French Theory Is Still Alive

Derided as irrelevant, French theory could make a comeback

By Franois Cusset

Why still bother with theory, French or otherwise? It would take a true rhetorical talent to
convince anyone today, even an academic humanist who hasnt left his or her campus for
years, that theory and the many debates surrounding it can have any impact, say, on
technological change, the leisure industry, the state of Western democracy, or global
geopoliticsor on the run-up to the next presidential election, for that matter. In other
words, isnt it simply too late to still be speaking about French theory and intellectual life
in the United States today?
The word "today" conjures up a mix of collective panic and historical changes, an utterly
confused, postcommunist, postcolonial age of global civil war and absolute
entertainment, religious terrorism and state terrorismthe age of a new type of empire
unsure as to who its real enemies are and how to identify, much less absorb, its "citizens."
In such an unsettling present, one wonders if there is anything left to expect from this
weird textual object known as theory, born between the two world wars or in the crazy
1970s, depending on historical accounts, but definable today as a strange breed of
American academic market rules, French (and more generally Continental) detachable
concepts, campus-based identity politics, and trendy pop culture. It seems to many
observers that the gap between real-life politics and theorys guerrillas is much too wide
already, after 30 years of academic fever, for the two worlds to even speak a common
language. Or for a possible use of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, or even Jacques
Derrida to shed some light on todays global disorderseven when Foucaults genealogy
of "biopolitics," Deleuzes comments on our "societies of control," and Derridas concept
of "unconditional hospitality," all coined more than two decades ago, appear to be exactly
addressing our contemporary situation.
This tendency to relegate theory to a leisurely time when "reality" wasnt a problem (but
did such a time ever exist, even before September 11, 2001?), and to call for more urgent
issues to be raised today than just theoretical ones, is where old-style liberals, or even
Marxists and neoconservative watchdogs, converge. They agree that theory is perilous
today, or at best just patently useless, much as the West German federal police and the
East German political police agreed that Foucault was dangerous or useless enough to
deserve being arrested twice during his visit to the two sides of Berlin in 1978. That is
exactly the kind of consensus that should be tirelessly questioned until it no longer holds,
today no less than 30 years ago.

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For in fact, theory and activism do converge today. They do so in certain new forms of
social activism, within a new generation of readers on both sides of the ocean who
manage to think and write in the lines of these authors, but always away from their
intimidating shadows. New uses of theorys major texts are possible today, even
necessary, beyond the age-old uncertainty over theory and praxis as two distinct
moments, in favor of what Deleuze and Flix Guattari would call "theoretical practice"
a real practical approach to theory.
But then, how to stick to such theoretical practices when the United States is under direct
attack? One of the saddest things about the immediate post-9/11 climate in the United
States public space, beyond blind patriotism and a frustrated virility willing to retaliate
as soon as possible, was surely the intellectual fields deliberate powerlessness. After
decades of rhetorically questioning the imperialistic West, deconstructing Americas
power, and demonizing the first worlds neocolonialism, the various radicals bred in
academic quarters stood still, mute and shocked. In the aftermath of the attacks on
New York City and Washington, most of these brilliant campus radicals didnt have
much to say about George W. Bush, Iraq, terror, national pride, and global
democracy, apart from a distant feeling of horror and disarray. Whereas liberals of
all sorts in Europe or Asia did expect some sort of awakening from their North American
counterparts, or a new inspiration to come from the belly of the beast, perhaps a new tone
on American campuses for times of emergency, what they witnessed was mostly selfcriticism and a sense of uselessness.
When touring campuses right after 9/11, I was astounded to discover that the dominant
feeling in academe was one of desperate impossibility, complete with guilt and
resentment. Yesterdays tenured radicals were now writing sophisticated articles just
to make a note of the insuperable gap between the world and the text, theory and
"reality," intellectual leisure and the new state of global emergency. Just when theory
was precisely challenged to speak out beyond self-reflection and lead to other issues
inseparable from todays situationthe issues of capitalism and its new social forms, of
the media and its industrial production of fear, of the exhausting of the rhetorics of
promise as political horizonacademic experts again limited theory to a specialized
debate.
But there is another side to the story. Theory is not only what academics do with it in a
specific disciplinary and historical contextsay, in Ivy League departments of literature
around the beginning of the 1990s. Neither identity politics nor textual strategies, the
two main currents into which Foucault or Derrida were channeled in the American
university, have exhausted the still unidentified flying object known as French
theory. What has been forgotten in the process of its American domestication is
nevertheless still there, at work in the text, hidden but still available. In that respect,
textual politics is still a potentially useful thing, and it is not merely the denial of "real"
politics that so many off-campus liberals keep deriding. Theory, in short, is not a thing of
the past, when theory, politics, and counterculture were best friends before the nasty
academic marketplace tore them apart and left us orphans.

