The Constructive Turn: Christopher Norris and the New Origins of Historical Theory

For those readers familiar with Christopher Norris’s intellectual trajectory, his most recent publication, dealing with Baruch Spinoza, a major seventeenth century exegete of Descartes and a contemporary of Locke and Puffendorf, of Newton and Leibniz, might come as a—perhaps unsettling— surprise. After all, most if not all of Norris’s critical work in the eighties made it its province to discuss what is known as “deconstruction,” a present-day form of critique intent upon discrediting, according to many of its critics, questions concerning origins, historical contingencies, ideological implications and other such forms of outdated inquiry. Yet even a cursory reading of the present book should quickly restore peace to temporarily unsettled minds. For one, Norris has no intention of leaving deconstruction behind, of betraying “theory,” to use reductionist speak, in favor of “history.” And for another, Norris is not in the least inclined to subvert his major research paradigm, which is, roughly speaking, the relation of literary theory to philosophy. Nonetheless, there are two aspects of Norris’s Spinoza which I find novel in his critical practice. One is his shift in emphasis from literary interests, or his interest in questions of reading, to the terrain of the epistemological, the ethical, and the ontological, a shift in emphasis from the literary to the philosophical that is. This shift is perhaps best reflected in the choice of a philosopher, such as Spinoza, and in the very title of the book.

The other related aspect concerns Norris’s explicit insistence on the political nature of his critical project. Indeed, he aligns himself, throughout the volume, not with the “political” %tout court%, but with a quite specific model of politicality, namely with the unfinished project of Enlightenment thought. What is then remarkable about this shift is that Norris appears %nolens volens% as a conscious historical agent, so dear to the marxist and idealist tradition, one who intentionally intervenes in or makes history (history of critical theory) as he is writing about it. Theory’s task is here to affect history. This gesture strikes me, if I may say so, as thoroughly non-postmodern. Simultaneously, the tracing of Spinoza’s role in the formative pre-history of critical theory, and the historical reconstruction of Spinoza’s arguments, amounts to nothing less than Norris’s equally strikingly non-postmodern turn towards explicitly constructionist practices. Given that recently Norris had directed his attention, in his What’s Wrong With Postmodernism?, to what is wrong with postmodernism, it might not be difficult for some readers to read his even more recent Spinoza as a sequel which now essays that which is right with modernity. His reiteration of the necessity of interventionism in human affairs, of strategically relating theory to politics, and of subscribing to an enlightenment paradigm surely lends itself to such a reading. Other readers might simply reflect, in more than one way, on the historical contingencies of critical theory in general. Specific cultural, institutional, and political contexts, or specific structures and substructures of everyday life, seem to effect the way in which critics raise or avoid social questions. Time, place, and other such structurally configurative contingencies seem to figure in the forms of social critique, of politics, of non-literary and literary critics alike. So it is apparently not only theory which can or should effect history. This is the story Norris is about to tell with his Spinoza. History also apparently effects theory, not only in Spinoza’s, but also in our time. It is to his credit that this is a standpoint which Norris, all formidable postmodernist pressures to the contrary, does not suppress.

Norris, I think, might be quick to point out that he himself never had a problem with the relation between theory and history, or history and theory, or with non-postmodern critical strategies for that matter. His books on deconstruction were above all political books, carefully designed to emphasize the political edge of the deconstructionist project in the face of all those intellectuals who either breezily embrace historical (marxist and...