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FRENCH THEORY: HOW FOUCAULT, DERRIDA,DELEUZE, & CO. TRANSFORMED THE INTELLECTUALLIFE OF THE UNITED STATES

Citation Ferng, Jennifer. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida,Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the UnitedStates by Franois Cusset, translated by Jeff Fort, withJosephine Berganza and Marlon Jones. University of MinnesotaPress, Minneapolis, MN, U.S.A., 2008. Originally published inFrench in 2003. 388 pp. Paper. ISBN: 978-0-8166-4733-0.Leonardo 43.2 (2010): 190-191. 2010 ISAST.

As Published http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/leon.2010.43.2.190

Publisher MIT Press

Version Final published version

Accessed Sat Mar 16 10:36:21 EDT 2013

Citable Link http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/58805

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French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed

the Intell ectual Life of the United States

Jennifer Ferng

Leonardo, Volume 43, Number 2, April 2010, pp. 190-191 (Review)

Published by The MIT Press

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by MIT Libraries at 09/24/10 2:23PM GMT

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/len/summary/v043/43.2.ferng.html

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190 Leonardo Reviews

french theory:howfoUcaULt, derrida,deLeUze, & co.transformedtheinteLLectUaL Lifeofthe United states

by Franois Cusset, translated by JeFort, with Josephine Berganza andMarlon Jones. University o MinnesotaPress, Minneapolis, MN, U.S.A., 2008.Originally published in French in 2003.

388 pp. Paper. ISBN: 978-0-8166-4733-0.

Reviewed by Jennier Ferng, Department o

Architecture, Massachusetts Institute o Tech-

nology, U.S.A. E-mail: .

Artist and activist Jean-Jacques Lebel,who had imported beat poetry intoFrance rom the United States, onceinvited Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guat-tari to a 1975 concert held in Mas-sachusetts, where the two had theopportunity to meet Bob Dylan andJoan Baez backstage. Somewhat unim-

pressed with the two French philoso-phers, the olksingers had not botheredto read Anti-Oedipus, and likewise thetwo theorists were unortunately notinterested in smoking marijuana: aninadvertent misalignment o socialinterests, creating a somewhat awkwardencounter or all parties involved. Thisanecdote o an ill-conceived compat-ibility epitomizes the spirit o compre-hending the objectives o French theoryand prompts an inevitable query: havewe on the U.S. side o the Atlantic beenable to come to terms with the French,

their traditions o intellectual thoughtand their philosophical legacy?

Deleuze stated in Cinema I: TheMovement Imagethat Theory is itsel apractice, no less than its object is . . . Itis a conceptual practice, and it mustjudged in terms o the other practiceswith which it interacts (in an epi-graph beoreFrench Theorys preace),and i this inaugural quotation is anevocative portent, the book unolds asa meta-narration o the historical mis-understandings, mistranslations andmisappropriations that emerge rom

within the diering internal organiza-tions o France and the United States,leading French theory into ormidablepolitical situationsinvolving Westerncapitalism, multiculturalism and post-colonialism, to list a ewand to all-starpersonalities such as Judith Butler,Edward Said and Frederic Jameson.The still unidentied fying objectknown as French theory, a general termapplied by Cusset himsel throughoutthe book, which reers to the body o

be to advance the creative applicationo concepts o metaphor, metonym,metalepsis, metathesis and allegory,synecdoche and such while signicantlyenhancing debate over what consti-tutes pseudoscientic versus scienticdiscourse. And there, as The Poetics oDNAconcludes, the implications are othe utmost signicance in the realmso technology, economics, politics andreligion.

Writing as a social scientist with ascientic background, I would main-tain that, in the end, the process andepiphany o coming to the realizationthat the structure o the double helixand its related structural reproductivelogic is part mystery and part deductiveprogress is o the greatest value in ando itsel. It is in itsel prime evidence othe necessary power o the use o meta-phor to advance science. Moreover,in assessing Roos critique o hyper-bolized notions o DNA, one might askwhether her own hyperbolic ideologicalposition has not served as pseudoscien-tic synecdoche.

