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ОглавлениеSurely, now more needs to be said about the “when or where” of what precisely. My tedious recourse to capitalization, “Theory,” demands it.
As if implicitly demonstrating the principle that the event of decolonization takes place in both the colony and the metropole, the debate over Theory—largely, but not exclusively in the North and the West—has long assumed a necro-political tone. I myself have chimed in. Apart from a certain critique of Mbembe’s existential humanism, what seems called for now is less fussing over whether Theory is alive or dead—let’s just stipulate that its condition is “chronic”—and more careful consideration of its circumstances. Or, more precisely, how did its condition arise and with what implications for those of us who insist upon handling Theory?
Although Adorno’s feelings about Nietzsche are hard to pin down, his approach to die Liebhaber in “Bach Defended Against His Devotees” seems obviously to channel the sentiment found in Nietzsche’s stinging aphorism (number 298) from the first volume of Human All Too Human: “In every party there is someone whose far too credulous expression of the party’s principles provokes others to defect” (Nietzsche 2010, 198). Regardless of whether Nietzsche is his source, Adorno’s “devotee” is arguably the Doppelgänger of the thinker who knows how to assimilate tradition by “hating it properly.” Frankly, I am not especially concerned here to sort the matter of influence. Instead, the point is to situate Theory in the context of a thinking—as my title clearly suggests—about how its offering participates in the logic of devotion challenged by Adorno. More particularly, in a straightforwardly pedagogical mood, my discussion and the readings that follow explore, within the semantic resonances of “offering,” how one might work with Theory so as to, as it were, sacrifice it properly. Drawing initially on Terry Eagleton and Giorgio Agamben I consider here how Theory is exposed, even risked through its offering, and examine what grasp of Theory emerges from thinking its offering as an act of sacrifice. Theory not as on offer, but Theory as offering, or as I will propose, Theory as “giving a reading.” How does one handle that? When and where does that handling take place?
Not long ago the medievalist Andrew Cole told us everything we do not need to know about the “birth” of Theory. A more emphatic and thus persuasive account of why Theory ought not be profiled, that is, handled, as having an identity would be hard to imagine. And, so as not to be misunderstood, Cole’s text is a really good one. However, as with any sort of achievement it exacts a price and here this takes the form of the text’s seduction. His text is properly seductive in that it leads one astray—thinking here of Freud’s Verführung, whether actual or not. More directly, what concerns me in Cole’s approach is its devotional tone, a tone that manifests not only in his historicism but in his conviction that Theory is best grasped as exhibiting an identity. So as to cut to the proverbial chase, in order to sacrifice theory properly, it must not be profiled, it must not be given an identity that one can “historicize” or not. This is especially important when thinking about handling theory in the diffuse era of “the peace,” that is, in the moment that has survived the Theory Wars, a moment, I will argue, during which Theory obliges us to be thoughtful about when and where we handle it, especially now that Theory has been reduced to a cinder, a glowing coal.
Perhaps then a more direct if less immediate interlocutor here is the late Wolfgang Iser, whose How to Do Theory, with its explicitly pedagogical orientation, falls more squarely in the path of these reflections. What Iser and Cole share—and Cole makes only a passing reference to him—is the inclination to treat Theory as a type, a genre of academic discourse. Iser’s text is textbook-like in its effort to demonstrate not how various theoretical traditions ought be applied to objects of scholarly attention (although a bit of this occurs), but how theoretical traditions might be taken in their own right as objects of scholarly attention and, decisively, presented in the context of the graduate or undergraduate classroom. The organization of his study says it all: Chapter 2, Phenomenological Theory; Chapter 3, Hermeneutical Theory; Chapter 5, Reception Theory (no surprise) and so on, culminating in a postscript dedicated to “Postcolonial Discourse” (not Theory) represented by Edward Said. In his preface Iser somewhat nervously distances himself from his text by stressing its commissioned status and by noting the more or less persistent coaxing of his editor to do this or that. Anyone who has published a book will know that Iser is not making this up. Editors do behave this way. But the issue here is not who actually wrote the text, but rather of what is its existence a sign? To respond succinctly: its existence symptomatizes the typecasting, the “profiling” of Theory. As his introductory chapter makes plain: Theory is now (it was written in 1992!) something academic intellectuals can’t avoid, so we might as well be clear about how to do it. To be frank, I actually think “do” is the most provocative word in Iser’s title for the attention it directs to the practice of offering and if I am dissatisfied with his text, and I am, it is because he doesn’t do enough with “do,” starting with the problem of treating it as a verb that simply precedes a noun. Doing Theory shields Theory from the doing, so as to set Theory off from the work of doing, of offering. Put differently, Iser wants us to understand different types of Theory so as to offer them competently, he does not want to offer them theoretically, almost certainly a sure path to a low score on RateMyProfessors.com.
