Direct Flights and Stop-Overs

Editors' note: This is a continuation of the discussion begun in SubStance # 97, " The American Production of French Theory" (Vol. 31, no. 1, 2002)

I. Transatlantic Exchanges

As we have seen, ¹ French theory is literally on the move—it is still being exported, transported, and transmuted. We've heard various versions of how, and why, French theory is inevitably misunderstood, just as American theory gets jumbled and scrambled up during its own trip across the Atlantic. Much of what "passes" and does not "pass" as French cultural theory (some "travels" well while other parts do not) can be described by a number of spatializing metaphors that turn toward what at first glance might seem a purely spatial phenomenon —"howx passes from f to a" or "how y passes from a to f." But it is actually a temporal-spatial movement that can be seen and understood in terms of "transit." In other words, what I'm interested in exploring here comprises a certain "chronotopics" of passage, a chronotopics that looks not only at the contexts of production and consumption of French thinking in America (understood as the larger "Americas"), or American thinking in France, but also, at the time and spaces of the passages used to go from one context to another—the transport or transit that must necessarily occur in time and in space in order for x to get to a from f or for y to get to f from a. I wish first to read this chronotopics of passage in part with the aid of Walter Benjamin's Passagen-Werk, an excellent model for turning space into sight and sight into space, before turning both space and sight into visible time.

That Anglo-North-American theorists should systematically misread French thinkers, and vice-versa, I take as a given. This situation is part and parcel of the generalized trend whereby Europe and the Americas have always "misread" one another. As far as the particular relationship through theory that exists between France and the United States is concerned, I believe that the following observation is in order. Given that no two red-blooded Frenchmen can agree on how to read their own theory—Foucault, for example—and given that very few bona fide American philosophers are able to agree on their own theorists—let's say on the philosophical merits of someone like Richard Rorty—I would be surprised indeed to find many instances where French theorists were not misread in North-America, and vice-versa. As a matter of fact, I would be very worried if one day Americans and the French stopped misreading one another. And so, I am interested less in the correctness of any given reading or use of French or American theory ("correctness" in the use of someone else's theory is a thorny issue), than I am in the fluctuations of passages, both direct passages and indirect ones.

Passing from one place to another, from Europe to the Americas, for example, always involves a passage that becomes, through that very movement of which it is the receptacle, the facilitator of the movement it contains. Passing from one place to another also involves the problem of a common language. As two geographically separated languages that are at times in a position of subalterity in relation to one another, the languages of France and North America can be listened to neither from a single fixed point of reference in a neutral and unconnected exterior, nor in terms of certain shared permanent notions, but, rather, as a set of mobile, transitory points that both must cross while passing, or making passes, from one side to the other. The "language" that serves to provide "communication" between Europe and the Americas, and vice-versa, often involves notions of proprietorship. When French theorists complain that American theorists misread them, it is curious to observe that the same theorists do not complain when French theory misreads German theory, for example. Thus it would seem that...