French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States

by François Cusset, translated from the French by Jeff Fort, with Josephine Berganza and Marlon Jones
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2008
408 pp. Paper, $24.95
ISBN: 978-0-8166-4733-0.

Reviewed by Jennifer Ferng
Department of Architecture
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

jferng@mit.edu

Artist and activist Jean-Jacques Lebel, who had imported beat poetry into France from the United States, once invited Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to a 1975 concert held in Massachusetts, where the two had the favorable opportunity to meet Bob Dylan and Joan Baez backstage. Somewhat unimpressed with the two French philosophers, the folk singers had not bothered to read Anti-Oedipus , and likewise, the two theorists were unfortunately not interested in smoking marijuana, an inadvertent misalignment of social interests, creating a somewhat awkward encounter for both parties involved. This anecdote of an ill-conceived compatibility epitomizes the spirit of comprehending the objectives of French theory and prompts an inevitable query: Have we on this side of the Atlantic been able to come to terms with the French, their traditions of intellectual thought, and their philosophical legacy?

Deleuze stated in Cinema I: The Movement Image that "Theory is itself a practice, no less than its object is. . . . . It is a conceptual practice, and it must judged in terms of the other practices with which it interacts" (situated before the preface), and if this inaugural quotation is an evocative portent, the book unfolds as a meta-narration of the historical misunderstandings, mistranslations, and misappropriations that emerge from within the differing internal organizations of France and the United States, leading French theory into formidable political situations - those that involve Western capitalism, multiculturalism, postcolonialism to list a few - and to all-star personalities such as Judith Butler, Edward Said, and Frederic Jameson. "The still unidentified flying object" known as French theory, a general term applied by Cusset himself throughout the book that refers to the body of works originating in the 1960s-70s by theorists ranging from Deleuze to Virilio, remains an influential and preeminent set of academic methodologies, and there has not been a singular discipline or field including art, cultural studies, film, gender studies, history, literature, that has remained untouched by its pedagogical impetus. Densely written, highly informed, and comprehensive in its scope, connecting theory to the far-flung reaches of politics, social actions, both inside and outside the university setting, Cusset's book, as translated from the original French, sets out in a cultivated, distinctive fashion to rediscover why American academics became so enamored with the ideas of Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze, and others such as Baudrillard. In his intricate descriptions of how these concepts were appropriated, skewed, then deployed in the service of politicized agendas that ranged from affirmative action, neoconservative crusades for counter-intelligentsia, deconstruction, to postmodern architecture, the multifarious episodes and numerous examples are well-contextualized and historicized, expatiating how these reactionary thoughts were transmitted from French institutions and intellectual figures to those corresponding in the United States. What the French call "thought" is what Americans know as "theory," or so claims Sylvère Lotringer, who edited an older volume of articles with Sande Cohen, similarly entitled French Theory in America (2001) and views the first book of French theory as John Cage's For the Birds. For those not well-versed in French philosophy, poststructuralism, and Marxism, this book may prove to be a fairly difficult task since Cusset assumes that the reader is familiar with the suppositions associated with Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze and is capable of seeing beyond the popularized associations of power, discipline, difference, and schizophrenia to some of the more sophisticated philosophical consequences of these arguments.

Three moments of cultural contact between France and the United States -- the artistic and intellectual exiles who traveled from the U.S. between 1940 and 1945; the exportation of Surrealism, Sartrean existentialism, and the ideas of the Annales group; and the October 1966 conference held at Johns Hopkins University -- mark what Cusset views as integral, prolonged exchanges that revolutionized viewpoints for those in both countries. Alan Sokal's notorious hoax article from 1996 "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" in the cultural studies journal Social Text performs as a crux of vexation and controversy, launching debates about the merits of these theorists' ideas printed through underground publishing houses such as Semiotext(e) and communicated to an American audience in the 1970s, who, in turn, disseminated French theory through many seminars, conferences, and artistic movements.

Cusset assembles his book around three central themes, though there are, in fact, many more that could be recognized: the French issue of writing that becomes the American issue of reading, how capitalism was transformed into the enigma of cultural identity, and how micropolitics turned into a different question of symbolic conflicts (the "denationalizing" of texts in a global market). French theorists cast representation and language as problems in specifying any goal, pressuring existentialists, structuralists, Marxists, and feminists to surpass their critiques. While the entirety of the book is engaging but concentrated, two sections are rather compelling, chapter six called "The Politics of Identity" and chapter twelve "Theory as Norm: A Lasting Influence." Intellectuals from the third world, as Cusset indicates, are forced to use the "arms of the adversary," such as terms taken from the Enlightenment and rational progressivism, and the subaltern is often taken as the "blind spot of the historical process" (147). French academics are set apart from the international networks set up by American universities, theorizing exile and miscegenation as a political condition of the contemporary subject (296). How Foucault and Derrida are read directly in Mexico and Brazil, for example, produced entirely different readings than those generated from within the United States.

Stanley Fish, a literary critic who pokes at the uselessness of academics and who has also reviewed this book, does not believe that such intellectuals need be essential, stating "Although the 'textual' or the 'discursive' is . . . a crucial site of social contestation, the people who study that site are not crucial players in the contest" (157). Theory should be given a place in contemporary times and a global destiny to fulfill, as Cusset intimates; along these lines, what is the expected responsibility of a public intellectual in the United States, and how can academic encounters foster the adoption of given ideological policies related to the present global recession, climate change and the environment, or the crisis of the humanities in education? French society, Cusset insists, is just beginning to grasp the multiple subject and the consequences of intellectual isolation, where, in the words of Walter Benjamin, their drive for knowledge derives entirely from "a feeling of obligation, not to revolution but to traditional culture" (323). By exploring social critique beyond Marx and continuing to exercise political vigilance (330), French theory may bring about the convergence of opposing philosophical ideologies. It not only produced "intensive hypotheses, general and specific at the same time . . . on communitarian apparatuses, discursive regimes, or the machinery of capitalist desire," but if it could reestablish opposition to polarized representations and binary discourses such as German Marxism and French Nietzscheanism and join such apparently disparate camps (334), theory could coincide with forms of activism today (even in 1978 when Foucault was arrested for visiting both sides of Berlin). Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West acknowledged the importance of the "art of deliberate misunderstanding" or "felicitous misreading," which was indissociable from a culture's pure essence, and this very act is what Cusset conjures for us and demands that we owe to the life of texts -- or "the interval between the emergence of writing and its canonical normalization, between the logics of the intellectual field and the unpredictabilities of posterity" (338) -- and to an existence of devoted political engagement, either at home or abroad, that will help us fathom the conditions of our changing world.