“Something worth reading”: Theory and/as the Art of the Sentence
Toward the end of Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy, the narrator, who calls himself Jacques Moran, encounters a strange man on a lonely road. Words are somewhat nonsensically exchanged, and violence of some extreme sort apparently ensues. For as Moran rather vaguely reports:
I do not know what happened then. But a little later, perhaps a long time later, I found him stretched on the ground, his head in a pulp. I am sorry I cannot indicate more clearly how this result was obtained, it would have been something worth reading. But it is not at this late stage of my relation that I intend to give way to literature. (1955: 151)
Nor at this early stage of my relation do I intend to linger with this bit of Beckettian pulp fiction. But I would like to note the neat definition of “literature” that Beckett’s Moran provides—“literature,” we are told, is “something worth reading.”
Toward the beginning of Literary Theory: An Introduction, Terry Eagleton offers a similarly simple definition, a “purely formal, empty sort of definition,” of the word “literature”—“Perhaps,” writes Eagleton, “ ‘literature’ means . . . any kind of writing which for some reason or another somebody values highly” (1983/1996: 8). This “functionalist” definition, as he calls it, doesn’t quite satisfy Eagleton, but it works well enough for my purposes here, mainly because it allows me—at the outset of this book, Ten Lessons in Theory—to begin troubling the definitional distinction between “literature” and “theory,” to begin introducing “literary theory” as a particular kind of writing that “for some reason or another” more than a few people have valued highly (even if others have loathed and reviled it). Taken together, Eagleton’s and Beckett’s definitions of “literature” give me license to suggest that “theory,” like “literature,” is “something worth reading,” that “giving way to literature” and “falling into theory” (Richter 1999) can be intimately related responses to remarkably similar temptations.
Written as a “literary” introduction to “the activities that have come to answer to the nickname theory” (Culler 2007: 1), this book stakes itself upon three major premises. The first premise is that a genuinely productive understanding of theoretical activities depends upon a much more sustained encounter with the foundational writings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud than any reader is likely to get from the standardized introductions to theory currently available; discourse concerning these four writers thus pervades Ten Lessons in Theory. The second premise involves what Fredric Jameson describes as “the conviction that of all the writing called theoretical, [Jacques] Lacan’s is the richest” (2006: 365–6); holding to this conviction pretty much throughout, Ten Lessons pays more (and more careful) attention to the richness of Lacan’s psychoanalytic writings than does any other introduction to theory (that isn’t specifically an introduction to Lacan). The book’s third premise, already introduced above, is that “literary theory” isn’t simply highfalutin speculation “about” literature, but that theory fundamentally is literature, after all—something worth reading, a genre of writing that considerable numbers of readers have, for some time now, valued highly, even enjoyed immensely. The book not only argues but attempts to demonstrate that “the writing called theoretical” is nothing if not a specific type of “creative writing,” a particular way of engaging with the art of the sentence, the art of making sentences that make trouble—sentences that articulate the desire to make radical changes in the very fabric, or fabrication, of social reality. As presented and performed here, theoretical writing involves writing about “writing as the very possibility of change” (Cixous 1975/2007: 1646).
Both the presentation and the performance of the book are consistent with this emphasis on sentence-making as trouble-making transformation. As its title indicates, the book proceeds in the form of ten “lessons,” each based on an axiomatic sentence or “truth-claim” selected from the more or less established canon of theoretical writing. Each lesson works by extensively “unpacking” its featured sentence, exploring the sentence’s conditions of possibility and most radical implications, asking what it means to say that “the world must be made to mean” (Stuart Hall), that “meaning is the polite word for pleasure” (Adam Philips), that “language is by nature fictional” (Roland Barthes), and so on. In the course of exploring the conditions and consequences of these sentences, the ten lessons work and play together to articulate the most basic assumptions and motivations supporting theoretical writing, from its earliest stirrings to its most current turbulences. Provided in each lesson is a working glossary—specific critical keywords (like “reification” or “jouissance”) are boldfaced on their first appearance and defined either in the text or in a footnote.