Are we then simply not better o inthe humanities in developing insteada much greater appreciation o theremarkable discovery o DNA andmRNA and the intricacies o theseelds o investigation within molecu-lar biology and biochemistry? Andthere, recognizing the majestic powero epiphany and the creative urge todetermine structures, processes andprinciples o relations that drive scienceis o the essence. Thus take or instance

the uncanny description o the statuso DNA at the identication o its struc-ture (note 7, p. 223) as Roo herselquotes rom James Joyce:

This is the moment that I call epiphany.First we recognize that the object is oneintegral thing, then we recognize thatit is an organized composite structure,a thing in act: nally, when the rela-tion o the parts is exquisite, when theparts are adjusted to the special point,we recognize that it is the thing whichit is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to usrom the vestment o its appearance.The soul is the commonest object, thestructure o which is so adjusted, seemsto us radiant. The object achieves itsepiphany.

And in this indeed, the discoveryo DNA was as much art as sciencein terms o the style and suddennessin which it nally revealed itsel (wasrevealed) through the workings o theengaged individual and collective scien-tic mind.

(A uller version o this review can beound at .)

an argument or the role o the analogi-cal gure in sustaining dominant West-ern patriarchal cultural hierarchies.Keeping such brie detail in mind, andthe synopsis in her conclusion, one canimagine the signicant challenge thisstudy will present to scientists not wellenough versed in social science to beable to challenge the logic o her argu-ments on their own terms.

WhatThe Poetics o DNAdoes is tovery eectively bring together anintriguing range o the popular, sci-entic and philosophical literatureon DNA to bear on the evolution oanalogies, on the shiting metaphoricimperatives describing DNArst sograndly as the secret o lie, then thebook o lie and nally the less-mag-nicent parts list as hybrid metaphor.In doing so, Roo is able to exploreascinating and important issues con-cerning genetics, language, ideologyand gender politics, as well as those ocopyright and commodication and theimplications all this has or the uture.Apparently the crux o the matter is aclash o Enlightenment values, in whichscientists seek explanatory actors,structures and mechanisms that human-istic social scientists necessarily reject asmere metaphoric vehicles or symbolicdomination. Therein representationsare always language- and culture-boundsuch that science is in eect ultimatelya orm o social science and not a sepa-rate realm with any specic claims totruth value.

It goes without saying that this book

is avowedly political, that it has a veryspecic postmodernist agenda. Sucharguments about the political uses oscience and the misuse o science bypseudoscience are o immense impor-tance in this age o the commodica-tion o the gene. And yet all this criticalinsight also needs to be assessed inthe tragic or stark comic light o theremarkable act that almost hal o thepopulation in the United States doesnot even believe in evolution. In this Ibelieve that the idea that any represen-tation o science being dependent on

analogy is necessarily a misrepresenta-tion with compromising ideologicalbaggage and is in itsel deeply prob-lematic: it allows or science to be seenas merely one orm o truth, and thusintelligent design and creationism asmerely another species o the truth,albeit it pseudo-truth to some. Thechallenge must be then to return to dointellectual and scientic justice to thereality o DNA. Instead o doing so, thisbooks contribution will more likely

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Leonardo Reviews 191

oster the adoption o given ideologicalpolicies related to the present globalrecession, climate change and the envi-ronment, or the crisis o the humanitiesin education? French society, Cussetinsists, is just beginning to grasp themultiple subject and the consequenceso intellectual isolation, where, in thewords o Walter Benjamin, their driveor knowledge derives entirely rom aeeling o obligation, not to revolutionbut to traditional culture (p. 323). Byexploring social critique beyond Marxand continuing to exercise politicalvigilance (p. 330), French theory maybring about the convergence o oppos-ing philosophical ideologies. It not onlyproduced intensive hypotheses, generaland specic at the same time . . . oncommunitarian apparatuses, discursiveregimes, or the machinery o capitalistdesire, but i it could reestablish oppo-sition to polarized representations andbinary discourses such as German Marx-ism and French Nietzscheanism andjoin such apparently disparate camps(p. 334), theory could coincide withorms o activism today (even in 1978,when Foucault was arrested or visitingboth sides o Berlin). Oswald Spengler,in The Decline o the West, acknowledgedthe importance o the art o deliber-ate misunderstanding or elicitousmisreading, which was indissociablerom a cultures pure essence, and thisvery act is what Cusset conjures or usand demands that we owe to the lieo textsor the interval between theemergence o writing and its canonical

normalization, between the logics othe intellectual eld and the unpre-dictabilities o posterity (p. 338)andto an existence o devoted politicalengagement, either at home or abroad,that will help us athom the conditionso our changing world.