If earlier I invoked a certain “necro-political” tone in the debate over Theory it was with an eye toward commenting upon the “marketing history” of what I have called “the peace.” Consider then the following “facts,” aware that one needs to resist taking the evidentiary force of chronology at face value.
In 1983 the University of Minnesota Press, published Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction. A witty, well-informed and unabashedly left-leaning survey of those traditions within critical theory that had transformed the study of literary texts, this book quickly emerged as the best-selling title at the press, surpassing sales of so-called regional books about life in and around Minnesota. Its sales were directly indexed to the book’s wide adoption for use in classroom instruction, testifying to the perception among educators that “literary theory” mattered as an offering within the hallowed halls of higher education. Iser’s text is obviously modeled on it; indeed its implicit rejoinder is: yes, yes, but how does one do it?
In 2003 Eagleton published, now at Basic Books (a trade press), After Theory, an equally witty, but far more mean-spirited description of the fate of Theory (no longer simply literary theory) in the early years of the new century. Although not exactly rife with self-loathing, After Theory hardened Literary Theory’s left leanings, recasting its survey as a form of blood sport in which theoretical propositions about society, culture and the economy that resisted the implicit authority of a certain anti-Soviet orthodoxy were deemed “bloodless,” pale shades and thus worthy of the oblivion into which the context of the new century was said to be consigning them. The title thus resonated not only as an anodyne historical descriptor but also as a command to a pack of dogs.
Five years later in 2008, the University of Minnesota Press published what was called the 25th anniversary edition of Literary Theory: An Introduction to which Eagleton had added an “Afterword.” This last was written more in the spirit of his warm valediction to Jacques Derrida who had passed in October of 2004, a statement pitched almost directly against the sanctimonious obituary for Derrida published by the New York Times where it was proclaimed that with Derrida’s demise the “theory of everything” was now dead. Without exactly calling off the dogs, Eagleton was here thinking after Theory in a less distempered way.
Now, let me quickly correct some false impressions. This is not really about Terry Eagleton. It is not about the press that publishes the academic journal that I edit. It is not even about the first two decades of my professional career. It is about what, in a plainly melodramatic register, we could call the fate of Theory, and here not merely literary theory. If one accepts that print capitalism is one of the decisive materializations of Theory, then the dates I have recorded matter in tracing an alternate version of what Said sought to capture in his influential essay, “Traveling Theory,” namely, the slackening or attenuation of the perceived urgency of theoretical reflection in both the humanities and the social sciences. Again, in a somewhat awkward rhetorical register, these dates mark the passing of Theory as witnessed from the vantage point of a partisan with a trans-Atlantic audience. Although their differences are legion, Eagleton and Iser share the conviction that Theory, unlike many theorists themselves, has a life. It is the type of thing that has a life span, and a finite one at that. Time’s up.
We come then to the proverbial heart of the matter. Namely, what should or even can we do with the Theory that has passed, whose condition is curiously “chronic”? As my opening paragraphs will have clarified, the strategy of deepening our devotion to this discursive identity is not a viable option. In their most piquant manifestations such strategies manifest as cockfights spurred by the schoolyard idiom of: “is so, is not,” or, in Gerald Graff’s more sober idiom, “the conflicts.” Are those of us who embrace the materialization of Theory that manifests in university curricula, in pedagogical practice, left with no other option than to reanimate and defend a corpus whose expiration date has passed? Is the passion of Theory essentially nostalgic? I’ll not linger here, but a significant part of what is at issue in what I have called the passing of Theory is precisely the reorganization of the university as a business, begun—if we are to believe James Buchanan’s account in Academia in Anarchy (Buchanan 1970, passim)—during the student movements of the 1960s whose 50th anniversary many around the world began marking in 2018.
