Untying Things Together: Philosophy, Literature, and a Life in Theory

By Eric L. Santner

Untying Things Together helps to clarify the stakes of the last fifty years of literary and cultural theory by proposing the idea of a sexuality of theory.

In 1905, Freud published his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the book that established the core psychoanalytic thesis that sexuality is central to formations of the unconscious. With this book, Eric L. Santner inverts Freud’s title to take up the sexuality of theory—or, more exactly, the modes of enjoyment to be found in the kinds of critical thinking that, since the 1960s, have laid claim to that ancient word, “theory.” Santner unfolds his argument by tracking his own relationship with this tradition and the ways his intellectual and spiritual development has been informed by it.

Untying Things Together is both an intellectual history of major theoretical paradigms and a call for their reexamination and renewal. Revisiting many of the topics he has addressed in previous work, Santner proposes a new way of conceptualizing the eros of thinking, attuned to how our minds and bodies individually and collectively incorporate or “encyst” on a void at the heart of things. Rather than proposing a “return to theory,” Santner’s book simply employs theory as a way of further “(un)tying together” the resources of philosophy, art and literature, theology, psychoanalysis, political thought, and more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Apr 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9780226816487

Eric L. Santner

Eric L. Santner is the Harriet and Ulrich E. Meyer Professor of Modern European Jewish History at the University of Chicago, where he teaches in the Department of Germanic Studies. He is the author of Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany.

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Untying Things Together

Untying Things Together

Philosophy, Literature, and a Life in Theory

Eric L. Santner

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2022 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81646-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81647-0 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81648-7 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226816487.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Santner, Eric L., 1955– author.

Title: Untying things together : philosophy, literature, and a life in theory / Eric L. Santner.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021033646 | ISBN 9780226816463 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226816470 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226816487 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Theory (Philosophy) | Freud, Sigmund, 1856–1939.

Classification: LCC B842 .S335 2022 | DDC 140—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033646

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Preface

INTRODUCTION   On Some Causes for Excitement

CHAPTER ONE   A Life in Theory

CHAPTER TWO   Theory and the Jewish Question

CHAPTER THREE   Too Much Sad

CHAPTER FOUR   Caninical Theory

CHAPTER FIVE   The Manafold of Experience

CHAPTER SIX   Will Wonders Never Cease: Remarks on Post-Thaumatic Stress Disorder

CHAPTER SEVEN   The Stranger Order of Things

EPILOGUE

Acknowledgments

Index

Footnotes

Preface

A number of years ago, in the discussion following a lecture I gave at the University of California, Berkeley, someone asked me how I would characterize my method. The question had a critical edge and seemed in part to be asking how I identified myself in the context of university disciplines, in part to be asking about what struck the questioner as an odd way of working with concepts, my tendency to distort them by incorporating them (or parts of them), often through a play on words, into neologisms, each of which thereby takes on the aspect of a disjunctive Aufhebung, one that displays the relative autonomy of its parts. This book is in many ways an attempt to answer those questions even though it was not conceived that way. Indeed, the title of the book, Untying Things Together, is both an example of the problem and a way of addressing it. It signals my efforts to bring together literary texts, works of art, philosophical arguments, psychoanalytic concepts in a way that registers their limits, their need for supplementation and support by a neighbor discourse without thereby losing their distinctiveness.

I am mindful here of the great German-Jewish thinker Franz Rosenzweig’s account of what he called the new thinking that, in his telling, emerges when the insufficiencies and impasses of modern philosophy and theology, their co-involvement in a legitimation crisis of knowledge, open on to a new understanding of what is meant by thinking. In Rosenzweig’s case, the call for a new thinking proved to be incompatible with the pursuit of what Max Weber famously elaborated under the heading of Wissenschaft als Beruf, science as a calling/vocation. The letter that Rosenzweig wrote in 1920 to Friedrich Meinecke explaining his decision to leave academia could indeed be read as a kind of counterargument to Weber’s 1917 lecture. I will return to this conflict of the faculties later in the book. My own work has been in large measure an effort to offer a third way, that is, to practice something like what Rosenzweig called the new thinking within the university. My argument will be that this third way has much to do with what, beginning in the 1960s, has been practiced in various humanities disciplines—and not just at North American universities—under the heading of theory.

