Derrida From Now On

8. Autonomy, Autoimmunity, and the Stretch Limo

8 Autonomy, Autoimmunity, and the Stretch Limo From Derrida’s Rogue State to DeLillo’s Cosmopolis Things inside were distant and still, where he was supposed to be. —Don DeLillo, Falling Man It may strike the reader as somewhat retrograde to be coming out at just this time with another book on Derrida, especially one with the implicitly optimistic title Derrida From Now On. For we are living at a time when ‘‘literary theory’’ or ‘‘cultural theory,’’ or, as it has simply come to be known, ‘‘Theory,’’ is no longer being reviled or criticized (those were perhaps the good old days) but has been declared simply dead or irrelevant, its time come and gone, a mere cultural relic ‘‘from now on.’’ And the death certificate of the late-great-Theory has been signed and certified not just by its critics but by some considered to be its leading voices. Terry Eagleton, for example, begins his 2003 book After Theory with the unambiguous pronouncement, ‘‘The golden age of cultural theory is long past.’’1 It is not simply past, says Eagleton, but long past, and those who today lay claim to the mantle of cultural theory bear little resemblance to the giants of that golden yesteryear. Cultural theory too had its ‘‘greatest generation,’’ and it is now long gone. But what exactly does Eagleton mean here by ‘‘cultural theory’’? It would, it seems, be a general name under which to gather a whole series of movements of the 1960s through the 1990s, movements ranging from structuralism, critical theory, deconstruction, and postmodernism to psychoanalysis , feminism, postcolonialism, cultural studies, and so on. But as 147 Eagleton goes on to argue, and this is really the critical point of his book, these different movements did not live up to the true vocation of cultural theory in the same way or to the same degree. For what we witness during this forty-year period, and what ends up bringing about the demise of cultural theory in the best sense, is a progressive depoliticization of theory, a turn away from critical theory and class analysis to what Eagleton considers more apolitical forms of theory such as postmodernism and cultural studies. Eagleton thus begins the chapter entitled ‘‘The Path to Postmodernism ’’: ‘‘As the countercultural 1960s and 70s turned into the postmodern 80s and 90s, the sheer irrelevance of Marxism seemed all the more striking.’’2 Eagleton clearly deplores this irrelevance and displays a good deal of nostalgia for those countercultural 1960s and 1970s, a time—a golden age—when cultural theory was not, according to him, as insular and narcissistically self-absorbed as it is today but was still concerned with the social and political realities of the day. Thus while theorists of the 1960s and 1970s once wrote about important questions of class and poverty , today’s generation of postmodernists and hipster theorists write ‘‘reverential essays on [the TV show] Friends.’’3 As Eagleton puts it in one of those pithy phrases that always spice his prose, ‘‘an interest in French philosophy has given way to a fascination with French kissing.’’4 Yet Eagleton’s opening salvo, ‘‘The golden age of cultural theory is long past,’’ is not only a lament for a bygone critical theory tied to political practice and activism but a sort of promise of, or hope for, something new on the horizon. Now that the ‘‘golden age’’ is long past, now that cultural theory has turned so completely away from a world of staggering inequalities and injustices to concern itself with bourgeois popular culture , with such things as navel-piercing and cyborgs, now that the bankruptcy of cultural theory has been so completely exposed, something new is perhaps—just perhaps—in the offing. Eagleton writes: ‘‘A new and ominous phase of global politics has now opened, which not even the most cloistered of academics will be able to ignore. Even so, what has proved most damaging, at least before the emergence of the anti-capitalist movement , is the absence of collective, and effective, political action. It is this which has warped so many contemporary cultural ideas out of shape.’’5 Something is happening, Eagleton seems to be suggesting, that will make a new, repoliticized cultural theory not only possible but perhaps even inevitable. Whereas the postmodern 1980s and 1990s were typified by an absence of collective and effective political action, the anticapitalist or what might be called the antiglobalization movement has made such action possible once again. The...