The Future of Theory (review)

Like "the peculiar history of Theory" which he sets out to explore, Jean-Michel Rabaté's The Future of Theory, published in Blackwell's manifesto series, "tends to describe loops and circles" rather than straight lines (2). Focusing on the current feeling that Theory is dying, or even dead, Rabaté's work (taking Hegel as an organizing point of departure yet looping back to Plato and the ancients and forward to myriad prominent theorists of the 20^th century) traces out a genealogy of "that loaded word theoria" in order to show how Theory continually produces both knowledge and new, unanswered questions, how Theory seduces us and sustains our libido sciendi, that is, our desire to theorize anew. Although somewhat labyrinthine, the movements of the text's four chapters elaborate key problematics succinctly exposed in its introduction, and the text remains both focused yet laudably dense and expansive.

Beginning with the story of Thales, the philosopher who fell down a well while observing the stars as a supporting example for today's scorn of theory as detached from reality's concrete problems, Rabaté argues, against the grain, that theoria has never been totally divorced from reality, pointing out that Thales was also a political figure. The Future of Theory examines how the predominant opinion that Theory has been far too one-dimensional has driven and continues to drive the search for truth, or the search for more adequate theories. Rabaté's principle assertion is that Theory must recognize "its double Greek origins, which point both to a 'pure' intellectual contemplation and to ritual witnessing in the framework of the city or policy," for Theory's "lack" of purity is actually an asset (9). This strength is what Rabaté terms Theory's effect of "hystericization," a key concept around which the whole text revolves. Drawing not so much on early clinical definitions of hysteria, but on the Surrealists' (and later Lacan's) use of the term, Rabaté draws a parallel between hysteria and Theory: "hysteria gives birth to a discourse and maintains a quest for truth that always aims at pointing out the inadequacies of official, serious, and 'masterful' knowledge. . . . like hysteria, Theory never stops coming back, at least under slightly different guises" (9-10). In Breton and Aragon's words, hysteria is a "mental state . . . based on the need for a reciprocal seduction," and it is this seduction, linked to wonder, desire, and jouissance,that Rabaté explores throughout his work.

Lacan looks to Hegel as a source for the discourse of the hysteric, and Rabaté turns to Hegel's work as well in his first chapter, "Genealogy One: Hegel's Plague." Re-examining Hegel's reception, Rabaté moves through readings of Wahl, Koyré, Kojève, Hyppolite, and the Baltimore meeting of 1966 (whose participants, including Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, and de Man, attest to the ubiquitous presence of Hegelianized Theory during this period), with reference, in addition, to Bataille, Blanchot, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Foucault, and Levinas, to show how Hegel's thought, when read through Husserl or Heidegger, has continually fueled the "theory machine" (23). In this genealogy, Hyppolite's influence is key, for his attempted synthesis of the Phenomenology and Logic and Existence transformed Hegelianism, informing Lacan's move to a vision of Hegel in which "negativity, language, science, and a pervasive Otherness" dominate (29) and Derrida's reflections on language and death.

Rabaté's second chapter, however, presents another, quite different genealogy, "The Avant-Garde at Theory's High Tide," detailing how three key theorists, Benjamin, Bakhtin, and Barthes, "have variously resisted Hegelian categories" in the goal of determining "what can be 'redeemed' . . . and what ought to be rejected in the cult of Theory for Theory's sake" (50). Returning notably to the notion of Theory's seduction, Rabaté selects these figures in order to elaborate the place of wonder, freedom, praxis, and ethics in Theory. After a discussion of the Tel Quel journal, Rabaté moves to a reflection on the problem of killing texts off with one's Theory of the text in "Theory, Science, Technology...