement with it. Althusser's autobiography reveals autocriticism not to be the opposite of tabloid distortions but to be tabloid; that is, Althusser's self-criticism U 137 is congruent with Johnson's introductory anecdote quoted above. Althusser scandalizes his reader not only with his explanation of his murder of his wife-it was his mother's fault-but with his account of his work as a philosopher, which he does his best to discredit. (He says he read only the first volume of Capita, for example.) Rather than divide theory off from scandal, I suggest one could extend a line back from Althusser's autobiography to the discourses of Lacan, Foucault, and Bataille to argue that theory and scandal have always converged. Moreover, Althusser reveals that academic legitimation, even when modeled on the Hollywood celebrity or superstar, extends only so far. In proclaiming he is "the great Althusser," Althusser shows himself to be not so much a celebrity intellectual-now notorious because he's an insane weirdo-but that the celebrity intellectual is also always from a certain perspective the opposite, a "nerd" intellectual, largely a legend in his own mind. Althusser exposes his nerdiness by expecting that he will receive immediate, excited recognition from the people he addresses, as if they would approach him to ask "Gee, Mr. Althusser, can I have your autograph?" Instead they implicitly respond by saying, "Yeah, like we care." The celebrity intellectual is at some point always a failure: unlike Hollywood celebrities, the celebrity intellectual's fame is quite limited. I open this discussion with the example of Althusser as a celebrity intellectual in order to complicate current critiques of the institution of criticism, one of which turns on the institutionalization in criticism of a specifically white male subjectivity as universal and unmarked, and another which turns on the present status of the public sphere. Through an always already mimetic, embodied, and in certain cases subversive "performativity," emergent or still and dominated groups mark their subjectivities to make visible...