What's Left of Theory. New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory. Essays from the English Institute, and: Cultural Studies and Political Theory (review)

REVIEWS novel to the "historical positioning of the subject in post-revolutionary society" (194); the individual hasbecome so entrenched in the public sphere that the practice ofintimate forms ofliterature was fated to obsolescence. The genre, as Goethe had praised and used it, could no longer bring author, book, and reader into a flourishing social network which blurred the boundaries between public and private. The close ofthe twentieth century, Beebee explains, "saw a remarkable revival ofthe form." From A. S. Byatt's Possession to Martin Walzer's Briefan LordLiszt, it seems rather inexplicable that in the age oftelephones and reticent letter-writers the genre could take offwith such renewed vigor. And yet, it is not as surprising as it seems: some ofPostmodernism's hobby-horses have always been at the root of epistolarity—the dialogic nature ofdiscourse, the dialectic between private selfand the public sphere, and above all the fatal incompleteness experienced by the reader and correspondent alike. Electronic mail, likewise, has turned us into avid correspondents . So how can we explain the fact that despite electronic logorrhea, the "notable epistolary fiction based on Internet communications" (203) still remains to be written? Is such a novel in store? Beebee does not think so, arguing that "the interactive fictional practices of the Internet are themselves so compelling as to inhibit their passive apprehension in a conventional fiction" (203). This is not a book for the faint of heart; it is occasionally overburdened by its desire to cover all bases, forgetting plot for detail. But this lack ofnarrative ease should not discourage the serious reader who can only gain considerably from such wealth oflearning and innovative scholarship. Marina Van ZuylenBard College JUDITH BUTLER,JOHN GUILLORY, AND KENDALL THOMAS, eds. What's Left ofTheory. New Work on the Politics ofLiterary Theory. Essaysfrom the English Institute. New York. London: Routledge, 2000. xii + 292 pp. + JODI DEAN, ed. CulturalStudies andPolitical Theory. Ithaca/London: Cornell UP, 2000. 362 pp. These two collections speak briefly to a process that has made many people uneasy but almost as many optimistic, namely, the mutual inflection of theory and politics in the wake ofpoststructuralism and its cultural studies avatar. This reciprocity is truly spectacular. On the one hand, as Jonathan Culler argues in his contribution to What 's Left of Theory, "The Literary in Theory," literature and the models and terminologies we have developed to understand it have become sources of"theory" (see Derrida, Kristeva, Foucault, etc.); further, this "theory" has impacted upon the way we grasp the political. Commenting on Judith Butler's Antigone 's Claim, Culler notes that her argument "shows that literature is better to think with, in that its language provides powerful resources for a critique ofconstructions that it has been used to sustain and thus of the institutional arrangements it has helped to subtend" (286). On the other hand, as the editors of What 's Left ofTheory point out in their introduction, theory has been "contaminated" by politics (x), which, as they say, has raised hackles in certain "purist" quarters. Driven, as mentioned above, by poststructuralist attempts to rethink identity and its public ties, the theoretical tum in political studies and the "politicizing" of theory have occurred almost simultaneously. Overall, CulturalStudies andPolitical Theory focuses on the former, while What 's Left ofTheory zeroes in on the latter. Vol.26 (2002): 170 THE COMPAKATIST It goes without saying, the overlappings are considerable, to the point that theoretical and political analysis is very hard to sort out in many, ifnot most, ofthe contributions to the two collections. A genuine interdisciplinariry results, which confirms that the "disciplines" addressing both "theoretical" and "political" issues have been hybrid knowledge domains all along. This interdisciplinarity obtains, in What 's Left ofTheory, across diverse fields and objects ofinquiry: gay sexuality in New York (Michael Warner's "Zones of Privacy"), race and queer legal studies (Janet E. Halley's '"Like Race' Arguments"), colonial photography and Elizabeth Bishop's poetry (Marjorie Levinson's "Picturing Pleasure: Some Poems by Elizabeth Bishop"), pedagogy, marxist theory ofvalue, and Mahasweta Devi's fiction (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "From Haverstock Hill Flat to U.S. Classroom," which makes a very "baroque" argument, I might add), and so on. A special...