Theory After 'Theory'

323 Pages·2011·4.63 MB·English

by  Jane Elliott

THEORY AFTER ,THEORY׳
Edited by Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge
O Routledge
Taylor & Francis Croup
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First edition published 2011
by Routledge
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© 2011 Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge for selection and editorial
matter; individual contributions; the contributors
The right of the Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted, in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Theory after ‘theory’/edited by Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Literature—Philosophy.
I. Elliott, Jane, 1969-. II. Attridge, Derek.
PN441.T445 2011
80 l'.95-dc222010033268
ISBN13: 978-0-415-48418-3 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-48419-0 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-83116-8 (ebk)
CONTENTS
Notes on contributors viii
Acknowledgements xiii
Introduction: theory’s nine lives 1
Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge
PART I
Assessing the field 17
1 Philosophy after theory: transdisciplinarity and the new 19
Peter Osborne
2 Theory as a research programme - the very idea 34
Cary Wolfe
3 Theory after critical theory 49
William Rasch
4 Extinct theory 62
Claire Colebrook
PART II
Between theory and practice: judgem ent, will, potentiality 73
5 Perception attack: the force to own time 75
Brian Massumi
6 The will of the people: dialectical voluntarism and the
subject of politics
Peter Hallward
7 The persistence of hope: critical theory and enduring in
late liberalism 105
Elizabeth A.Povinelli
8 The practice of judgement: Hannah Arendt’s
‘Copernican revolution’ 120
Linda M. C. Zerilli
PART III
Rethinking the politics of representation 133
9 When reflexivity becomes porn: mutations of a modernist
theoretical practice 135
Rey Chow
10 The canny subaltern 149
Eva Cherniavsky
11 Theory after postcolonial theory: rethinking the
work of mimesis 163
Simon Gikandi
PART IV
Biopolitics and ethics 179
12 After life: swarms, demons and the antinomies of immanence 181
Eugene Thacker
13 Inclining the subject: ethics, alterity and natality 194
Adriana Cavarero
14 The person and human life 205
Roberto Esposito
PART V
Renewing the aesthetic 221
15 The wrong turn of aesthetics
Henry Staten
16 Literature after theory, or: the intellective turn 237
Laurent Dubreuil
17 The liberal aesthetic 249
Amanda Anderson
PART VI
Philosophy after theory 263
18 The arche-materiality of time: deconstruction, evolution
and speculative materialism 265
Martin Hagglund
19 Concepts, objects, gems 278
Ray Brassier
20 Pharmacology of spirit: and that which makes
life worth living 294
Bernard Stiegler
Index 311
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Amanda Anderson is Caroline Donovan Professor of English Literature at The
Johns Hopkins University and Director of the School of Criticism and Theory (at
Cornell University). She is the author of The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the
Cultures f Theory (Princeton University Press, 2006), The Powers of Distance:
Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton University Press, 2001)
and Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture
(Cornell University Press, 1993). She has also co-edited, with Joseph Valente,
Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle (Princeton University Press, 2002).
Ray Brassier is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the American University of
Beirut. He is the author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Palgrave,
2007). He is currently working on a book that proposes to conjoin historical with
eliminative materialism.
Adriana Cavarero is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of
Verona. Her publications include Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfliood
(Routledge, 2000), Stately Bodies: Literature, Philosophy and the Question of Gender
(University ofMichigan Press, 2002), For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy
of Vocal Expression (Stanford University Press, 2005) and Horrorism: Naming
Contemporary Violence (Columbia University Press, 2008).
Eva Cherniavsky is Andrew R. Hilen Professor of American Literature and
Culture and affiliated faculty in Women’s Studies at the University ofWashington.
She is the author of That Pale Mother Rising: Sentimental Discourses and the Imitation
of Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century America (Indiana University Press, 1995) and of
Incorporations: Race, Nation, and the Body Politics of Capital (University of Minnesota
Press, 2006). Her current research considers the changing contours ofthe political
in the context of neoliberal governance with an emphasis on the reimagination of
citizenship in popular culture.