To pursue further the matter of how we might carry on within the general project of the critical humanities I will bear down a bit more systematically on the senses of “offering” in my title. As with “passing,” “offering” invites distinct but related glosses. In the case of “offering,” at least two. Perhaps its more immediate sense arises when we speak, as so many of us do, of “offering” classes or seminars. Here “offering” means presenting or giving, and my title certainly aims to posit the notion that Theory should continue to be available as an area of inquiry in any and every setting that regards itself as a locus of education. At the risk of moving too quickly, I would even go as far as to propose that in the absence of Theory education ceases to be about learning. It becomes about training. And, as an aside, this problem was one among several agitating members of GREPH when they fought to keep philosophy on offer in high school curricula in France during the 1980s.
The less immediate sense of “offering” is surely the sense of it that arises in the biblical formulation of a “burnt offering” where it touches immediately on the matter and practice of sacrifice. Perhaps less immediate still, at least for those unaware that the word “holocaust” derives from the Greek for “completely burned,” is the join, the knot within sacrifice between veneration and execration. Indeed, the staggering ambivalence that binds denying and affirming sacrifice is precisely one of those problems that calls insistently for theoretical attention. Thus, with a certain night and foggy vividness, my title is also a call to “sacrifice” Theory, to treat it precisely as a “burnt offering,” whence my earlier invocation of Derrida’s (and earlier T. E. Hulme’s) figure of the cinder. But now what can this mean given that I have also parsed the title to posit the necessity of offering Theory as part of what it means today to educate? Am I talking, for instance, about sacrificing the Theory that Theory has passed into, that is, a largely Northern, Western canon of “great ideas,” a canon long valued for its role in initiating certain people, largely but by no means exclusively white men (what, e.g., at Duke were once referred to as “Fred’s Boys”), into the cult of knowledge? Yes, of course. But one understands vaguely if at all what it might mean to sacrifice Theory properly if we leave it at that. Setting aside the antagonistic theoretical profiles of the four posts—postmodernism, postfeminism, post-Marxism and postcolonialism—the concept of Theory that followed in their wake is one whose papers are patently not in order. It is, as Arendt said about the refugee, stateless. In effect, just passing through. Passing through its own peace.1
In the book whose argument these remarks introduce, I engage this snarl of issues by thinking about the various tensions between Theory and identity. Two aspects of this tension are foregrounded. On the one hand, when Eagleton in After Theory tells us that the context in which Theory mattered is now lost to us, he is effectively giving Theory an identity, even a purpose, and the gist of his analysis is to illustrate that this identity, like the context that determined it, has been lost. Put differently, through the device of the concept of “context” Theory is given an identity, a time and place of belonging, indeed the very identity whose birth Cole has so assiduously reconstructed. If this loss can be characterized as a sacrifice, our relation to it is cast as largely devotional if not nostalgic. Through such an analysis we are coaxed to mourn the loss of an identity and to organize the reactive crusade aimed to confront what ineluctably looms up as blasphemy. If we are book publishers we seek out, translate and distribute any shred of paper on which a “theorist” wrote something including a note like “I forgot my umbrella” or, far less trivially, the fragile transcripts of lectures recorded at the College de France. Febrile archiving indeed.
On the other hand, and this point is a difficult one, the tension between Theory and identity also manifests as a conflict between Theory and identity, not then the identity of Theory, but the Theory of identity, a Theory that disappears as theorizing, in its prioritization of a practice, the act of identification. Here, Theory is sacrificed to a politics of identity that in its most dangerous forms resuscitates ethnocentrisms of all sorts. The “Nation State Law” mooted in the summer of 2018 by the Israeli Knesset is a handy and glaring example. So, when I assent to the proposition that the sacrifice of Theory is part of what must be on offer in a place calling itself a university, this sacrifice of loss, this conflicted pairing of identity and Theory is among the things that must go.2
But go how? The takeaway of these introductory remarks can be phrased as a response to this question. Beyond sacrificing the Theory that has passed, how should Theory, in general, be sacrificed properly? Or, rephrased more directly, is there a sense in which Theory sacrifices itself? If so, by what means?