But while each lesson constitutes a precise explication of the working terms and core tenets of theoretical writing as such, each also attempts to exemplify theory as a “practice of creativity” (Foucault 1983/1997: 262) in itself. And so, while the book as a whole constitutes a novel approach to theory, it also asks to be approached as a sort of theoretical novel. In other words, Ten Lessons is a textbook, to be sure, but a textbook written to be read closely, not (or so its writer dares to hope) as yet another routine, academically commodified, and dutifully “historicized” rehearsal of the now-standard “theories of literature,” and not as a guide to the practical “application” of theory to literature, but rather as a set of extended pedagogical prose poems or experimental fictions or variations on the theme of theory as literature, of “life as literature” (Nehamas 1987) and of “the world as text” (Barthes 1968/1977: 147).
The ten lessons are divided into two parts. Part 1 is called “Antiphysis: Five Lessons in Textual Anthropogenesis.” The word antiphysis actually appears but rarely in the canon of theoretical writing; the word isn’t glossed in any of the critical dictionaries that I’ve employed here to explicate key theoretical terms. And yet the word antiphysis does quite nicely express the core tenet of what’s called “historical materialism” —Karl Marx’s permanently revolutionary argument that humans distinguish themselves from animals, and that human history as such begins, when people first start working to produce the very conditions of their human existence. The word antiphysis thus concerns the rudimentary but transformative labor—the actual work on or against physical nature—that must be performed for any “human reality” ever to form itself, bring itself into being. And in this argument, all human realities do, in fact, actively and transformatively bring themselves into being; all human realities are restless exercises in anthropogenesis, a word that concerns the human causality, the human origins or human geneses, of the human qua human. The phrase “textual anthropogenesis,” then, involves what’s called linguistic determinism, or what I’ll call semiotic materialism, the argument, also to my mind permanently revolutionary, that any human reality, and any individual subject thereof, must be made out of language as a specifically “antinatural”—unreal or “antireal”—form of productive labor. Thus the book’s first five lessons, all in various ways, concern “the virtual character of the symbolic order” of language as “the very condition of human historicity” (Žižek 1999/2002: 241); they all concern the difference between human and non-human animals, between human reality and “the real,” as well as the constitutive interrelations between historical and semiotic materialisms; they all address the linguistic formations and transformations, the political inscriptions and ideological interpellations, of the specifically human subject, the “animal at the mercy of language” (Lacan 1966f/2006: 525), the animal sentenced to keep making sentences in the purely anthropogenetic, socio-symbolic, textual or virtual reality that is, so to speak, ours.
Part 2 is called “Extimacy: Five Lessons in the Utter Alterity of Absolute Proximity.” A key Lacanian neologism, the word extimacy mixes “exteriority” with “intimacy,” and thereby “neatly expresses the way in which psychoanalysis problematizes the opposition between the inside and the outside, between container and contained” (Evans 1996: 58). The word “extimacy” signifies the unsettling idea that “the innermost, intimate core of a person’s psychical being is, at root, an alien, foreign ‘thing.’ ” (Johnston 2009: 86): “extimacy” involves the strange “coincidence of utter alterity with absolute proximity” and “brings us close to what, in ourselves, must remain at a distance if we are to sustain the consistency of our symbolic universe” (Žižek 1999/2008: 368). And so, here, the word “extimacy” marks the various ways theoretical writing tends, rather like the Mobius strip so beloved by Lacan, to turn itself and its readers inside out and outside in; “extimacy” serves to condense the various concerns with alienation, alterity, foreignness, defamiliarization, constitutive otherness, difference, différance, queerness, and so forth, which continue to pervade and motivate theoretical writing.