Rey Chow is Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at Trinity College of Arts
and Sciences, Duke University. Since 1991 she has authored seven books, including
Writing Diaspora (Indiana University Press, 1993), Ethics after Idealism (Indiana
University Press, 1998), The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Columbia
University Press, 1992), The Age of the World Target: Selj-Referentiality in War,
Theory, and Comparative Work (Duke University Press, 2006) and Sentimental
Fabulations, Contempormy Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility
(Columbia University Press, 2007). Her writings have been widely anthologized
and translated into multiple European and Asian languages. The Rey Chow Reader,
ed. Paul Bowman, is available from Columbia University Press.
Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor ofEnglish at Pennsylvania State
University. She has published books on contemporary European philosophy, liter­
ary theory, feminist theory, literary history and poetry. Her two most recent books
are Milton, Evil and Literary History (2009) and Deleuze and the Meaning of Life
(2010).
Laurent Dubreuil is a Professor ofRomance Studies and Comparative Literature
and the Director of the French Studies Program at Cornell University. His main
research has to do with philosophy, literary criticism and theory, and the epistemol-
ogy of the disciplines. He is the author of several books, including, A force d’amitié
(Paris: Hermann, 2009), L’État critique de la littérature (Paris: Hermann, 2009) and
Empire of Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming in 2011). The
editor-at-Iarge of the French interdisciplinary journal Labyrinthe, Dubreuil is cur­
rently assembling a special issue of Diacritics on ‘Negative Politics’. A Mellon Fellow
in the New Directions Program, Laurent Dubreuil is also working more and more
on neuroscience, evolutionary theory or animal behaviour from a ‘theoretical’ and
‘experimental’ perspective.
Roberto Esposito teaches Theoretic Philosophy at the Istimto Italiano du Scienze
Umane in Naples and in Florence. His main works, winch have been translated into a
number of different foreign languages, are Categorie dell’impolitico (11 Mulino, 1988,
1999), Nove pensieri sulla politica (11 Mulino, 1993), L’origine della politica (Donzelli, 1996),
Communitas: Origine e destino della comunità (Einaudi, 1998), translated as Communitas:
The Origin and Destiny of Community (Stanford University Press, 2010) and Immunitas:
Protezione e negazione della vita (Einaudi, 2002). His most works are Bios: Politica efiloso-
fia (Einaudi, 2004), translated as Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (University ofMinnesota,
2008), Terza Persona: Politica della vita e filosofia dell’impersonale (Einaudi, 2007) and
Termini della politica: Comunità, immunità, biopolitica (Mimesis, 2009).
Simon Gikandi is Robert Schirmer Professor ofEnglish at Princeton University.
His many books include Reading the African Novel (Portsmouth, 1987, rep. 1994),
Reading Chinua Achebe, (Portsmouth, 1991,rep. 1996), Writing in Limbo: Modernism
and Caribbean Literature (Cornell Univeristy Press, 1992), Maps of Englishness:
Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (Columbia University Press, 1992) and
Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Cambridge University Press, 2000). He is the general editor of
The Encyclopedia of African Literature (Routledge, 2003) and co-'-editor of The
Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge University Press,
2004). He is currently completing a book on the relation between slavery and the
culture of taste.
Martin Hagglund is a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows and a
Distinguished International Fellow of the London Graduate School. He is the
author of Kronofobi: Essaer om tid och andlighet (Symposion, 2002) and Radical
Atheism: Derrida and. the Time ofLife (Stanford University Press, 2008). He is cur­
rently completing his next book, Chronolibidinal Reading: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov. He
is also working on a sequel to Radical Atheism, which turns from a critique of tran­
scendence to a critique of immanence, by engaging Bergson and Deleuze on
fundamental questions of time, life and desire.
Peter Hallward teaches at the Centre for Research in Modern European
Philosophy at Kingston University London and is the author of Damming the Flood:
Haiti and the Politics of Containment (Verso, 2007), Out of this World: Deleuze and the
Philosophy of Creation (Verso, 2006), Badiou: A Subject to Truth (University of
Minnesota Press, 2003) and Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and
the Specific (Manchester University Press, 2001). He is currently working on a
book-length project entitled The Will of the People.