A few more dates. Same cautions as before. In 1995 the first of Giorgio Agamben’s multivolume treatment of homo sacer appeared. Although much effort of late has been devoted to tracing the shafts of sunlight that separate these studies, they can all be said to explore how political sovereignty founds its constitutive instability on a particular type of political actor, the figure of homo sacer. Brazenly collapsing a host of subtleties, I will thus parse Agamben’s discussion of sovereignty by foregrounding its provocative juridical character. Following Carl Schmitt, the one who is sovereign, the decider, is the one who is in a position to suspend the law in order to preserve it. In the rhetoric of statecraft this constitutes a declaration of “a state of emergency” where the state, to protect the identity given it by its ruling oligarchy, violates the principles on which it is founded in order to eliminate what the state believes threatens it. In other words, the “one” (the unity of the state) is almost always more than one. Significantly, for Agamben, this structure of standing outside and above the law in order to preserve the essence of its rule is the very same invaginated structure that isolates homo sacer as the one whose expulsion from society, from the human community, is precisely what preserves that community as a biopolitical formation. In a different terminological register, this is the scapegoat, and in most contemporary regimes, whether democracies or not, this figure is now (at least since Covering Islam) the “terrorist,” who, according to Boris Johnson, walks among the people of Britain disguised as mailboxes. Although Agamben has himself offered various iconic incarnations of such a figure, he has consistently placed important stress on the occupants of the extermination camps during World War II, especially the living corpse called “the Muselman,” the Muslim. What does this stress clarify?
It clarifies the simple fact that homo sacer is not and cannot be a “burnt offering.” As Agamben writes: “The protagonist of this book is bare life, that is, the life of homo sacer (sacred man) who may be killed and yet not sacrificed” (Agamben 1998, 8).3 Indeed, the whole point of this inaugural volume is that homo sacer is one (or ones) who can be eliminated by the sovereign without sacrifice, that is, without producing a significant relation to something, or someone, absolutely other. The sovereign may sacrifice him or herself to the potent instability that sustains it, but homo sacer is beyond sacrifice. It is precisely unsacrificable and in this sense “holocaust” may be the wrong word for those consigned to crematoria in the Nazi extermination camps. Those exterminated there may have been “completely burned,” but they were not sacrificed. They were purely and simply slaughtered. Hopefully now the reader can sense where I am heading. If, in offering Theory, we sacrifice it, we precisely do not treat it as an incarnation, however uncanny, of homo sacer. We do not treat it as something we can expel from the sociopolitical order without effect, without losing our constitutive relation to someone, or something, other, even or especially when this otherness might designate the biopolitical plane of immanence on which life itself slips and slides. Although Eagleton, in After Theory, has a somewhat different point to make in invoking the “bloodlessness” of Theory (he predictably deplores its apolitical abstraction), the adjective “bloodless” nevertheless invites comparison with Agamben’s discussion of homo sacer, who as we have seen is a figure whose sacrifice offers nothing vital to the gods, a figure whose sacrifice secures no relation to anything or anyone other, in effect, a figure whose sacrifice is not one.4
A final date. In 2018, as if anticipating these impatient remarks, Eagleton published a small book with Yale University Press, titled, Radical Sacrifice. Given the preceding I can hardly avoid it, but, more to the point, “reading” it (however sparingly) helpfully amplifies the gesture of sacrificing theory properly. In general terms this text continues Eagleton’s examination of conscience begun in his first book, New Left Church; indeed, it is dedicated to the “Carmelite Sisters of Thicket Priory” and builds steadily to an argument about the deep convergence between radical sacrifice and proletarian revolution. He writes:
It is axiomatic that men and women must accomplish their emancipation for themselves. It can no more be delegated than the act of dying. The notion of revolution turns on the paradox that what has been reduced by the arrogance of power to a state of inert objectivity is precisely on that account capable of emerging as a new kind of subject. […] Seen in this light, revolution is a modern version of what the ancient world new as sacrifice. (Eagleton 2018, 180–81)