While Part 2 of Ten Lessons is similar to Part 1 in that it strives to explicate and perform theoretical writing as a “practice of creativity” in itself, Part 2, despite its alienating title, also serves as a slightly more orthodox introduction to and survey of “the history of literary theory,” addressing certain “schools” or “approaches” that have by now acquired perhaps a bit too much “name recognition” —formalism, structuralism, semiotics, poststructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonial theory, feminism, gender studies, and finally, queer theory. But what initially sets this section of the book apart from other, more routinely “historicizing” introductions to theory is that it begins with a full lesson devoted to Hegel. Major theorists from Althusser to Žižek acknowledge Hegel’s importance to their writing. Jean-Michel Rabaté insists “that a patient reading of Hegel . . . is, if not a prerequisite, at least an essential step on the way to an understanding of theory” (2002: 21) as such. And yet, no introduction to theory to date devotes more than a few sentences, if that much, to Hegel’s work. The lesson on Hegel given here attempts to rectify this situation, letting some prolonged exposure to the ever-pertinent Hegel serve the book’s readers as “an essential step on the way” to better understanding not only the lessons on formalism, structuralism, poststructuralism, etc., that are to follow, but also, retroactively, the five lessons on “antiphysis” that precede.
“Antiphysis” and “extimacy” are, of course, intimately interrelated matters, so much so that we might here borrow the phrasing of one of our lesson’s guiding sentences and say that there is no lesson in “antiphysis” that is not, at the same time, a lesson in “extimacy,” and vice versa, so that a productive understanding of this book wouldn’t in my estimation be seriously damaged by your reading Part 2 before Part 1. Before getting to either portion of our lessons, however, we have to consider the question of why any of us should even be studying “theory” anymore in the first place; we must work through an introductory chapter that explains why theory isn’t dead—even if certain readers have long wished it were. The introduction accounts for this “death-wish” against theory and takes up several descriptions (from Jonathan Culler, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Žižek, Judith Halberstam, Fredric Jameson, and others) of what theory has done and must continue to do to “stay alive,” explaining why theoretical writing always attempts to “shatter and undermine our common perceptions” (Žižek 2006: ix), usually by taking any and all “meaning as a problem rather than a given” (Culler 2007: 85). The introduction accounts for theory’s necessarily antagonistic stances, exploring the various motivations behind theoretical writing as a mode of creative abrasion, a means of relentlessly writing against (against common-sense assumptions, against given meanings, against “things as they are,” etc.). The chapter concludes with a justification of theory’s notorious “difficulty,” its discursive warfare against “clarity,” and ends by insisting that theoretical writing’s inevitable mission is to try “to keep open the difference between things as they are and things as they might otherwise be” (Critchley 1997: 22).
As for the individual lessons themselves, let’s let the following serve as a preview:
Lesson 1: “The world must be made to mean”—or, in(tro)ducing the subject of human reality
The guiding sentence for the first lesson comes from Stuart Hall. The lesson explains how the sentence’s first clause, “the world must be made,” expresses the principal assertion of historical materialism and then posits the ending infinitive—“to mean”—as a sort of semiotic kicker. The lesson presents historical/semiotic materialism (the constitutive interrelation between labor and language) as the grounding “antiphysical” assumption of theoretical writing, the twin foundations of anti-foundationalism, so to speak. Here, we begin to unpack this word “antiphysis,” to understand why theoretical writers think that human reality can never be taken “naturally,” as a given, and can never be understood as biologically determined or theologically guaranteed. Here also, with a nod to Lacan’s insistence on our species’ universal “pre-maturity at birth,” are we introduced to the idea that the “subject of human reality”—the specifically human individual—must always be induced, must always be brought into being not merely physically, but through labor and language, “work with words.”
