Crimes of the future : theory and its global reproduction

281 Pages·2014·2.13 MB·English

by  Rabaté

Crimes of the Future
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Crimes of the Future
Th eory and its Global Reproduction
Jean-Michel Rabaté
NEW YORK • LONDON • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY
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Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2014
© Jean-Michel Rabaté, 2014
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Library of Congress Cataloging-i n-Publication Data
Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 1949-
Crimes of the future : theory and its global reproduction / Jean-Michel Rabat?.
pages cm
Summary: “Crimes of the Future sees one of the world’s leading literary
theorists exploring the past, present and potential future of Theory”-- Provided by
publisher.
ISBN 978-1-4411-4634-2 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-4411-7287-7 (paperback)
1. Literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Criticism. I. Title.
PN81.R13 2014
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2013049294
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-4634-2
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Contents
About the Author vi
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction viii
1 How Global Should Th eory Be? 1
2 Th eory and its Lines of Flight: Future, ancient, fugitive 39
3 Investigations of a Kantian Dog 57
4 Divided Truths on Lies: Derrida with Hannah Arendt 77
5 Derrida’s Anterior Futures 93
6 A Future without Death? 113
7 Th e No Future of an Illusion 125
8 Th e Styles of Th eory: Crimes against fecundity 149
9 Universalism and its Limits: Th e reasons of the absurd 171
10 Aft er the “Altermodern” 197
11 Conclusion: Th e long- lasting joke of the future
(Marx and Kafk a, Althusser and Antigone) 219
Index 241
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About the Author
Jean-Michel Rabaté, who has been professor of English and Comparative
Literature at the University of Pennsylvania since 1992, is a co- founder and
curator of Slought Foundation, an editor of the Journal of Modern Literature ,
and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has authored
or edited more than 30 books and collections on: modernism, psychoanalysis,
and philosophy; and on writers like Samuel Beckett, Th omas Bernhard, Ezra
Pound and James Joyce. In 2013, he edited A Handbook of Modernism Studies
(Wiley-Blackwell). Forthcoming in 2014 are An Introduction to Literature
and Psychoanalysis; A Companion to 1922 ; and Th e Value of Samuel Beckett .
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of four chapters have been published in collections or
reviews. All of these chapters have been revised and rewritten for this book.
A version of Chapter 2 was published as “Th eory: future, ancient, fugitive,” in
Th e Conditions of Possibility, Th eory@buff alo , vol. 13, 2009, pp. 6–20.
A version of Chapter 5 was published as “Th e ‘Mujic of the Footure’: future,
ancient, fugitive,” in F utures: Of Jacques Derrida , Richard Rand (ed.). Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2001, pp. 179–200.
A section of Chapter 6 was published as “Th e death of Freud: what is to be
preferred, death or obsolescence?,” in Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and
Social Sciences , vol. 19, no. 1, 2010, pp. 37–63.
A version of Chapter 8 was published as “Crimes against fecundity: style and
crime, from Joyce to Poe and back,” in S tyle in Th eory: Between Literature and
Philosophy , Ivan Callus, James Corby and Gloria Lauri-Lucente (eds).
London: Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 111–39.
I am grateful to the editors for granting permission to use these texts.
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Introduction
Originally, this book’s title was Th eory of the Future . It was planned as a sequel
to my 2002 book, Th e Future of Th eory , 1 whose theses I wanted to revisit more
than ten years aft er; also, I did not mind practicing the kind of verbal reversal
in the tradition of Marx’s chiasmic logic when he replied to Proudhon’s Th e
Philosophy of Poverty by publishing Th e Poverty of Philosophy . Yet, when I had
to explain to friends and colleagues what I had in mind with this loft y title,
they would invariably ask: “So, you have a theory about the future; well, what
can you predict for the future?” I would answer by quoting Rabelais’s quip: “I
predict that the blind will not see, that the deaf will not hear, and that there
will be crimes . . .” I was in no risk of being found wrong, but was also echoing
another book title, that of G iven: 1° Art, 2° Crime , 2 a book that discussed
