Enduring Resistance: Cultural Theory after Derrida/La Résistance persévère: la théorie de la culture (d’)après Derrida (review)

This collection aims to reassess the lasting significance and possible future of decon-struction in the wake of its reception within the various domains of cultural theory. The book’s Introduction takes its cue from deconstruction’s own resistance to closure, which might be seen as a recurrent feature of its historical dissemination across a number of disciplinary and discursive terrains, as much as an essential characteristic of its own critical practice. The volume ranges across the body of texts and themes for which Jacques Derrida has become well known, offering reinterpretations of a number of deconstructive topics that will be familiar to many. There are essays on Derrida’s thinking of inheritance and memory, according to which deconstruction’s own legacy might be debated; on deconstruction and the possibility of alternative modernities; and on deconstruction and questions of language, literature, writing, film, image, institution, economy, nihilism, violence, religion, and the other. These are themes that, by their very repetition, or repeated recombination, establish a sort of coherence for books like this. However, if theoretical endeavour is genuinely to renew its impetus, it must do more than simply regather itself around established themes in order to rearticulate them by dint of novel critical refinements. Instead, what we call ‘theory’ must think much more seriously about the conditions of possibility for new engagements in the ‘world’ — or ‘worlds’ — of today. If academic critical thinking is to reconnect with broader, more complexly constituted audiences, ‘theory’ needs to supplement itself in radically imaginative ways, going far beyond the eternal labour of critical refinement or propositional reconfiguration. If theory’s ‘text’ and technique are not to be drowned out by new forms of social media and communication, but to capitalize on them instead, critical thought must discover other modes of articulation and fresh resources for praxis. If theory is to realize its critical force by playing any sort of part in emerging social movements or protests, it must think hard about ways to contribute to the possibility of a new public sphere in which its voice may be heard among others. A new public sphere, I should add, that is beginning to emerge precisely as a form of resistance to the ideological apparatuses made possible by this very same concept in its historical legacy; a new public sphere that, in its profound unrecognizability as yet, places extraordinary demands on both thinking and action in regard to a host of contemporary phenomena, from student protests, to Facebook and Wikileaks, to the North African revolutions. Such developments don’t so much create an ‘outside’ in which theory risks getting left behind unless it ceaselessly refines its own ‘text’; instead, they open transformative spaces in which — among others — ‘theorists’ are called on to respond. This book, sad to say, falls some way short of such a response.