Lesson 2: “Meaning is the polite word for pleasure”—or, how the beast in the nursery learns to read
This lesson’s guiding sentence comes from Adam Phillips’ The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites. The lesson begins with the curiously unappetizing assertion that we are never simply “born human” but must always be meaningfully made that way. The lesson expands upon Lacan’s suggestion of human prematurity at birth and discusses the various “orthopedic” processes by which, as Louis Althusser puts it, the “small animal produced by the union of a man and a woman” must be turned into “a small human child” (1971: 205). For a historical/semiotic materialist conversant with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, this “turn” is always laboriously linguistic—it always involves both the adjustment of the pleasure principle to the reality principle and the sacrifice of animal “being” to human “meaning.” Freud, as we’ll see, posits that “whoever understands the human mind knows that hardly anything is harder for [us] than to give up a pleasure which [we have] once experienced. Actually, we never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another” (1907/1989: 437–8). Lacan, as we’ll read, casts this exchange of “one thing for another” in terms of a sacrifice of real “being” (l’être) for symbolic “meaning” (la lettre). Phillips’ sentence merges these articulations, revealing “politeness”—the discursively orthopedic politics of self-policing—as that arena of exchange in which the pleasures of animality (such as they are for us) must be traded up for “meaningful” participation in the polis.
Lesson 3: “Language is, by nature, fictional”—or, why the word for moonlight can’t be moonlight
Although it was Nietzsche who first stressed the radically figurative nature of language— the utterly metaphorical condition of any articulated “truth”—our guiding sentence here comes from Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida. Readers of Lesson Three are asked to consider the disturbing propositions that we are all “made out” of language and that language itself simply isn’t real (or isn’t simply real). Language exists, to be sure, but it cannot be real; language exists only ever “antiphysically,” precisely by virtue of not being real, by never quite failing to negate the real. Along the lines of Lacan’s assertion that “the symbol first manifests itself as the killing of the thing” (1966d/2006: 262), this lesson posits a certain murderous or prohibitory “no to the real thing” as any noun’s structural condition of possibility. The lesson rehearses several elementary examples to illustrate the “antiphysical” point (the word “elephant” can’t really be an elephant, the word “dirt” etched into real dirt isn’t really dirt, a pointing finger must be read as something other than just real flesh in order to function as a sign, etc.). The lesson also adumbrates Lacan’s take on the linguistic subject as a subject of desire, his “oedipalization” of language acquisition, the way he links language’s “no to the real” with the metaphorical “no of the father,” connecting the “paternal” prohibition against incest to the figurative “bar” that separates signifier from signified, preventing any word from ever completely being the thing that it means. The lesson closes with a riff on a passage from Don DeLillo’s postmodern ghost story The Body Artist and with the suggestion that while it might seem like a “bad thing” that the word for moonlight can never really be moonlight, it’s probably a “good thing” that words for excrement aren’t really excremental—in other words, the lesson closes by suggesting that we “animals at the mercy of language” should be more gratefully relieved than fundamentally disturbed to be told that we are made out of words, that words aren’t really real, and that language is literally nothing.
Lesson 4: “Desire must be taken literally”—a few words on death, sex, and interpretation
The lead sentence here is from Lacan, for whom “to take literally” means to take “to the letter,” and so this lesson thoroughly unpacks the various structural coimplications of language and desire, starting with the uncanny resemblance between Alexandre Kojève’s Hegelian description of desire as “an emptiness, the presence of the absence of a reality” (1947/1980: 5) and Lacan’s formulation of the signifier as a literal “presence made of absence” (1966d/2006: 228). In the first section, on words, the lesson maps Lacan’s trio of need, demand, and desire onto his three psychic registers of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic; the lesson also takes up Freud’s key distinction between “thing-presentations” and “word-presentations.” In the second section, on death, the lesson gets at the notion of the death-drive in the same way Freud did in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, by taking up that famous bit of child’s play called “the fort-da”; this section also addresses the relation between the death-drive and narrative (as per the analysis of Peter Brooks). The section on “sex” attempts to justify, or at least cogently explain, the Lacanian assertion that human sex is a problem of speech and that speech itself is a sexual dilemma. As the lesson spells out, the English word “sex” itself comes from the Latin secare, “to cut.” Because the word “sex” shares its root, so to speak, with other “cutting” words (scission, scissoring, sectioning), the “meaning of sex” can be said to involve nothing but “coming to terms” with “the cut” of materialist language, in which not just “sex” or “scissors” but all words in all languages are serrated, castrating: so much, then, for any retrograde notion of some “completely natural” sexual desire among humans. In this section, however, the problem of sex is “taken to the letter” by being taken as a problem of writing, the literal forming of written letters on the page. A few passages of literary writing from Poe and Faulkner that thematize incestuous desire are briefly interpreted, and this move takes us into the fourth section, on the relation between interpretation and desire. Here, however, we turn away from the explicitly psychoanalytic register, away from Lacan’s matter-of-fact assertion that “desire, in fact, is interpretation itself” (Lacan 1973/1981: 176) and toward a consideration of Nietzsche’s quip that there are no facts, only interpretations, and his interpretation of the “will to truth” as a form of the “will to death.” The lesson ends with Michel Foucault’s discussion of the “life and death” of interpretation and his Nietzschean or “aestheticist” insistence on writing as an art of self-transformation.