modernity as haunted by crime as much as by technology, and in which
Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray became prime suspects. However, the exact
formulation of my new title was brought to me when I re- read Knut Hamsun’s
classic novel, Hunger . 3
Hunger games
In that extraordinary fi rst- person novel, a true precursor of Camus, Kafk a
and Beckett—a novel that should be mandatory reading in all high schools
since it allows any young student to identify with a totally dispossessed,
alienated, at times homeless and above all frantically hungry young man—we
follow the narrator as he wanders through the streets of Oslo battling with
poverty and near- starvation. His only source of revenue comes from the
articles he manages to sell to newspapers, although most of the time he cannot
write because he is too sick or delirious, subsisting on the sale of remaining
possessions that he pawns one aft er the other. Among his projects of articles
with which he intends to make money from newspapers is a recurrent project
of writing an essay entitled “Crimes of the Future.” “. . . perhaps today, as a
matter of fact, I would get an article started on ‘Crimes of the Future’
( Fremtidens Forbrydelser ) or ‘Freedom of the Will’, something like that,
1 Jean-Michel Rabaté, Th e Future of Th eory . Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.
2 Jean-Michel Rabaté, G iven: 1° Art, 2° Crime—Modernity, Murder and Mass Culture .
Brighton, Sussex: Academic Press, 2007.
3 Knut Hamsun, Hunger , Robert Bly (trans.). New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998.
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Introduction ix
something saleable enough so that I could get fi ve kroner at least . . .” 4 As
Robert Bly notes wryly, these abortive articles that he will never write would
only get him less than fi ve dollars. 5 A little later, however, having pawned his
only coat, he gets a few coins to buy some bread and cheese—on which he
almost chokes. His strength having returned, the writer now hopes to get ten
kroner, and the topics that he intends to publish should be less obvious: “it
was not enough any longer to write an essay on something so elementary and
simple- minded as ‘Crimes of the Future,’ which any ass could arrive at, let
alone read in history books.” 6 Instead, the starving writer contemplates
writing a three- part essay on “Philosophical consciousness,” with which he
plans to settle his accounts with Kant’s “sophistries.” Alas, when he wants to
write, he realizes that he has left his stub of a pencil in the coat he has just
pawned. I leave you to follow the endless peregrinations of Hamsun’s a lter ego ,
and will suggest that he is closer to the paradigm of the revolutionary subject
of the future than Melville’s Bartleby, also spectacularly abstemious even if
never actually hungry. 7 What I share with Hamsun, moreover, is the idea that
anyone is capable of writing an essay on “crimes of the future,” provided one’s
hunger remains at the right level. Th e allusion to history books should suggest
“crimes of the past” and not of the future; Hamsun knows very well that one
understands the forthcoming crimes of the future by contemplating the
annals of past crimes systematically consigned in chronicles and history
books.
One of the most disturbing aspects of Hamsun’s H unger is that its main
character looks like a criminal—he loiters in a distracted manner, follows
cute women and addresses them with obnoxious remarks, he tells wild lies to
strangers in parks, he is prone to hysterical fi ts, he spends nights in jail, etc.—
yet he never stoops so low as to commit a crime. Th e result is that it is the
reader who wants him to be a criminal, a thief at least, if not necessarily a
rapist. When he is obliged to chew on soft wood to assuage his pangs of
hunger (he hasn’t eaten for three days), we want to scream to him: “Steal that
loaf of bread!” We would like him to become like Jean Genet’s a lter ego in
Diary of a Th ief ; even though Genet was hungry at times, these periods never
4 Knut Hamsun (see footnote 3), p. 8.
5 Knut Hamsun (see footnote 3), p. 243.
6 Knut Hamsun (see footnote 3), p. 12.
7 I am alluding to a recent fascination for Bartleby as a political subject uttering a forceful
refusal of the dominant values in his emblematic “I would prefer not to,” a fascination
shared by Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida. For a balanced critique
of this common trope linking politics and an ethics of refusal, see Jacques Rancière,
“Deleuze, Bartleby and the literary formula,” in Th e Flesh of Words , Charlotte Mandel
(trans.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, pp. 146–64.