Theory's Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy by Zahi Zalloua (review)

Haven't we been hurt enough by the misbehavior of the humanities' once-loyal critical mode—the hermeneutics of suspicion? Hasn't Derridean deconstruction's indeterminate privileging of Mind-Language, to borrow from Latour, run out of steam? What, if anything, does theory's appetite for negation have to offer? Zahi Zalloua's provocative, timely, and delightfully readable Theory's Autoimmunity argues that theory, far from a vestigial practice, is perhaps more necessary now than ever.

Zalloua asserts that Paul Riceour's "hermeneutics of suspicion" overlooks and, in fact, threatens to de-mobilize the necessary and important work of theory; instead, Zalloua argues, theory is best practiced as a form of "skepticism." Stripped of the more paranoid and self-defeating tendencies inherent to "suspicion," skeptical theory opens itself to the world, for better and, importantly, for worse. Drawing upon Derrida's pharmakon, Zalloua reasons that theory—performed honestly, curiously, and ethically—is autoimmune; it is curative and diseased. A non-all and double-bind, skeptical theory deconstructs and constructs; as it renders a literary text open to new interpretation, it similarly opens itself up to its very own de-interpretation; in the words of Zalloua, "Such an identification with skepticism effectively problematizes any simple positivity of theory, any thematization of its identity, rendering it unfinalizable and unpredictable" (16). From this domain of the "un-", theory "enables as it disables," making possible a space of shifting alterity that allows for direct engagement and experience with the Other—or, an external subjectivity that threatens to destabilize the immunological fetishization popularized by post-Cartesian philosophy—and, in doing so, allows not only for a hermeneutics that accounts for the vast terrain of onto-epistemological experience, but also contests any map claiming universal insight to its topography.

As a work that is primarily concerned with uncovering the ostensibly overlooked value of theory, Theory's Autoimmunity performs what some may regard as the Cardinal sin of hermeneutic practices—namely, reading theory through literature and philosophy. However, this is done to show not only the ongoing co-constitution of these epistemic traditions, but also the way in which theory, like literature, is a genre whose articulations demand thoughtful examination. The first chapter of the book sets out to do precisely that; through a reading of Montaigne's essays, Zalloua argues that Montaigne—due to his essays' performative openness to the world, experience, and "traumatophilia," as well as the unwillingness to subscribe to totalizing knowledge—serves as the paragon of the skeptical theorist. By extension, Montaigne's essay-form reflects its author's otherness to himself—his opening-up of a new subjectivity that will in turn be further metabolized by another—and thus exists as an early example of a way to perform theory that accounts for the way the theorizing subject is indelibly impacted in the process.

The following chapters perform the autoimmune character of theory as that which, abiding by a Lacanian "non-all," points to multiplicity, contradiction, and an always present "otherness." Chapter wo looks to formations of ideology and critique through an examination of Baudelaire's "To Each His Chimera" and Toni Morrison's Beloved, arguing that literature ultimately enables the autoimmunity of theory due to the affective and cognitive "event" of the literary that discloses a matrix of interpretation and limitation. Chapter Three, in looking to psychoanalysis through Stendahl's Red and Black, suggests that irony and the death-drive have in common the demand/ resistance of interpretation, which theory can mobilize in examining registers of power. Chapter Four, which takes on Marguerite Duras' The Ravishing of Lol Stein, examines the possibilities for theory to discuss sexual difference while eschewing universalizing and unmarked discourse by interpreting Lacanian symbolic reality as predicated on the non-all logic of autoimmunity and thus indelibly and inextricably queered.

Those who will take issue with the methodology of Theory's Autoimmunity, I suspect, will do so on the basis that, because Zalloua draws mainly from canonical theories and theorists (as...