As the rhetoric of dying, to which Eagleton devotes an entire chapter, and the becoming-subject of the inert object might suggest, radical sacrifice bears an undeclared relation to resurrection or, to reanimate the gothic register of Capital, galvanization. As a culminating gesture, these formulations clarify where the several preceding discussions of sacrifice were heading. While it is hard not to resonate to Eagleton’s utopianism—surely the world can’t get much worse—what does not yet hum is his willingness to overlook what is properly different in the various accounts of sacrifice to which he attends. The reader likely will not be surprised to hear that this stands out most conspicuously in his discussion of Agamben. Arising here and there in Eagleton’s rambling and allusive exposition (there are pages on which he drops five or six “big names” and he repeatedly solicits an invitation to spend Christmas with the Derridas) when he settles down to “read” Agamben, he concentrates his energies on Remnants of Auschwitz where the specter haunting the camps, the Muselman, shuffles out onto the mirror stage. To be truer to convictions I will go on to defend, Eagleton does not actually “read” Agamben. He “comments” on the figure of the Muselman largely to establish its solidarity, perhaps even its kinship, with homo sacer, a point on which we agree. What slips away, however, is the difference between the Muselman and the other internees. In effect, if homo sacer is the unsacrificable, the one who is simply murdered rather than sacrificed, then the Muselman does indeed qualify as sacred because in an important sense s/he is already dead, s/he contains nothing to offer to anyone or anything. S/he is bloodless. But this ought to complicate rather than confirm the correlations being drawn by Eagleton. This ought to remind us that to sacrifice properly what is offered is not, cannot be drained of value, and while it is true that Eagleton observes this difference in his other commentaries, the drive to funnel all ancient sacrifice toward modern revolution loses nuance worth holding on to.
Agamben himself struggles with this difficult matter, but Eagleton—who, after all, is writing after Theory—cannot be bothered to produce a theoretical encounter between his own aims and those of Agamben. Indeed, although the word “theory” occasionally appears in Radical Sacrifice, one has to sift with a prospector’s patience for the golden veins that run between this text and After Theory. They are there and they manifest in vessels, notably blood vessels, or put less facetiously, they manifest in the rhetoric of sanguinity that calibrates the scales of judgment in much of Eagleton’s writing and, as we have seen, nowhere more bluntly than in After Theory. Rather than demonstrate this proposition here, I will simply stress that my issue here is not doctrinal. I am not really concerned to establish whether Eagleton gets Agamben “right.” Of greater immediate pertinence is clarifying what stands illuminated about sacrificing Theory properly by holding onto the proposition that within the discussion of homo sacer sacrifice is at odds with itself, and nowhere more so than in the “zone of irreducible indistinction” (Agamben 1998, 9) wherein the sovereign and scapegoat rub elbows.
So, Theory must be offered and not merely offed. And yes, I am investing Theory with properties that cannot but strike one as exorbitant. With this in mind, consider the well-known formulation that concludes Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” a title whose French iteration (deliberately?) echoes Mallory’s fifteenth-century text on the death of a sovereign: “We are no longer so willing to be the dupes of such antiphrases, by which a society proudly recriminates in favor of precisely what it discards, ignores, muffles or destroys; we know that to restore writing to its future, we must reverse the myth: the birth of the reader, must be requited by the death of the Author” (Barthes 1986). “Requited” here is a translation for “doit se payer.” In an alternative Howard translation it is rendered as “ransomed,” but either way the notion of paying for a birth is here connoted in the register of what I have been calling sacrifice, although perhaps more like a pawn than a child. Something offered so as to secure something other. The author (and in the last sentence where the text cites its title, “Auteur” is capitalized) must be sacrificed for the reader. It is not therefore, unsacrificable. It is not sacred.