Lesson 5: “You are not yourself”—or, I (think, therefore I) is an other
This lesson explores the politically anti-identitarian strains of theoretical writing. The lead sentence is the slogan that appears on the famous Barbara Kruger text-art photograph (woman’s face in shattered mirror), but it also relates to Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre” or “I is an other” (which insight appears, mashed-up with the Cartesian cogito, in the lesson’s subtitle).
After introducing some of the ethical motivations behind theoretical antiidentitarianism, the lesson performs a close reading of Kruger’s jagged edges, then moves to a thorough explication of Lacan’s essay on the mirror-stage. The second section is an extensive explication of Althusser’s essay “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses,” while the third section returns to Nietzsche and Foucault and to the question of an effective “aesthetics of resistance” to the ideological interpellation of the subject.
Lesson 6: “This restlessness is us”—or, the least that can be said about Hegel
This lesson’s lead sentence comes from Jean-Luc Nancy’s Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, and the lesson begins with a question: if Hegel is in fact what Nancy calls him—“the inaugural thinker of the contemporary world” (2002: 3)—and if Jean-Michel Rabaté is right to insist that reading Hegel is “an essential step on the way to an understanding of theory” (2002: 21), why do most introductions to theory slight Hegel so drastically, saying very little about his writing, if even mentioning his name at all? This widespread neglect of a crucial theoretical figure is best explained by Fredric Jameson, who warns that “the attempt to do justice to the most random observation of Hegel ends up drawing the whole tangled, dripping mass of the Hegelian sequence of forms out into the light with it” (1971: 306). This lesson attempts to do justice, not to a random observation of Hegel, but to the crucial Hegelian concept of Aufhebung, or “sublation.” While the lesson doesn’t consider the whole Hegelian sequence of forms, it does attempt to chart some of the key movements of the dialectic, taking up, in particular, Hegel’s theoretical sublation of Christianity and his rehearsal of the struggle between “lord and bondsman” or “master and slave.” The lesson ends with an attempt to demonstrate the political pertinence of a restlessly Hegelian analysis with a close reading of the famous photograph of the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, Tennessee, the stark depiction of the “I am a man” placards held up against the fixed bayonets of the state militia.
Lesson 7: “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism”—or, the fates of literary formalism
The lead sentence here is from Walter Benjamin, but the lesson begins with Terry Eagleton’s assertion that all the readers and writers of all the civilized documents in the world basically fall into two groups—those who actually understand Benjamin’s dialectical observation and those who simply don’t get it. Historically speaking, the latter group tends to be populated by literary formalists, particularly the Anglo-American New Critics, who arguably made attempting to prevent our understanding of Benjamin’s sentence their critical mission in life. Thus, the first section of this lesson examines the standard definitions of (and political charges against) literary formalism, taking up, in particular, the way the New Critical concern with formal control and containment mirrored an underlying and reactionary interest in social containment and control. The section also shows how Virginia Woolf practically demolished New Criticism in advance with certain passages from A Room of One’s Own. The second section of this lesson performs a close reading of two often-anthologized essays by Cleanth Brooks— “Irony as a Principle of Structure” and “My Credo”—demonstrating Brooks’ investment in using formalist methods of reading poetry to transubstantiate “new” literary criticism into orthodox religious devotion. The third section pits Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s “defamiliarization” against Brooks’ new critical “faith,” arguing that Shklovsky’s resolutely secular (actually, quite Nietzschean) conception of formalism—and particularly, his attention to the distinction between “poetical” metaphor and “prosaic” metonymy—is still quite pertinent to and compatible with contemporary materialist semiotics and poetics.