A kind of methodological image that comes to mind appears in a famous prose text by Kafka that I have addressed in other work and do so again in this book. In it a strange creature called Odradek causes a family father to wonder about the integrity and future of his household in large measure because of the questionable ontological integrity of the creature that has intermittently taken up residence there:

At first it looks like a flat, star-shaped spool for thread, and in fact, it does seem to be wound with thread; although these appear to be only old, torn-off pieces of thread of the most varied kinds and colors knotted together but tangled up in one another. But it is not just a spool, for a little crossbar sticks out from the middle of the star, and another little strut is joined to it at a right angle. With the help of the second little strut on the one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright, as if on two legs. It is tempting to think that this figure once had some sort of functional shape and is now merely broken. But this does not seem to be the case; at least there is no evidence for such a speculation; nowhere can you see any other beginnings or fractures that would point to anything of the kind; true, the whole thing seems meaningless yet in its own way complete. In any case, it is impossible to say anything more definite about it, since Odradek is extraordinarily mobile and impossible to catch.¹

Odradek is an entity that might be said to be untied together, if not exactly into a single entity, then at least into something of one. Furthermore, Odradek is itself a sort of punning neologism in that the name—if it even is that—which in the text is said to incorporate both Slavic and Germanic elements, has, in the hands of numerous scholars, ended up free associating with multiple series of words in both language families, words that congregate around various kinds of drift and nonbelonging. My own sense of almost familial intimacy with Odradek—at the very least, that we belong to the same congregation—is such that I’ve come to think of my work as contributions to a new science of constitutively errant objects, call it Odradek studies.

In his efforts to debunk the myth of disenchantment that informs so many accounts of modernity, Jason Josephson-Storm offers his own image of a patchwork of some of the very discourses I will be addressing here. His claim is that, if one were to assemble a Franco-Frankfurt-Frankenstein’s monster out of oft-taught fragments from German critical theory, French poststructuralism, a dash of feminism, and more than a hint of Heidegger, the undead creature one would end up with would vaguely resemble the German New Age philosopher Ludwig Klages, whose esoteric teachings appear to have influenced some of the very figures associated with the myth of disenchantment, among them, Max Weber, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno.² As I hope to show in this volume, Odradek was made of rather different stuff than Josephson-Storm’s monster, whose testimony is ultimately meant to reinitiate moderns into cosmic mysteries disavowed by modern hermeneuts of suspicion. Though I share the basic thrust of Josephson-Storm’s argument, namely, that we have never been disenchanted, I will be arguing in a more Marxist vein that the occult sciences of the moderns are hidden in plain sight, indeed in the very practices of everyday life that count as most secular and most disenchanted.

To go back to the Q&A at Berkeley, I recall that I was somewhat flustered by the question for I had never really given a lot of thought to methodology and have always felt a deep resistance to doing so. Some of that resistance has to do with the contingencies of my intellectual biography, the influence of which has become a red thread running through and untying together the following chapters. Quite simply, I never fully settled into any discipline, never fully embraced my departmental identity, never felt at home in any single field, never really identified with the title scholar, or, as one says in German, Literaturwissenschaftler, scientist of literature (thus the lure of Odradek studies as a kind of alternative to Wissenschaft als Beruf). Surely this is one of the things that helped me to bond with Rosenzweig, who, as noted, himself left the university to undertake alternative, undisciplined pedagogical and literary projects no longer constrained by the discourse of the university. No doubt it also contributed to my attraction to the case of Daniel Paul Schreber, whose psychotic break was precipitated by a crisis of investiture, an inability to identify with his sociosymbolic identity and authority as judge.