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In fact, if there is a future for theory, it will start on campus, provided it doesnt die there.
But theory may even find a suitable nesting place there; for now that its passions and
controversies are over, now that it has been quietly normalized and institutionalized, it
may finally be possible to treat it with a historical approach, a colder eye, rather than with
the jargon-filled, decontextualized approach that has been a leading narrative of theory in
the United States. When speaking about theory, the choice seems for too long to have
been largely whether to mime it or to blame it. It is high time that we all go beyond that
approach.
But if theory is to be of any use nowadays, the many tricks and games implied by its
cultural metamorphoses should be taken seriously: by addressing the American identity
of French theory, and even by pondering the strange feedback effect of a recent return
of French theory to France, where it is now coming back undercover, under the
disguise of an American type of threat against Frances age-old abstract
universalism.
To put it bluntly, I would summarize the transferring of a body of theoretical texts from
1960s70s France to 1980s90s North America along three lines: First, the French issue
of writing has become the American issue of reading; second, the mystery of late
capitalism has been transformed into the enigma of cultural identity; and third, the
question of micropolitics has been turned into the very different question of symbolic
conflicts. When revolution is reinterpreted as stylized rebellion, when social forces
are turned into identity politics, when writing is replaced by reading, when texts
published by ditions Gallimard or Les ditions de Minuit wind up translated by
specialized university presses, when mottos coined during Left Bank marches are
being reused in New York art galleries, then indeed one can speak of a "structural
misunderstanding"not in the sense of a misreading, but in the sense of a highly
productive transfer of words and concepts from one specific market of symbolic goods to
another.
First, then, a shift from writing to reading. A mix of identity politics and an old American
tradition of metacommentary on education has placed a new stress on the identities and
internal diversity of the readers themselves (that is, most often, the students). There may
even be pragmatic reasons behind such a shift, at least for a reader to be simply able to
use a text. As far as the second and third shifts are concerned, they should probably both
stand under the general category of a denial of market forces. Which amounts to a case of
double denial: While campus Marxists derided French theory as an aesthetics, or a
rhetoric, minority experts often mistook it for a theory of cultural symbols. In fact,
Marxand, more broadly, any social critique of capitalmay be the major blind
spot of French theory on both sides of the Atlantic, although for opposite reasons:
Foucault, Deleuze, and even Derrida enjoyed such a success within American, but also
many third-world, universities precisely because of their distance from classical
Marxism, or because of what was even seen as their anti-Marxism; meanwhile they were
banned from their home country ???? under the charges of a perverse collusion with
the worst of leftist Marxism. Their texts, however, were neither pro-Marx nor anti-Marx.

