The Baltimore Effect: The Testimony of a Practitioner of Literary and Gender Studies

I. State of Affairs

Allow me to quickly set the scene for my contribution.

For many years, I taught at Cornell University. Along with Yale and Irvine, Cornell was one of the centers for the instruction and diffusion of so-called "French thought," and more specifically, deconstruction. (Cornell's participation in this venture lasted longer; the stir began later at Irvine and stopped earlier at Yale.) It was Derrida's graceful if rigorously earthshattering contribution to the Johns Hopkins conference in 1966 which led to a shift from "Hopkinsian" structuralism (Johns Hopkins University can be considered the main port of entry for the initial landing of structuralism in the United States) towards the post-structuralism of Yale and Cornell.

At Cornell, beginning in the seventies, faculty members set out to teach courses entitled "French Thought" or "Contemporary French Thought" in literature departments. It was through these departments—first French literature and Romance studies departments, then comparative literature and English departments, as the body of texts in question was being progressively translated into English—that the diffusion and study of the thinkers described as structuralist or post-structuralist essentially took place. One spoke of their work in terms of "French thought" rather than "French philosophy," following the neo-Heideggerian and Derridean distinction between "thought" and "philosophy." The term "philosophy" wasn't used because, on the one hand, it called upon a discipline that "French thought" challenged, breaking through its institutional boundaries, and questioning its intellectual perimeter, its proper place; on the other hand, the term was avoided because it was too closely associated with the metaphysical program which Derrida named "phallogocentrism." In the United States, as we know, the word "philosophy" has been largely appropriated by the practitioners of analytic philosophy, who exercise control exclusively in the setting of philosophy departments. However, the term "theory"—which since the introduction of "French Thought" has been used in absolute construction (i.e., without any qualifier) as a quasi-proper name to designate what was undertaken between 1970 and the early 2000s in the wake of this introduction—caught on later. Its spread—which confirms the overstepping of disciplinary boundaries and, in particular, the boundaries aimed at marking off the place of "philosophical" thought—seems to have coincided with the emergence of fields of study that were themselves largely tributaries of "French thought," and the propositions made in its name; I am thinking in particular of what started to be called, beginning in the late eighties, "feminist theory"; in the previous decade, one still spoke not of "feminist theory" but of "feminist criticism."¹ Attesting to this "theoretical" turn, David Carroll's edited volume The States of 'Theory': History, Art and Critical Discourse, published in 1990, brought together literary scholars, philosophers, historians, and specialists in aesthetics and politics. The volume features Derrida's hilarious text entitled, "Some Statements and Truisms about Neo-Logisms, New-isms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and other small Seismisms" (which, to my knowledge, has never been published in French).²

For my part, I arrived at Cornell in the Department of Romance Studies in 1984, when "French thought" as well as literary studies were reaching their peak at the university. The rise of literary studies and the keen interest in "French Thought" are connected for reasons that I will return to later. I left Cornell in 2007, in the wake of Derrida's death in 2004, at a time when a return of, or to, metaphysics began. The rekindling of the metaphysical project first took the shape of a disavowal of what one had begun to call, from the vantage point of its presumed ending, not post-structuralism, but "the linguistic turn." At the same time, literary studies were collapsing, if not globally then at least across the Western world, faced with a triple crisis of enrollment, audience, and definition.

The university world in the United States strives to maintain itself in a state of constant arousal, hence the need for stars, for attractive and idolized figures who embody the intellectual trends attached to their names...