It is, however, Freud’s perspective, his way of engaging with his materials, that has perhaps had the greatest influence on my approach to things, even though I never systematically studied his oeuvre. I never took a course on Freud and started reading him relatively late in life, even though as an adolescent I had already clocked some time on an analytic couch. At any rate, when I fumbled around for an answer to the question raised at Berkeley, I said, without having thought of this notion before, that my work could be seen as dedicated to the dreamwork of the concept. A more Lacanian formulation would, perhaps, be the instance of the letter in the concept. The thought here is that every significant concept says more than it knows, that the life of a concept includes something like an unconscious. Which is to say that the more that it doesn’t know that it knows is not more positive knowledge as, for example, when we discover more properties of the thing named by a concept (that, for example, COVID-19 can be transmitted by air). It pertains, rather, to a dimension of stasis, a kind of semantic turbulence or signifying stress immanent to the concept and the forms of life in which it gains its meaning. This turbulence ramifies through the signifying material of the semantic field at issue the way a wish, as Freud demonstrated, ramifies through the displacements and condensations elaborated by the dreamwork. Much of this book addresses the nature of those ramifications for understanding what I would still like to call by that old-fashioned term the human condition. Recalling that Hannah Arendt entitled the German version of her book of that name Vita Activa oder vom tätigen Leben, my argument is, however, that Freud’s discovery points to an intensification of our active life that introduces aberrations, errancy, excess into the very domains that for Arendt constitute the human condition.

As I discuss in the introduction, this book grew out of an experience of writer’s block, a kind of stasis plaguing my creative capacities. Approaching and then turning sixty-five surely played a role in this. I was not sure if I had another book in me, and I certainly did not want to force it. I did, however, have an idea that I thought might be worth pursuing, one that had a very clear frame provided by the grace of a chiasmus. The project would involve a sort of commentary on Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and be organized by shifting the center of gravity of the concepts so as to read Three Essays on the Sexuality of Theory. This would give me a chance to engage with a question that has preoccupied me throughout my academic career: What is the sex appeal of what we have, in academia, come to call theory? What are we doing when we (as one used to say) do theory? As it turned out, Freud’s Three Essays proved to be an unworkable model. What emerged instead was a kind of self-analysis about my own involvement with the intellectual currents linked to a term that, though of ancient lineage, had come, at least since the 1960s, to be sur-charged with world-historical as well as erotic import.

This retrospective, autobiographical aspect would seem to give these reflections a certain owl of Minerva quality; that is, it becomes possible only at the point at which the concepts and practices at issue have begun to lose their salience. The allusion here is to Hegel’s preface to his Philosophy of Right. The full quote is, When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old. . . . The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.³ This book might thereby be seen to be part of a larger current in contemporary literary studies that has come to be characterized as postcritical, a coming to terms with what Rita Felski refers to in the book of that name, the limits of critique.⁴ One of the admirable aims of that critique of critique has been to generate a more capacious, more embodied, more lived engagement above all with literature, to deepen our experiential exposure to the charms and resonances of poetic speech. This more would allow us, finally, to step out from under the judgmental shadow of the hermeneutics of suspicion that had seemed to turn all acts of reading into so many exercises of ideological unmasking and disenchantment. (As we have seen, for Josephson-Storm, this new suspicion of hermeneutics leads to the claim that disenchantment, rather than being a process of draining culture of its mythic dimensions, turns out to be modernity’s constitutive myth.) That skeptical, not to say paranoid, approach that searched everywhere for the invisible hand of domination behind the enchanting screen of literary language derived much of its considerable intellectual authority and cultural capital from the names of some of the great master theorists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud to Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, among others. My own sense of a properly postcritical approach to one’s materials and one’s attachments to them takes a somewhat different point of departure.