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They were, rather, an endless confrontation with, discussion on, reinterpretation of
Marxism. ????
In any case, the denial of market forces helps explain what has been done with
French theory in many universities in the United States under the general label of cultural
studies: detailing clothing styles and coded lingos as forms of rebellious expression
with little or no consideration of social positions and contexts; debating sex wars
and gender norms with hardly a mention of the profitable commodification of
femininity; praising Madonna as a postfeminist icon, or denouncing her as a traitor
to feminism, but without ever mentioning her marketing tactics; and, more
generally, pointing at symbolic discriminations without analyzing the culture
industry as a whole, with its endless ability to absorb negativity, recycle criticism,
and gradually shift from mass promotion to a more timely marketing of differences
as cultural studies precisely chose to do around the end of the 1980s.
The problem is that one risks speaking the very language of late capitalism. One
risks mistaking theorists for what they clearly denounced: the promotion of
relativism, of fluctuating and nonreferential values, that is, a praise of the new
virtual, global, financial capitalism. Praising the autonomy of the signifier for itself,
the death of the subject for itself, or a general economics of floating signs and
drifting symbols detached from any stable standard only gives food for thought to
management gurus.
Maybe such readings of French theory are also a direct effect of the changing American
university, or of what the late professor of comparative literature Bill Readings called
The University in Ruins (Harvard University Press, 1996). The university too has to
comply with the new dogmas, the dogmas of self-regulation, of a paradigmatic Internet
network, and of the ultimate free market. Academe too has no other choice than to
break down all barriers to the dissemination of intellectual commodities. Maybe so,
but the result is to risk turning real social critics into trendy conservatives.
All "traveling theories," as the late Edward Said once called them, carry with them such a
risk, for they have always involved a disconnection from a specific context and
reconnection with a new onein this case, disconnection from a certain Continental
notion of writing, from the horizon of Marxism and revolution, and from a timely
critique of semiology and the linguistic turnand reconnection with many American
traditions like textual ontology and literary irony, best represented by the New Critics of
the 1940s, against the "fallacies" of psychology and intentionality. Reconnection too with
the American tradition of pragmatism. Reconnection with a historical tradition of
subversive counterreadings, a quintessentially American tradition that started with the
Founding Fathers and their reinterpretation of the Bible. Reconnection again, much closer
in time, with the bold new analysis of schizophrenia, therapy, and marginality
inaugurated in the 1950s by the likes of Gregory Bateson or R.D. Laing. Reconnection
may not be the right term: What should be said here is that there is a historical
convergence of the two branches, French and American, Foucault and Bateson, Deleuze
and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Derrida and Robert Penn Warren.

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Last, but not least, that exemplary adventure in intellectual dissemination can also shed
some new light on the broader epoch in which it took place, on the decisive context of
1980s America. It can renew our understanding of a decade torn between a brutal
conservative backlash and a historical crisis of Americanness, between a financial boom
and an identity fragmentation, or, in a sense, between Ronald Reagan and black studies
Leonard Jeffries; a time of tensions on campus culminating in the harsh PC debates of the
1990s and the cultural rise and political triumph of the neoconservatives. They seemed
harmless while they were screaming against Martin Bernal and his Black Athena: The
Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (Rutgers University Press, 1987); they look
scary now that they are advising the White House on Iraq, Israel, or old Europe.
And across the Atlantic, far from such a state of affairs, there was the simultaneous
French erasure of French theory. Around the beginning of the 1980s, right when the
works of Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, and Jean-Franois Lyotard were being put to work
on American campuses as the theoretical foundation for a new type of politics, those
very names were being demonized in France as the epitome of an outdated
"libidinal" and leftist type of politics. What we are facing here is a symmetrically
reversed situation: on the one hand, a society run by a new wave of conservatives, but
whose intellectual field, limited to isolated campuses, enjoys a proliferation of radical
discourses, minority theories, and bold textual innovations, with little effect on the rest of
Americas public space; on the other hand, a country run by a new wave of liberals
(Franois Mitterrands "socialists"), but whose broad intellectual field, occupying a
central role in the public space, has just been taken over by a herd of young center-left
humanists, with the result of sweeping away leftist and radical tendencies and
replacing them with a universalist moral blackmail still on the front stage in todays
France.
Now that the last survivors of French theory have disappeared (Derrida in 2004, Jean
Baudrillard in 2007), the neo-Kantians and abstract universalists who forged their
reputations in the antitotalitarian late 1970s are still in power in France, they are
still advising governments, still appearing on prime-time television, still filling up
the nonfiction best-seller lists. All in all, they are one major reason, with their
unquestioned essentialism and their daunting vision of an apocalypse of civilization, why
the proud French Rpublique seems so scared by a few schoolgirls wearing a Muslim
scarf.
The nightmarish promise of a Balkanized society made up of selfish and conflicting
radical identity groups, in the view of all French columnists and most French citizens, is
identified with the contemporary United States. That very argument has just been voiced
again, maybe more hysterically than ever (speak of a change in French politics!) during
the run-up to the last presidential elections in France, when Nicolas Sarkozy urged a
national wake-up call against the twin evils of "cultural relativism" and the decline of
Western values.
And yet, behind such bad news, things are starting to alter in France, with a change of
focus, language, and generation. Such changes include legal battles in favor of

