The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory

Jeffrey R. Di Leo

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781350183612
• eBook ISBN: 9781350012813
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria di letteratura comparata

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory is the most comprehensive available survey of the state of theory in the 21st century. With chapters written by the world's leading scholars in their field, this book explores the latest thinking in traditional schools such as feminist, Marxist, historicist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial criticism and new areas of research in ecocriticism, biopolitics, affect studies, posthumanism, materialism, and many other fields.

In addition, the book includes a substantial A-to-Z compendium of key words and important thinkers in contemporary theory, making this an essential resource for scholars of literary and cultural theory at all levels.

PART ONE

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Essays

Chapter one

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Early Theory

Paul Allen Miller

Theory is often considered to be a critical practice of relatively recent vintage. We speak of the linguistic or the theoretical “turn.” The problem of course is that “theory” as a separate “thing” is largely a disciplinary fiction. Having begun life in the American university system as “literary theory,” in the 1970s and 1980s it represented an attempt to come to terms with the rapid developments in linguistics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, the social sciences, and the formal study of literary and rhetorical technique that were known as structuralism and post-structuralism. These theoretical interventions, mostly centered in post-1968 France,¹ but drawing on traditions of linguistic and literary scholarship that originated in the former Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Denmark, were often combined with the Hegelian Marxism of Frankfurt school critical theory, Georg Lukács, and Bertolt Brecht. The result was a heady mixture of diverse traditions and focused debates. Comparative and general literature programs were at the center of this intellectual ferment in the United States. They combined a traditional interest in the definitional problems of literary form with the cosmopolitan and multilingual perspective necessary to engage these issues. At the same time, philosophy departments in the United States remained tied for the most part to a tradition of Anglo-American logical positivism and scientific empiricism that left little room for the speculatory flights of their continental confrères. Theory was new. Theory was avant-garde. Theory was opposed to traditional scholarship. These were all the truisms of the age.

In fact, however, if one returns to the texts of those who were considered the leading lights of post-structuralist theory, a very different vision emerges. Of course, in many cases, these thinkers offer new insights and contest traditional readings of the texts they examined and of the topics they engaged. But they do so very much from within the dominant traditions of Western thought and by engaging many of the central texts of the Western canon. A number of books and articles have been published in the last twenty years demonstrating the deep engagement of the major thinkers of French post-structuralist theory with the classic texts of Western thought.² If theory is a dissident movement within Western thought, it is one with a very long and well-attested pedigree.

In what follows I will offer what limited space demands to be a cursory chronicle of these thinkers’ engagement with what we can only call “early theory.” I will survey the work of Lacan, Derrida, Cixous, Irigaray, Foucault, and Kristeva in terms of their engagement with the classical past. In each case, we will see that their commitment to early theory is substantive and extensive, offering less a rejection of traditional scholarship than a continuing engagement with it.

There was from the beginning a strong affinity between Lacan’s work and philology. As Jean-Michel Rabaté observes, “Lacan . . . stood out among his immediate contemporaries and colleagues in psychiatry as a philosopher who could read Greek and German fluently and who put to good use his knowledge of the classics.”³ For Lacan the study of the Classics was central. His return to Freud sought not to found a series of timeless truths, but to “re-found” the subject in relation to the discrete forms of meaning that structured its desire. It is paradigmatic of Lacan’s engagement with Greco-Roman antiquity that in 1959, when searching for a model of pure desire for his seminar on “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,” he chose Sophocles’s Antigone. His reading of the tragedy represents the climax of a three-year engagement with the tragic genre that had begun with Hamlet and would end with Claudel’s Coûfontaine trilogy. Throughout this period there are references in the seminars to Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus. Nonetheless, it is the reading of the character of Antigone as one who does not cede on her desire that is considered a masterpiece by classicists like Nicole Loraux.

The following year, Lacan focused on Plato’s Symposium for his seminar on “transference.” Socrates, like Antigone, represents for Lacan a purity that exceeds the bounds of communally acknowledged goods. His atopia, as Alcibiades terms it,⁴ places him beyond the bounds of the order defined by the Athenian polis, and it is that singularity that is the basis of his purity. What Lacan sought in the figure of Socrates as portrayed in the Symposium was a model for elaborating a theory of Eros as a response to the fundamental lack in our being that Freudian theory sees as the root of human desire. These two seminars formed a pair, and both Lacan’s ethics and his reading of the Symposium became touchstones in later postmodernist debates. Whereas the seminar on the ethics asks what do we owe our desire, that on transference asks what do we owe the other as both the cause and the object of that desire.