It was, after all, Hegel himself who most compellingly and consequentially attempted to push thinking beyond the limits of critique in the sense given that concept by Kant (above all in his Critique of Pure Reason). The fundamental gesture of that push was to relocate the Thing-in-Itself that, in Kant’s view, exceeded the grasp of human knowledge—critique was meant to police that threshold against metaphysical trespass—within the world itself and its forms of intelligibility that were, in turn, always part and parcel of a historical form of life, always embedded in our embodied forms of agonistic sociability. What Kant located in a noumenal realm beyond phenomena becomes, for Hegel, a kind of conceptual agitation immanent to the realm of phenomena that thereby ceases to be a realm at all in the sense of a consistent whole delimited by knowable boundaries. (No doubt one meaning of what Hegel called absolute knowledge involves absolution from such boundaries.)

In a sense, Hegel’s point was that (Kantian) critique functions as a kind of defensive posture against the at times tragic, at times comedic disorientations of being in the midst of life and the turbulence of history, a way of protecting oneself against the partiality and partisanship at play in our commitments and claims about the world. Partiality and partisanship are seen here not as symptoms of merely subjective perspectives on the world, exercises of a particular will to power, but rather as ways of being in the midst of a world that is itself still undergoing creation, a process that, as I want to argue, is not synonymous with what we have come to refer to as social or cultural construction (the traces of which the hermeneutics of suspicion was always at pains to demonstrate). In the chapters that follow, I will be arguing that much of what has, at least in humanities departments at universities in Europe, North America, and beyond, come under the heading of theory from the 1960s onward was postcritical in this Hegelian sense (as we will see, for a great many of the thinkers in question, Hegel remained one if not the crucial point of reference in their work). At its best, theory was dedicated to inquiries concerning the nature of the work at play—and the play at work—in that work in progress called world, inquiries into the meaning of the creatureliness of what is both subject of and subject to the forces of creation.

While studying at the Tübinger Stift, Hegel joined his friends Friedrich Hölderlin and F. W. J. Schelling in the composition of what might be characterized as the first postcritical manifesto, a brief text to which its discoverer, Franz Rosenzweig, gave the title Das Älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus (The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism).⁵ They conceived their project as one that transforms the impetus of Kant’s critical project and the aspirations of the Enlightenment more generally—and here they include those of the French Revolution—into a new social, cultural, and aesthetic pedagogy guided by what they call a mythology of reason, itself grasped as the overlapping of a Monotheism of reason and the heart . . . [and a] polytheism of the imagination and art. What interests me, above all, is a statement made in the very first paragraph of the manifesto that essentially asks how the world must be constituted, such that a moral being can emerge in it.⁶ As we will see, Slavoj Žižek picks up on this question in his debates with major new trends in Hegel scholarship. There he insists, very much in the spirit of this early, postcritical manifesto, that he develops the topic of ontological incompleteness—what I have characterized as the dimension of creatureliness—in order to answer the question ‘How should reality be structured so that (something like) subjectivity can emerge in it?’⁷ For Žižek as well as for the authors of the first postcritical manifesto, the answer revolves around and, as it were, pulsively theorizes this point of convergence of subjectivity and ontological incompleteness, this point at which a peculiar sort of deficit is seemingly shared, a nameless gap is jointly occupied, by human being and world. Or as I put it in the discussion that follows, human subjectivity encysts (on) a gap already troubling the Other, whether that is taken to be another human being, a family, a form of life, a tradition, or indeed nature itself. The wager of this book is that those discourses that have, for better or worse, been grouped under the heading of theory (or even high theory) take part in this circuit of pulsive theorizations that Freud, for his part, had shown to be constitutive of human sexuality and therewith of a distinctively human sort of vital pressure at odds with the homeostatic imperatives that regulate biological life. As I will also argue, this very oddness—in theory-speak, queerness—is what Freud came to link, to paraphrase E. E. Cummings, to the oddness of God to choose the Jews and thereby to the cause of anti-Semitism.