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homosexual couples or malefemale equality, a reconsideration of Frances immigration
"problem" in the light of its long-overlooked colonial history, a rejuvenated
anticapitalism, and various new forms of minority movements. French society is now at a
time when all those American intellectual currents, forbidden for import over the last
three decades, can finally be put to use in making sense of an unprecedented situation.
Indeed, universities and independent publishers are working hard these days to
make cultural studies, minority theories, "pop" philosophy, gender analyses, and
the postcolonial paradigm not only better known in France (the only major country
where prominent theorists behind such currents had not yet been translated), but
also critically reformulated to better address specifically French issues. In that sense,
it could be that an old gap is finally about to be bridged: just as Sarkozys and Bushs
obvious agreement on many things smells like one sort of FrenchAmerican
reconciliation, common lines of attack and reflection among activists and left-wing
academics on both sides of the ocean look like another sort of timely trans-Atlantic
alliance. We will be able to work and think and act and march together again, not just
French and American free-minded citizens, but also their counterparts anywhere in the
world, beyond good old national borders.
Nothing may be more essential to political resistance and intellectual autonomy today
than not taking for granted texts and discourses, from literature to ideological
propaganda. Grounds for action and subversion will be found in the undecidability of
meaning, in the construction of a text by the ever-changing community of its
readers, in the leeway still to be found in interpreting a canonical work, even in the
deliberate stretching of the gap between text and context, signifier and uses, the
worship of classics, and the tricks of hermeneutical action. Reactionary politics and
the locking up of the existing social order will always require, on the contrary, a
submission to essentialized texts, to unquestioned canons, to interpretation
understood as the revelation by others of a one-sided meaning. Where interpretation
is obvious, where it is not a question, power reigns supreme; where it is wavering,
flickering, opening its uncertainty to unpredictable uses, empowerment of the powerless
may be finally possible.
The authors usually gathered under the label of French theory have always been obsessed
by such issues, and they were indeed convinced that protest does entail a reappropriation
of texts and other cultural commodities; notwithstanding the fact that they, more than
anyone else, found themselves submitted to such interpretative liberties, especially in the
United States. That is why these authors, their texts, and the endless interpretations they
inspire (together forming one cultural continuum) can still help us fashion a future of
struggles and world makingwithin but also beyond higher education, in the United
States but also throughout the rest of the world. n
Franois Cusset is a writer and intellectual historian at the Institute of Political Studies
and Columbia Universitys Reid Hall in Paris. This essay is adapted from his French
Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the
United States, translated by Jeff Fort with Josephine Berganza and Marlon Jones and
published by the University of Minnesota Press this month. Copyright by 2003

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ditions la Dcouverte. English translation copyright 2008 by the Regents of the
University of Minnesota.