After Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of Theory ed. by Tilottama Rajan, Michael J. O'Driscoll (review)

humanities 167 university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 fusion rather than negotiation, consensus building rather than dissent, transcending differences rather than respecting them. As a result, unequal power relations within the collaboration are often left unexamined, raising the question: >If collaboration is a safe place of fusion, of affirmative union, and monovocality, then what has this theory to do with the notion of difference?= York offers Cixous and Clément=s term >differently engaged= to describe collaboration that allows for difference while calling for analysis of the balance of power within collaborative relationships. In the final chapter, York takes a >hard look= at power in The Book of Jessica, the text based on the collaboration between Maria Campbell and Linda Griffiths, and suggests, without stating explicitly, that critics have been unable to imagine Campbell as a participant in the collaboration and thus have produced criticism that >replicates the property dispute that lies at the heart of the text.= Following on this provocative discussion, York includes an epilogue exploring >the ethics of working collaboratively= in her own pedagogy and recognizes the >indisputable differences in power that structure the university.= York=s study of women=s collaborative writing is a bold, often courageous, analysis of authorship and its relation to property and power. (RENÉE HULAN) Tilottama Rajan and Michael J. O=Driscoll, editors. After Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of Theory University of Toronto Press. vii, 344. $50.00 This anthology will of great use to practitioners and to historians (hostile, friendly, or disinterested) of literary theory. It is, however, >history= of a distinctly poststructuralist kind; for, as the editors ask in their introduction, how does one write >intellectual history= >when both the conceptuality of ideas and the linearity of history have been called into question.= Periodization , progress, continuity, causality, teleology B in the wake of poststructuralism , all such old standbys have been deeply >problematized.= Although conceding (in what has become a nervous and classic poststructuralist gesture) that such notions remain >useful and indeed necessary ,= the editors prefer to organize these contributions under such rubrics as >genealogies,= >performativities,= >physiologies,= and >technologies.= Mantric terms, these, intended to calm readers who many notice the appearances of >questionable= >necessities.= Tilottama Rajan herself offers the best of the >genealogical= essays, a brilliant account of the strange >error= by which B in a manner Freud would have understood B deconstruction mislaid its Sartrean legacy. By helping to recover that legacy, Rajan joins Christina Howell and Bernard-Henri Lévy in making it impossible for a serious understanding of deconstruction=s history to continue its long Oedipal repression of Sartre. It=s time to grow 168 letters in canada 2002 university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 up. To say that these essays vary in quality is not to say that there are any bad essays here. It is merely to note that some continue to reverberate weeks after the book has been deposited on its appropriate shelf. Rodolphe Gasché=s learned >Theatrum Theoreticum= (a >performativity=), for example, offers an arresting linkage of theatrical lighting (e.g., limelight) in the nineteenth century to the deconstructive enterprise. Ian Balfour=s consideration of the sublime by reference to de Man and to Hegel=s Aesthetics is one of the collection=s several reminders of the indispensability of Hegel. Victor Li=s wittily titled and well-written >The Premodern Condition= provides a probing indictment of the self-confuting paradoxes at work in the special status accorded to the >primitive= in Lyotard and Baudrillard. It is very hard, after all, to identify those >primitives= as a form of absolute otherness to the hyper-cerebralized West while writing in, of all places, Paris. D.H. Lawrence (unmentioned by Li) did the job more adroitly and received greater respect from ethnologists of the time. However, Li=s strictures against what others have called >pragmatic selfrefutation = (where one=s very utterance is the best argument against the claim it advances) point to an interesting tension in the collection. Against it we can set Mani Haghighi=s >The Body as History= (from >physiologies,= naturally) which defends certain Foucauldian paradoxes against criticisms levelled by Charles Taylor: >all...