Another aspect of the postcritical approach that has played a part in my own life in theory is the view that every act of reading is at some level transferential in nature and in that sense constitutively unsuspicious, willingly enchantable. I have found that I am unable to fully engage with a work of literature or philosophy—especially demanding ones—unless I at some level presuppose that the author knows what he or she is doing, is in command of their materials. If I get confused, I go on the assumption that I missed or misunderstood something, that I need to go back, reread, and get reoriented. Put somewhat differently, there can be no proper hermeneutics of suspicion without first entering into and finding one’s way through the thicket of the hermeneutic circle, something that requires not just reading but a great deal of rereading. It’s really only then that one can make genuine discoveries of those tensions, impasses, and enigmas, those cloudy spots, to use a term coined by Walter Benjamin apropos of Kafka, that belong to the substance itself, whether it’s a fictional world, a philosophical argument, a poem.⁸ I am tempted to say that it is also at such points that one can experience a kind of intimacy with the author, that one encounters the author as subject (in chapter 2 I give a concrete example of this experience in the context of my relationship with Franz Rosenzweig). One might also think, in this context, of Jacques Lacan’s pun used as the title of his twenty-first seminar, les non-dupes errent, which in French can be heard as les noms du père; the formula suggests that those who assume from the start the critical posture, perhaps especially one fortified by psychoanalytic theory, to avoid being duped are the ones who are really duped.

Yet another dimension of the postcritical stance I assume in my work with theory is what might strike some as a soft pluralism, a willingness to patch, to (un)tie together concepts that would seem to belong to antithetical theoretical paradigms, in a word, that I don’t take sides, don’t assume the very partisanship that I’ve suggested is part and parcel of one’s existential and libidinal implication in a world. Here I can only say that my partisanship is itself only ever partial, only ever made up of parts that hopefully, when placed in the right constellation, allow me to gain proximity to what is really troubling the material in question. This approach is, as I will argue, consonant with Walter Benjamin’s insight about translation, namely, that what is ultimately at issue in a text, what it is ultimately trying to say, only truly becomes manifest in its translation into another language, in what we might call the here and now of the translation. Or to refer to Benjamin’s famous contemporary Carl Schmitt, my approach to the theoretical paradigms and concepts with which I work is not political in the sense that he, Schmitt, gave that term, namely, that it always implies a friend-enemy relation, a division into oppositional camps. But as I also well know, one can never be in control of how one is oneself viewed in the context of a field ridden with polemics.

My mother told me that as a child I would sometimes go to sleep with a penny in my hand and hold it all night so that by morning my hand would have turned green from the copper. I have no idea how old I was when I did this, if I did this on a regular basis, only a few times, perhaps even only once but recalled by my mother as a recurring eccentricity of what she perhaps perceived as an incipient anal character trait. In a sense it doesn’t matter because the story rings so true to me. If not exactly a recollection, it captures something of my own sense of my childhood self. I’m tempted to say that it represents my first attempt to cope with a deficit that did not belong to me or even to anyone in particular; it was, rather, atmospheric, and yet I somehow felt it was in me. In a word, I breathed in and struggled to metabolize an impasse, something not working in the world, in the form of life, the big Other to which I belonged. The nature of that peculiar deficit and the work involved with managing, with economizing it (or, rather, imagining that one is doing so), ultimately leads, as I will argue in the following chapters, to the intersection of libidinal and political economy that has been at the core of the researches that have loosely gathered under the heading of theory. As I will further argue, the path toward that point of intersection has a certain Beckettian quality, one that leads into the neighborhood of what Beckett referred to as the unnullable least of creaturely life.⁹ And so: worstward ho!