LeonarDoreViews on-Line

November 2009

CamoupediaA Compendium o Research

on Art, Architecture and CamoufagebyRoy R. Behrens. Reviewed by MikeLeggett.

Digital Material: Tracing New Media in

Everyday Lie and Technology, edited byMarianne van den Boomen, SybilleLammes, Ann-Sophie Lehmann, Joost

1996, Transgressing the Boundaries:Toward a Transormative Hermeneuticso Quantum Gravity in the culturalstudies journal Social Text, perormsas a crux o vexation and controversy,launching debates about the merits othese theorists ideas, printed throughunderground publishing houses such asSemiotext(e) and communicated to anAmerican audience in the 1970s, who,in turn, disseminated French theorythrough many seminars, conerencesand artistic movements.

Cusset assembles his book aroundthree central themes, although thereare, in act, many more that could berecognized: the French issue o writ-ing that becomes the American issueo reading, how capitalism was trans-ormed into the enigma o culturalidentity, and how micropolitics turnedinto a dierent question o symbolicconficts (the denationalizing o textsin a global market). French theoristscast representation and language asproblems in speciying any goal, pres-suring existentialists, structuralists,Marxists and eminists to surpass theircritiques. While the entirety o the bookis engaging but concentrated, two sec-tions are rather compelling: Chapter 6,The Politics o Identity, and Chapter12, Theory as Norm: A Lasting Infu-ence. Intellectuals rom the thirdworld, as Cusset indicates, are orced touse the arms o the adversary, such asterms taken rom the Enlightenmentand rational progressivism, and thesubaltern is oten taken as the blind

spot o the historical process (p. 147).French academics are set apart romthe international networks set up byAmerican universities, theorizing exileand miscegenation as a political condi-tion o the contemporary subject (p.296). How Foucault and Derrida areread directly in Mexico and Brazil, orexample, produced entirely dierentreadings than those generated romwithin the United States.

Stanley Fish, a literary critic whopokes at the uselessness o academicsand who has also reviewed this book,

does not believe that such intellectualsneed be essential, stating, Although thetextual or the discursive is . . . a cru-cial site o social contestation, the peo-ple who study that site are not crucialplayers in the contest (p. 157). Theoryshould be given a place in contempo-rary times and a global destiny to ulll,as Cusset intimates; along these lines,what is the expected responsibility o apublic intellectual in the United States,and how can academic encounters

works originating in the 1960s and1970s by theorists ranging rom Deleuzeto Virilio, remains an infuential andpreeminent set o academic meth-odologies, and there has not been asingle discipline or eld, including art,cultural studies, lm, gender studies,history or literature, that has remaineduntouched by its pedagogical impetus.

Densely written, highly inormed andcomprehensive in its scope, connectingtheory to the ar-fung reaches o poli-tics and social action both inside andoutside the university setting, Cussetsbook, as translated rom the originalFrench, sets out in a cultivated, distinc-tive ashion to rediscover why Americanacademics became so enamored withthe ideas o Foucault, Derrida, Deleuzeand others such as Baudrillard. In hisintricate descriptions o how these con-cepts were appropriated, skewed, thendeployed in the service o politicizedagendas that ranged rom armativeaction to neoconservative crusades orcounter-intelligentsia to deconstruc-tion and postmodern architecture, themultiarious episodes and numerousexamples are well-contextualized andhistoricized, expatiating how thesereactionary thoughts were transmittedrom French institutions and intellec-tual gures to those corresponding inthe United States. What the French callthought is what Americans know astheory, or so claims Sylvre Lotringer,who edited an older volume o articleswith Sande Cohen, similarly entitledFrench Theory in America(2001), and

views the rst book o French theory asJohn CagesFor the Birds. For those notwell versed in French philosophy, post-structuralism and Marxism, this bookmay prove to be a airly dicult task,since Cusset assumes that the reader isamiliar with the suppositions associatedwith Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze andis capable o seeing beyond the popu-larized associations o power, discipline,dierence, and schizophrenia to someo the more sophisticated philosophicalconsequences o these arguments.

Three moments o cultural con-

tact between France and the UnitedStatesthe artistic and intellectualexiles who traveled rom the U.S.between 1940 and 1945; the exporta-tion o Surrealism, Sartrean existential-ism and the ideas o the Annales group;and the October 1966 conerence heldat Johns Hopkins Universitymarkwhat Cusset views as integral, pro-longed exchanges that revolutionizedviewpoints or those in both countries.Alan Sokals notorious hoax article o