What begins to crown here is not simply the reader but reading, and more specifically, as what arises out of a corpus whose sovereign had been the author. It is not therefore uninteresting that precisely in his function as an educator Barthes, in 1972, addressed a group of lycée teachers on the topic of what he titled, in an oblique evocation of Robbe-Grillet, “For a Theory of Reading.” Such talks were designed to bring high school teachers up to speed with developments in the university, and it is therefore proper that Barthes opens by informing them that the traditional and thus familiar pairing of “work and author” has passed. Perhaps more startling, however, is his subsequent declaration that “there has never before been a theory of reading” (Barthes 2015, 157), a counterfactual so glaring—has he actually not read Reading Capital, or Of Grammatology?—that “reading” directly assumes a provocative idiolectal resonance. Barthes’s remarks, brief though they are, quickly then capitalize on this feint by advancing not only a grid of the four levels of reading along with their correlative disciplinary stakeholders but, as if acutely aware of the chiasmus of his title, a Theory of Theory. Theory does not mean, he insists, either “‘a philosophical dissertation’ or ‘abstract system’” (Barthes 2015, 158). Instead, the term designates a “description” that examines problems in their “infinite reach,” one “open to criticism,” in a word, “responsible.” This segues immediately to a bracing attack on interdisciplinarity, confronting his audience with a proper problematic, that is, an echo chamber of questions and answers, in this case those of reading, Theory and discipline.
Of particular pertinence to the task of sacrificing Theory properly is what I have called the chiasmus, that is, the proposition that a Theory of reading is at one and the same time a reading of Theory or, to nudge this toward the motif of offering, that Theory and reading are two words for the “same” gesture. Lest one think that this nudge is utterly without textual warrant, that there is nothing here about sacrifice, about offering, consider not only the context (an address to educators) but even more importantly the following:
Reading, as we know, is a social object/issue; it is prey to instances of power and morality. […] For my part, I shall formulate the ethical question in the following way: there are dead readings (subject to stereotypes, mental repetitions and sloganizing) and there are living readings (producing an inner text, homogeneous with a virtual writing on the part of the reader). Now, this living reading, during which the subject believes what he reads emotionally while also realizing its unreality, is a split (clivée thus divided and shared) reading. (Barthes 2015, 160)
Barthes goes on to associate, freely or not, this split with Freud’s account of the “splitting (Spaltung) of the subject (le moi, so the ‘self’ or ‘ego’)” and concludes: “‘living reading’ is a perverse activity and reading is always immoral” (Barthes ibid.).
Written in 1972 this set of formulations about a Theory of reading/a reading of Theory falls directly between S/Z (1970) and The Pleasure of the Text (1973). It retrieves and complicates the distinction drawn in the former between two types of text, the writable and the readable (“writerly” and “readerly” in the Howard translation), by introducing into the latter a further distinction between the dead and living. Although the touch between the living reading that is homogeneous with a virtual writing and what in S/Z is designated as the “scriptible” is suggestive, I will settle for a more obtuse point. Namely, if reading can be either alive or dead, if it can be perverse, this is because a Theory of reading is obliged to treat it in a way that solicits, that invites, the recognition that we are no longer here talking about literacy, strictly speaking. We are talking about offering, offering as a way to think the practice of separating the living from the dead, of producing the occasion for learning how to “do” Theory by sacrificing it to the reading that Theory becomes.
Several matters follow from this and since they will figure in the “readings” that follow they call for attention. Perhaps the most urgent of these bears on the matter of what it means to treat reading as an offering of Theory that is theoretical. Derrida has, with his usual abandon, aligned reading and mourning (see The Work of Mourning), and here Barthes, as if channeling Bataille, aligns it with perversion and ultimately immorality. Whether it is best aligned with one or the other is not as pressing as the following question: What makes such formulations seem exorbitant, or what have we misread in reading in failing to recognize the possibility of such alignments? My response has the advantage of being straightforward: We have failed to recognize what reading does, when and where it brings about what it brings about. Reading theorizes in carrying on, struggling to make sense, within the encounter between the text and a possible world. Put differently, what we offer in sacrificing reading to this encounter is Theory, and yes, at a very basic level I wish to underscore the obvious, namely, that if Theory has mattered for however long it has mattered, it is because it grips and deeply rattles the way reading takes place. In a sense, this is the insight that silently animates any list of the sort adjective (“feminist”) or surname (Butlerian) followed by the word “reading.” More than a demonstration, this then is a proposal about offering Theory that sacrifices it properly to the readings it propels and the reading it is, the reading by which Theory became what it is. In short, to offer Theory is to offer (its) reading, neither close nor distant, slow nor fast, but reading. Implacably, this pushes us toward what I take to be the opening generated by sacrificing Theory properly, namely, what Barthes sought to delimit, in another context, through the test of commutation, or in my more pedestrian jargon, the when and the where of Theory. When does the reading that theorizes start and stop? Where does this take place?