Brian Massumi specializes in the philosophy ofexperience, art and media theory,
and political philosophy. He is the author of Parablesfor the Virtual: Movement, Affect,
Sensation (Duke University Press, 2002), A User’s Guide to Capitalism and
Schizophrenia: Deviationsfrom Deleuze and Guattari (MIT Press, 1992) and First and
Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot (with Kenneth Dean;
Autonomedia, 1993). He is an editor of The Politics ff Everyday Fear (University of
Minnesota Press, 1993) and A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari
(Routledge, 2002). His translations from the French include Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.
Peter Osborne is Professor ofModern European Philosophy and Director ofthe
Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University
London. He is an editor of the journal Radical Philosophy. His books include The
Politics ff Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (Verso, 1995; 2nd ed., forthcoming),
Philosophy in Cultural Theory (Routledge, 2000), Conceptual Art (Phaidon, 2002),
Marx (Grant, 2005), Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory (ed.,
Routledge, 3 Volumes, 2005) and EI arte mas alla de la estética: Ensayosfüosoficos sobre
el arte contemporaneo (CENDEAC, Murcia, 2010). He is currently completing a
book on philosophical aspects of contemporary art.
Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at
Columbia University, where she has also served as the Director of the Institute for
Research on Women and Gender and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of
Law and Culture. Her research focuses on developing a critical theory of late lib­
eralism. This critical task is grounded in theories of the translation, transfiguration
and the circulation of values, materialities and socialities within settler liberalisms.
She is the author of three books: Labor’s Lot (University of Chicago Press, 1994),
The Cunning f Recognition (Duke University Press, 2002) and The Empire ofLove
(Duke University Press, 2006). She was the editor of Public Culture and sits on the
editorial committees/boards of Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropology and
Social Analysis.
William Rasch is Professor of German Studies and Director of the Center for
Theoretical Inquiry in the Humanities at the Indiana University. He is the author
of Niklas Luhmann’s Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2000) and Sovereignty and
Its Discontents (Birkbeck Law Press, 2004), editor of a collection of essays by
Luhmann called Theories of Distinction (Stanford University Press, 2002) as well as
editor or co-editor of numerous volumes and special issues on Luhmann, Carl
Schmitt, German film and the bombing war during the Second World War. His
current research centres on political and legal theory.
Henry Staten is Lockwood Professor in the Humanities and Adjunct Professor of
Philosophy at the University ofWashington. He is the author of Wittgenstein and Derrida
(University of Nebraska Press, 1984), Nietzsche’s Voice (Cornell University Press, 1990)
and Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).
Bernard Stiegler is the Director of the Department of Cultural Development at the
Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris and the founder of the political group Ars
Industrialis. He has published more than 25 books in French, his best-kiiown work
being the three-volume project La technique et le temps published in English translation
as Technics and Time, vol. 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford Umversity Press, 1998),
Technics and Time, vol 2: Disorientation (Stanford University Press, 2009), and Technics
and Time, vol. 3: Cinematic Time and the Question ofMalaise (Stanford University Press,
2011). He also published, with Jacques Derrida, Echographies of Television (Polity, 2002).
Other books in translation include Acting Out (Stanford Umversity Press, 2009) and For
a New Critique ofPolitical Economy (Polity, 2010).
Eugene Thacker is associate professor in the Media Studies programme at the
New School in New York. He is the author of After Life (University of Chicago
Press, forthcoming) as well as Horror f Philosophy (Zero Books, forthcoming).
Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice
University and founding editor of the Posthumanities series at the University of
Minnesota Press. His books and edited collections include Animal Rites: American
Culture, the Discourse ofSpecies, and Posthumanist Theory (University ofChicago Press,
2003), Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (University of Minnesota Press,
2003), ]What Is Posthumanism? (University ofMinnesota Press, 2003) and The Other
Emerson (ed. with Branka Arsic, University ofMinnesota Press, 2010).
Linda M. G. ZeriUi is Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Professor of Political
Science and the College and Professor of Gender Studies at the University of
Chicago. She has published in the areas of feminist theory, democratic theory and
Continental philosophy. Her most recent book is Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom
(University of Chicago Press, 2005).