French Theory Is Still Alive

Derided as irrelevant, French theory could make a comeback

By François 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 hasn’t 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 geopolitics—or on the run-up to the next presidential election, for that matter. In other words, isn’t 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 terrorism—the 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 theory’s 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 today’s global disorders—even when Foucault’s genealogy of "biopolitics," Deleuze’s comments on our "societies of control," and Derrida’s 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" wasn’t 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.

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 theory’s 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 Félix 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 field’s deliberate powerlessness. After decades of rhetorically questioning the imperialistic West, deconstructing America’s power, and demonizing the first world’s 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 didn’t 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 self-criticism 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. Yesterday’s 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 today’s situation—the 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 horizon—academic 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 context—say, 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 doesn’t 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 France’s age-old abstract universalism.

To put it bluntly, I would summarize the transferring of a body of theoretical texts from 1960s–70s France to 1980s–90s 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 Éditions Gallimard or Les Éditions 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, Marx—and, more broadly, any social critique of capital—may 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 one—in 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 turn—and 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-François 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 America’s public space; on the other hand, a country run by a new wave of liberals (François Mitterrand’s "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 today’s 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 République 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 male–female equality, a reconsideration of France’s 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 Sarkozy’s and Bush’s obvious agreement on many things smells like one sort of French–American 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 making—within but also beyond higher education, in the United States but also throughout the rest of the world. n

François Cusset is a writer and intellectual historian at the Institute of Political Studies and Columbia University’s 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 Éditions

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

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