These evocations of genealogy and geography are, I will propose, helpful ways to think through one of the more generatively enigmatic formulations in Barthes’s corpus. It derives from the section named “Interpretation” in S/Z and reads (in my translation): “To interpret a text is not to give it a (more or less grounded, more or less free) meaning, but on the contrary to discern of what plural it is made” (Barthes 1974, 5). Immediately dashing the hopes of my students who want to read here license for any interpretation whatever, Barthes pressures the “plural” in ways that matter to the chiasmus of reading and Theory. Specifically, the plural designates a generative potentiality in the gesture of reading that enables theories of the typological sort to emerge. Or, to retrieve a few additional formulations from “For a Theory of Reading”:
What goes on in the total act of reading? Where does reading begin? How far does it extend? Can we assign structure or boundaries to this production? We shall have to draw on many disciplines to answer such questions. Reading is an overdetermined phenomenon, involving different levels of description. Reading is what does not stop. (Barthes 2015, 158, emphasis in original)
The invocation here of “overdetermination,” obviously anticipates the turn to Freud, but also therefore urges us to bring the concept of a “split reading” into urgent proximity with the “plural” of which the text is made, which in turn drives one to consider how the reading that is Theory, its when and its where, is what makes it impossible to know when a reading has begun, while at the “same” time to be convinced that it does not stop.
All such propositions underscore that at some vexed point in the reading/Theory chiasmus the Theory we offer happens when and where we least expect it. While on the one hand this reminds us that pedagogy and improvisation have much in common, it also brings back into range one of the more provocative moments in the meditation on reading that opens Reading Capital, a text also called up by Barthes’s invocation (unknowing?) of “overdetermination,” but not for that reason relevant here. Instead, attention ought to be directed to the footnote in Section 10 of Part One that reads:
The same applies to the “reading” of those new works of Marxism which, sometimes in surprising forms, contain in them something essential to the future of socialism: what Marxism is producing in the vanguard countries of the “third world” which is struggling for its freedom from the guerillas of Vietnam to Cuba. It is vital that we be able to “read” these works before it is too late. (Althusser and Balibar 1979, 34)
Setting aside the romance of a now jaded “Third Worldism,” what insists here is an acknowledgment that the reading that Marxist theory is offers itself to “works” that are well off the page. To be sure this resonates with the Althusserian principle of “theoretical practice,” but it channels practice more carefully into the gift, the giving, of reading, suggesting perhaps even positing that what reading reads is itself reorganized by the reading/Theory chiasmus. To put the matter bluntly, the oft-heard dismissal of Theory as a linguistic phenomenon ekphrastically isolated from things beyond language is at best nonsense and at worst sheer ideology. Whatever can be read can be theorized, and whatever can be theorized is read. So, to conclude abruptly, to sacrifice Theory properly, to offer it, is to offer reading. Not reading in the sense of literacy (however crucial it may be), that is, the competence for decoding messages structured by linguistic codes, but reading in the sense of the handling, working in, on and with the split, the plural that makes every text a text. To be continued.
Notes
1A provocative genealogical angle on the relation between Theory and sacrifice is assiduously traced in Ian Rutherford’s study of Theōria and Theōroi. The connection between Theory and collective spectating is well established. What Rutherford adds is the connection between spectating and pilgrimage, that is, the practice carried out by Greek city-states, of sending delegations to observe events such as festivals and ceremonies. The delegation, known as Theōroi, precisely as a condition of observing, would typically “offer,” as in sacrifice, something to its hosts, securing access and “intelligence.” Theory is thus obliged to offer and is conditioned by such offering. Rutherford traces this thinking of Theory to philosophy on the pages of Plato’s “Laws.” See Rutherford (2013).
2Interviewed in the spring of 2014 by Clément Petitjean about his then recent book, The Meaning of Sarkosy, Alain Badiou takes up the vexed motif of identity in the following way:
Since commodities are the principal motor of society, each person is called to appear before the market as a subject-consumer. In correlation with this, people fall back on identities, since to be drowned in the abstract world as an individual is a nightmare, wandering without end. So we cling to family, provincial, national, linguistic and religious identities. Identities that are available to us because they refer back to the dawn of time. It is a world opposed to the encounter, a world of defensive retreat. (Badiou 2014, n.p.)