Introduction

On Some Causes for Excitement

I

For some time now, I’ve wanted to write a small book with the title Three Essays on the Sexuality of Theory. As noted in the preface, I decided not to pursue that project because of the formal constraints of the frame, the pressure to produce exactly three essays that would more or less directly correspond with Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (The Sexual Aberrations, Infantile Sexuality, and Transformations of Puberty). In lieu of that volume, I want to share the rationale for the project beyond the compelling allure—the sex appeal—of its chiasmic reversal of Freud’s title. My intuition was that the kind of intellectual inquiry that in literary and cultural studies has for a number of years loosely gone under the heading of theory had something to do not just with sexuality but with sexuality as understood by Freud and first laid out in systematic fashion in his 1905 essays. The idea was not that all such work directly or even indirectly addressed questions of sexuality as was and continues to be the case, say, in feminist theory, gender theory, or queer theory. My hunch was rather that theory at a certain point became a kind of shibboleth for all inquiries concerned with the socialization and acculturation of our embodied being, the ways in which, to use Judith Butler’s formulation, human bodies come to matter, get caught up in, get sutured to, signifying operations that invest them with meanings and statuses, endow them with values, entitle—or even enjoin—them to enjoyment of one kind or another.¹ One might speak of processes of cultural anthropogenesis in which the entry into the symbolic system of language, the taking up of the role of a player in a culture’s language games, is the core event, one in which something of the order of the signifier gets under our skin and intensifies the body even if, as Émile Durkheim put it in a related context, the role of matter is at a minimum.²

My guiding thought here was that, when bodies come to matter, the subject matter of sexuality is always at some level called into play. Recalling the etymology of excite from excitare, to summon or call out, we might say that bodies that matter are excited bodies and so, in turn, exciting bodies. Theory, in the intellectual tradition that concerns me here, held and continues to hold out the promise of getting in on all that excitement. It does so by in some sense catching the body in the act of its inaugural excitations, in the midst of the emergence of sexuality as a constitutive by-product of our inscription into a historical form of life.

One thinks, to take one example, of Foucault’s writings about disciplinary power and biopower, about the ways these modern forms of power intensify the body and enter into the production of sexuality (admittedly in a sense Foucault wished to distinguish from Freud’s).³ How could such theory not itself be a considerable cause for excitement beyond whatever knowledge production it might yield? Leo Bersani, a great student of Foucault’s work, used a formulation some years ago that struck me as almost the proper name of the subject matter at issue when bodies come to matter. He characterized the drives as first laid out in Freud’s three essays as pulsive theorizations, a peculiar overlapping of physiological and epistemological/hermeneutic energies called forth by every child’s exposure to enigmatic messages emanating from the big Other of its caregiving environment.⁴ At a fundamental level, such messages convey inconsistencies and contradictions, a sense of something not working in the Other on which it depends for its physical and psychological survival.

In previous work I have used the term creaturely life to capture the nature of the excitement that splits our life-form into itself and the historically contingent forms of life in which it must be inscribed to flourish, a split that seems to undermine from within the capacity to flourish. Creaturely, as I use the term, signifies a mode of exposure peculiar to human life, exposure not simply to the elements or to the fragility and precariousness of our mortal, finite lives, but rather to an ultimate—and ultimately exciting—lack of foundation of the historical forms of life in which it takes place. This crucial missing piece of the world, this lack to which we are ultimately and intimately exposed as social beings of language, is one that we thus first acquire by way of our initiation into these forms of life, not one already there in the bare fact of our biological being (and, thus, one not readily accessible to the biological sciences). We could say that the precariousness, the fragility—the nudity—of biological life becomes potentiated, amplified, by way of exposure to the radical contingency of the forms of life that constitute the space of meaning within which human life unfolds, and that it is only through such potentiation that we take on the flesh of creaturely life, the carnal enjoyment that gathers around this missing link. Creatureliness is thus a dimension not so much of biological as ontological vulnerability, a vulnerability that permeates human being as that being whose essence it is to exist in forms of life that are, in turn, contingent, fragile, susceptible to breakdown—that are created and de-created.⁵

What came under the heading of theory thus involved something like a linguistic turn to the body, or perhaps better, into the body; it was always at some level engaged with the mysterious event of the word becoming flesh, of, to use Foucault’s terms, discursive practices intensifying the body. Here the relevant biblical reference would not only be John 1:14 but also, perhaps more importantly, the Letter to the Romans where Paul explicitly links the notion of the flesh, the sarx—as distinct from the soma, the body—to the autonomy of desire as a supplementary and wayward law, as a kind of deviant imperative at work in one’s members. For Paul, the flesh is a kind of surplus soma attached to the body, an enigmatic bonus—or, rather, malus—excited into being by the commanding letter of the law.⁶ I am suggesting that theory has exercised its attractions on its readers and acolytes by way of this sarxist dimension that, in light of Paul’s remarks, I would characterize as a hermeneutic inflammation of the soma, a sort of vicious—or better, deliciously vicious—circle secreted within the hermeneutic circle of interpretation.

