After Poststructuralism : Writing the Intellectual History of Theory

This page intentionally left blank 'Aporia' is of course de Man's term, and it is here that the historiographic interest of the essay lies. For inasmuch as Corngold begins but departs from de Man's readings of Hegel, his essay is also a reflection on the limits of de Man's historiography. And here it is worth recalling Corngold's own earlier -but hardly binary -distinction between mistake and error, wherein mistakes are wrong but errors, as tropes or turnings caused by getting the story crooked, can be fruitful. 3 De Man's readings trace a series of errors in Hegel and are themselves produced by error. De Man's 'error,' we could say, is that highly idiosyncratic view of language as a random positional power that Rodolphe Gasche describes as 'linguistic materialism' -a view powerfully adumbrated in 'Shelley Disfigured' and 'Phenomenal!ty and Materiality in Kant.' As Gasche argues, de Man's chaos-theory of language makes of language a blind, singular power. His analyses are thus 'in-different' to philosophy: they do not seek to contribute to a philosophical argument, but simply expose the operations of language as 'position ' and 'figuration.' 4 In this view, a text's aporias are not phenomenally retrievable; they can only materially interrupt the text's transparency. By contrast Corngold, in his own words, deploys a 'phenomenological-historical' method. Corngold's method finds its stimulus in de Man's error, which it continues through its own error or wandering away from de Man. But this very concern with phenomenology and history requires that one also call a halt to 'error' and recognize the mistakes that error produces. 5 And among these is de Man's foreclosure of the possibility that aporias, in Hegel at least, might be phenomenally knowable through the 'labour of the negative' as the process of thinking things through. Whereas Corngold seeks to return error to the mistakes it elides, our next essay tries to revision certain mistakes as errors. Beginning from Corngold's distinction, Tilottama Rajan's 'The Double Detour: Sartre, Heidegger, and the Genealogy of Deconstruction' approaches philosophical error as the creative ground for a history that unfolds through Concerning Technology and Other Essays 3-35. See also Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society 12-18. WORKS CITED

Every history of theory is simultaneously a theory of history. Rajan and O'Driscoll's wide-ranging volume tackles the issue of providing an intellectual history of theory, given a considerable continuity between theory and the history of ideas, and also given theory's own questioning of traditional intellectual historical models. The editors address this challenge by providing thirteen essays on a variety of theorists from Derrida to Zizek. Under the paradigms of genealogy, performativity, physiology, and technology, the essayists explore metaphors for connecting the work of theorists from different times, that are drawn from areas other than history, and that can enrich and revise our understanding of the histories of theory.

Not only do these essays reflect the impact on writing about theory - and by extension on intellectual history - in areas such as psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature, and cultural studies, but they are also an exploration of theme and situation - the writing of intellectual history after the linguistic turn and the poststructuralist critique. Written for the theory specialists, as well as intellectual historians and those in the humanities and social sciences who are concerned with critical theory, the essays represent a re-evaluation of the current state of theory, as addressed by leading scholars in the field.

Contents 5 Acknowledgments 7 Introduction 9 Genealogies 33 Some Theoretical and Historical Complications in Hegel’s Aesthetics of Comedy 33 The Double Detour: Sartre, Heidegger, and the Genealogy of Deconstruction 51 The Premodern Condition: Neo-Primitivism in Baudrillard and Lyotard 96 The Sublime between History and Theory: Hegel, de Man, and Beyond 118 Performativities 137 Theatrum Theoreticum 137 Topo-philosophies: Plato’s Diagonals, Hegel’s Spirals, and Irigaray’s Multifolds 160 The Eclipse of Coincidence: Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, and V Žižek’s Misreading of Schelling 187 Physiologies 205 Contradictory Pieces of Time and History 205 The Body of History 235 Written in the Sand: Bataille’s Phenomenology of Transgression and the Transgression of Phenomenology 253 Technologies 273 Theory avant la Lettre: An Excavation in Early Modern England 273 Derrida, Foucault, and the Archiviolithics of History 292 De Man, Marx, Rousseau, and the Machine 318 Contributors 341 Index 345 Tackles the issue of providing an intellectual history of theory, given the considerable continuity between theory and the history of ideas. The editors address this challenge with thirteen essays on a variety of theorists from Derrida to Zizek.