The concluding sentence, in picking up the thread of the encounter, strings these remarks into the preceding conversation with Petitjean, a conversation that concerns itself not simply with Althusser’s late concept of the encounter, but with the conflict between philosophy and this particular concept. As Badiou explains, this has to do with the impasse between the logic of necessity (rationalism) and the logic of experience (empiricism) that, for him, defines philosophy. For my part, I am less interested in the concept of the encounter than I am in the provocative relation between philosophy and identity active in Badiou’s formulation. In other words, if identity is what the consumer-subject appeals to so as to avoid the encounter, and if philosophy avoids thinking this concept, does this mean that philosophy and identity have something in common? Perhaps what they share is what de Man once invoked under the heading, “the resistance to theory?” That is, the reading that, in being resisted by Theory, effects the event of the encounter where Philosophy and identity fear to tread.
3Jean-Luc Nancy in “The Unsacrificeable” has taken up these matters from a rather different angle, but since he argues strenuously against the relation between sacrifice and what he calls, taking his cue from both Bataille and Heidegger, “an absolute outside,” a relation for which I advocate, some comments are called for. Nancy is concerned here with the violently ecstatic character of this relation and its destructive sublation of the spiritualization of sacrifice (see Nietzsche’s aphorism number 55 in Beyond Good and Evil). I take the point, but much hangs on what is meant by “absolute” in Nancy’s formulation. For my part, if one recognizes in it Foucault’s concept of “break,” that is, the radical historicity (the point at which history is no longer history) of the Kantian “noumena,” then the onto-theological disaster feared by Nancy and fended off by the principle of the “unsacrificable” loses much of its horror. Not its gravity, but its horror. To sacrifice Theory properly is to offer it to the possibility of onto-epistemic transgression. The political history of “absolutism” should reassure us in the regard.
4Although perhaps overstated, what is clear about After Theory is that it is deeply invested in what Agamben calls the “politicization of death.” This does not first and foremost concern the politics of killing (who, e.g., authorized and executed the murder and quartering of Jamal Khashoggi), but rather the sovereign power over the zone of indistinction wherein life and death brush insistently up against one another. From such a perspective one reads Eagleton’s persistent rhetorical appeals to death and blood (the basic binary is “bloodless,” bad; “full blooded,” good) with pricked ears. Even correcting for a certain Lawrencian identification, Eagleton is plainly involved in struggling over the matter of the political meaning of death, proposing both implicitly and explicitly that the bloodless blood of Theory (his figure is that of the “bloodstained coin” (Eagleton 2003, 161)) will be on the hands of those who, in denying the blunt facticity of the body, abandon any means by which to protect themselves from a death unchecked by moral condemnation. Theory will aneurysmalize itself. Like the fundamentalist martyr, the postmodern theorist is, apparently, always already hurling toward the instant but empty paradise of self-immolation. There are moments, alas, when Eagleton appears to want a piece of this action. One might then propose that Theory—perhaps uniquely in its postmodern incarnation—assumes the status of “bare life” in Eagleton’s analysis. Precisely to the extent that it has become bloodless, or is otherwise already dead (“cold-blooded” in Eagleton’s parlance), it cannot be sacrificed. It cannot be sacrificed because it has nothing to give, it has nothing of value to secure its status as a totem. Even if we interpret Eagleton’s argument to say that Theory must be sacrificed to or for politics, what seems clear is that in aspiring to an articulation of sovereign power, that is, the authority to exempt from life that which menaces it, he founds his politics on the very zone of indistinction that distinctly complicates the difference between Theory and politics. Indulge me as I then uncharitably suggest that this dilemma appears to suit Eagleton to, as we say, a T, the very letter whose introduction converts morality into mortality, the very letter tau that in the Semitic alphabets marked the brand, indeed brand x, that rendered an animal, for example taurus, one’s property. T, it so happens, also sounds out the name with which Eagleton signs After Theory, “TE” (Eagleton 2003, 227).
