Post-Deconstructive?: Negri, Derrida, and the Present State of Theory
Rent from DeepDyveToday it seems that we live in discouragingly post-theoretical, or even anti-theoretical, academic times. Venerable interdisciplinary journal Critical Inquiry, whose advertising materials used to hail it as "Theory-Driven," held a kind of high-profile wake for theory after 9/11, with many of theory's luminaries (now somewhat flickering, as they approach retirement age) pronouncing the entire operation dead in the water. Even Terry Eagleton (who, to hear The New York Times tell it, in fact invented theory sometime in the late 1970s) pronounced the enterprise over and done with in his 2004 book, After Theory. The Times story on Eagleton's book ran under the headline, "Cultural Theorists, Start Your Epitaphs." Indeed, an epicedial discourse surrounds theory in North America: from gasbag neocon wordsmythe Christopher Hitchens in the New York Times Book Review, to articles in Slate, Salon.com, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.1 Even the Christian Science Monitor ran a feature-story obit for theory (see Kirby). And, according to their website, "Christian Science . . . speaks to the dumb the words of Truth, and they answer with rejoicing"; so when Christian Scientists speak these words of Truth, you might begin to think there's something to it.
However, having already lived through several deaths of theory, I'll have to say that I'm not very impressed with the pitch and tonality of this latest rendition of "Danny Boy," though I think it is undeniably true that a certain kind of theory (let's call it English Department or Comp. Lit. theory circa 1980-something) is in fact over and done with, [End Page 68] and effectively has been for at least a decade. From the vantage point of the present, it's very hard to understand why, if I recall the statistic correctly, a late-80s MLA survey found that more than 10% of English professors surveyed thought their primary job was to show students how binary oppositions in a text cancel themselves out. If that version of "theory" is over, good riddance, one might say.
You'd never know theory was dead, though, if you ran a citation index on the big names associated with it. In 2003, the Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences index turns up 913 hits for Michel Foucault, 564 for Jacques Derrida, 317 for Gilles Deleuze, and 245 for Jacques Lacan. And these numbers have remained more or less consistent for the last several years: Foucault consistently leading the pack with 900-some citations, Derrida steadily in the 500-600 range, Deleuze and Lacan holding their own. And, contra the "theory is over" hypothesis, these numbers are up considerably from the supposed heydays of theory: Foucault, always leader of the citation pack, scores only 699 hits for 1986, and 700 for 1993.
Of course Derrida's death, still so personally difficult for the many people whose lives he touched, has only intensified this anxiety in the theory world, broadly conceived. As The New York Times put it shortly after Derrida's passing: "with the death . . . of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the era of big theory came quietly to a close" (Eakin 2004). In short, Derrida's death also painfully reminds us that all the "master thinkers" are gone, with the most-cited theorist (Foucault) having been dead for more than two decades. Which inevitably brings up these kinds of hand-wringing marketing questions: Who's next on the throne? Rancière? Agamben? Badiou? Can Žižek continue to write five books a year? Or is the age of big theory and big theorists indeed over?
Negri and Derrida
The latest "big thing" on the North American theory horizon, arguably, has been the work of Antonio Negri. Among all the provocations contained in Negri's recent work (with and without Michael Hardt), perhaps none is more memorable than a series of polemical provocations concerning postmodern thought in...