Jacques Lacan and his followers have long linked such a fleshy surplus to what they characterize as the constitutively hysterical status of the subject. As Slavoj Žižek put it very early on in his work, "the hysterical question opens the gap of what is ‘in the subject more than the subject,’ of the object in the subject which resists interpellation—subordination of the subject, its inclusion in the symbolic network."⁷ But also expressly anti-psychoanalytic theorists like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari who, as the latter has said, have no use for signifiers, ought, in my view, to be understood as representatives of a kind of sarxist materialism. Their project was, however, to unhinge the surplus soma—the body without organs—from its hermeneutic anchorage points and rethink the excitations that bedeviled Paul (and that remain linked to a commanding paternal Other, to God the Father) as pulsations of an impersonal, machinic desire operating in and through individual and social bodies.⁸ The dimension of the sarx constitutes, we might say, the subject-matter, the virtually real materiality, in the subject matter of sexuality.

There was then, as these preliminary remarks indicate, good reason for the perception that theory, even when not directly addressing sexuality, was somehow sexier than, say, straight philosophy or other forms of literary scholarship. If, as Freud thought, thinking could function as a mode of sublimation of sexual drives and desires, the forms of thinking that gathered under the heading of theory seemed to offer a particularly concentrated dose of that sublimity. Doing theory offered a mode of enjoyment linked to the repetition of the pulsive theorizations that suffuse human sexuality, the particular forms of excitations it involves.

There are doubtlessly many at times overlapping, at times competing stories one could tell about the emergence of this mode of intellectual inquiry, this explicit or implicit fixation on a constitutive inflammation of our embodied being linked to discursivity. And indeed, historical introductions to and commentaries on the (largely French) master thinkers who came to be identified with theory were for a time a major genre of academic publishing. What is especially difficult to delineate are the temporal signposts of this formation, when it began, when or indeed whether it ended, that is, whether we have entered a period of post-theory or, as one refers to it now, post-criticism. But it is just as difficult to establish the boundaries of what counts as theory, to establish, at the very least, a proper canon of the primary texts of what might be called high theory.

While wondering about this, I searched my own library for copies of some of those older introductory texts that served sometimes well, sometimes not so well, as orientation during my own initiation into this world but found to my dismay that I had given most of them away. I did, however, find a volume written expressly in the aftermath of theory, a study that casts a simultaneously critical and nostalgic glance back at its glory days, Terry Eagleton’s After Theory. The book, which was published in 2003, begins with a historical pronouncement that also gives a good sense of the canon at issue: The golden age of cultural theory is long past. The pioneering work of Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault are several decades behind us. So are the path-breaking writings of Raymond Williams, Luce Irigaray, Pierre Bourdieu, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Jürgen Habermas, Fredric Jameson and Edward Said. Not much that has been written since has matched the ambitiousness and originality of these founding mothers and fathers.⁹ I am not an intellectual historian and am ill-equipped to do justice to the complexity of the history that culminated in this golden age. Instead of a proper intellectual history, I’d simply like to sketch out what I take to be some of the crucial moments and dimensions of the emergence of the intellectual formation that came to be called theory.

II

Whatever other genealogies one might offer, I think it’s relatively uncontroversial to say that what came to be practiced under the heading of theory, even though its master thinkers were of an older generation, forms part of the legacy of the fervor of the 1960s and the various social and political movements that emerged or took on new shape and energy in that decade. Though these movements could vary considerably across national and cultural boundaries, they did generally share an antiauthoritarian and new left thrust. Another way of putting it would be to say that