Contents
Preface: “Something worth reading”: Theory and/as the Art of the Sentence
Introductory Matters: What Theory Does, Why Theory Lives
I. “Theory is [undead] everywhere”
III. Just being difficult/difficultly being just
Part 1 Antiphysis: Five Lessons in Textual Anthropogenesis
Lesson One: “The world must be made to mean”
—or, in(tro)ducing the subject of human reality
Lesson Two: “Meaning is the polite word for pleasure”
—or, how the beast in the nursery learns to read
Lesson Three: “Language is by nature fictional”
—or, why the word for moonlight can’t be moonlight
Lesson Four: “Desire must be taken literally”
—a few words on death, sex, and interpretation
Lesson Five: “You are not yourself”
—or, I (think, therefore I) is an other
I. Missing persons, bodies in pieces
III. Aesthetics of resistance?
Part 2 Extimacy: Five Lessons in the Utter Alterity of Absolute Proximity
Lesson Six: “This restlessness is us”
—or, the least that can be said about Hegel
—or, the fates of literary formalism
II. What’s the matter with formalism?
IV. Strategies of estrangement
Lesson Eight: “The unconscious is structured like a language”
—or, invasions of the signifier
II. Adventures in metaphor and metonymy
III. “the phallus”—for lack of a worser word
Lesson Nine: “There is nothing outside the text”
—or, fear of the proliferation of meaning
II. “What are we calling postmodernity?”
III. “something strange to me, although it is at the very heart of me”
Lesson Ten: “One is not born a woman”
—on making the world queerer than ever