The Platonic corpus, particularly dialogues such as the Phaedrus and the Symposium, which interrogate the relationship between desire and truth, are a central concern for all the major figures in post-structuralism. Lacan’s readings of the Antigone and the Symposium helped inaugurate a dialogic space that not only made post-structuralism possible but also anticipated the later investigations of antiquity that characterized the works of Derrida and Foucault, as well as Irigaray, Kristeva, and Cixous.

The Phaedrus was a crucial text for Derrida. Derrida’s vocabulary and set of concerns, unlike Lacan’s, are more conceptual than experiential. His task is not to train the next generation of analysts, which was the purpose of Lacan’s seminars, but to analyze the possible formations of the psyche and of reason per se as they are instantiated in the textual tradition that constitutes Western philosophy. In Derrida’s 1972 essay on the Phaedrus, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” the ambiguous figure of the pharmakos/pharmakon functions as the primary exemplar of the problematic status of writing, intentionality, and meaning within the Western metaphysical tradition. Plato’s aversion to writing, which is plainly stated in the Phaedrus’s declaration that the true philosopher would never entrust anything serious to writing, unless it were that special writing inscribed upon the soul, is interpreted by Derrida as symptomatic of a more general tendency in philosophy to banish the external and the material from the essence of meaning and value, and to posit a realm of pure presence, an absolute origin.⁵ The deconstruction of the fantasy of such a moment of plenitude and undivided origin is the central task of Derridian philosophy as a whole.

Plato and Socrates play a large role in Derrida’s La carte postale. The postcard of the title is a reproduction of the frontispiece to a thirteenth-century work of fortune telling. The image depicts two figures: one is seated at a desk producing a manuscript; the other is standing behind the first and giving directions, perhaps even dictating what is being written. They are labeled, respectively, Socrates and Plato. Among the many ironies noted by Derrida is the reversal of roles found in the postcard’s depiction of Plato and Socrates. By tradition, Socrates did not write. He is the first philosopher in the West, the one from whom all subsequent ancient schools claimed their descent, and yet he left no writings. Most famously, we know Socrates from the writings of Plato. The Socrates of modern philosophy and theory is very much Plato’s creation. He did, in a real sense, take Plato’s dictation. He received the young philosopher’s inscription to precisely the extent that Plato was the faithful disciple able to receive his.

In Khôra at the beginning of the 1990s, Derrida reads Plato’s Timaeus. This dialogue consists of an introductory conversation⁶ followed by a long speech in which Timaeus tells how a divine craftsman created the universe through imitating a set of preexisting eternal essences or forms.⁷ Halfway through, however, our speaker must pause and begin again.⁸ If the divine Demiurge creates perfect copies of the intelligible essences in the world of sense, then how, he asks, would those imitations differ from the originals, and if they were indeed perfect copies, then how are we to explain the manifest change and corruption of the world of our experience? A new beginning must be made, which makes possible the Demiurge’s labor of reproducing the intelligible order in the world of sense. This “cause” is the famous khôra, the mother or womb of creation.⁹

Written as a homage to Jean-Pierre Vernant, Khôra, like all works of Derrida, seeks simultaneously to accept and go beyond the terms of the text being read. In Mythe et société en Grèce ancienne, Vernant had posited a fundamental opposition between muthos and logos, with the latter representing a discourse founded on noncontradiction, a quasi-Aristotelian logic of the excluded middle, and the former being a narrative discourse that thrives on ambiguity and indeterminacy. For Derrida it is the Timaeus’s formulation of the khôra that calls this opposition into question. Khôra stands as the prephilosophical, prenarrative moment that makes the construction of both muthos and logos possible, even as it reveals their essential complicity. It is that which neither participates in the intelligible essences per se nor constitutes the realm of their mimetic instantiation. As such, it is neither being nor becoming, neither essence nor appearance, neither proof nor tale.

Derrida’s engagement with antiquity is not limited to Plato. Aristotle and Cicero both play major roles in 1994’s Politics of Friendship. Politics of Friendship is a book about the history of the concept of friendship from Plato to Blanchot by way of Cicero. It is also a book about the inseparability of politics from a concept of both the friend and the enemy. It returns again and again to a possibly apocryphal saying of Aristotle’s, “Oh my friends, there is no friend.” The true friend, as the saying makes apparent, is the impossible exception. That rare true friend is portrayed in Cicero as a second self, as the other of myself who reflects my self to myself. And yet my friend, as friend, remains other. And insofar as my friend remains other, he or she, as my second self, has the potential to call the integrity, the sufficiency, of my self into question. There is a potential violence in friendship: a violence that recalls the passion of love. Thus, Derrid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Theory in the New Millennium Jeffrey R. Di Leo
• Part One: Essays
• Part Two: Terms and Figures
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Copyright