Lesson 8: “The unconscious is structured like a language”—or, invasions of the signifier
In this lesson, we return to Lacan, at least with the guiding sentence, and more or less with a vengeance in Section Three. But the first two sections are devoted to explaining the developments in structural linguistics that made Lacan’s trademark assertion possible, to begin with. Here, we distinguish formalism from structuralism and examine the interdependence of structuralism and semiotics. We necessarily spend some time with Ferdinand de Saussure, charting the signifier/signified and syntagm/paradigm distinctions, mainly as a way of seeing how Roman Jakobson is able to connect metaphor and metonymy to condensation and displacement in Freudian dream analysis (thus enabling Lacan’s signature claim). We also spend some time exploring the most radical implications—particularly for considerations of sex, sexual difference, and gender identity—of Saussure’s insight that language is a differential system “without positive terms” (1959: 120). This discussion, of course, takes us back to “the structuralist Lacan,” to the famous “twin doors” (Ladies and Gents) in “The Instance of the Letter” and, inevitably, to “The Meaning of the Phallus.” The lesson ends with an attempt to establish: (1) that the phallus really isn’t the penis any more than the word moonlight really is moonlight, and for much the same reason; (2) that Lacan’s writings ultimately expose, rather than perpetuate, so-called phallogocentrism, that his writings describe, rather than prescribe, a patriarchal unconscious “structured like a language”; and that (3) we may already find in the allegedly “structuralist” Lacan the strong possibility of what Judith Butler calls “a queer poststructuralism of the psyche” (2004: 44).
Lesson 9: “There is nothing outside the text”—or, fear of the proliferation of meaning
The ninth lesson concerns poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonial theory. Poststructuralism and postmodernism have been branded as “trendy nihilisms” that deny life or literature any significance whatsoever. But poststructuralist and postmodernist writers actually fall quite short of affirming that “life” has “no meaning.” Rather, such writers examine our pervasive fear that human reality generates far too many meanings, far too much interpretation— they trace and engage with our anxieties about semiotic excess, what Jacques Derrida (who is, of course, responsible for the lesson’s guiding sentence) calls “the overabundance of the signifier” (1966/1978: 290). To see how poststructuralism concerns our “fear of the proliferation of meaning” (Foucault 1969/1998: 222), the first section of this lesson begins with a necessary revisiting of Nietzsche, with specific attention to key moments in “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” and the Genealogy of Morals. We then move through Derrida’s deconstruction of metaphysics, his attempted evaporation of “the center” and his abolition of the “transcendental signified,” and then to Roland Barthes’ and Michel Foucault’s interrogations of “the author.” The second section gets into postmodernism by way of the Habermas/Lyotard debate, but then more carefully explicates “the postmodern” by considering “the modern” in three aspects—socio-economic modernization, philosophical modernity, and aesthetic modernism. Section three, on postcolonial theory, begins—on what some will, no doubt, consider an inappropriately Eurocentric and “queerly” Foucauldian note—by pointing out the strong similarities between Edward Said’s anti-imperialist descriptions of “Orientalism” and Eve Sedgwick’s anti-homophobic limning of “sex.” We then look at some queerly Orientalist moments in Hollywood film-noir, specifically the Geiger Bookstore sequence in Hawks’ The Big Sleep and the entrance of Joel Cairo in Huston’s The Maltese Falcon. We then consider the reasons why some postcolonial theorists aligned with Marxism (Lazarus, Ahmed, Almond) would have major problems with what we’ve just done, why they rail against the “culturalist emphasis in postcolonial studies” (Lazarus 2004a: 9), why they think the hybrid intermingling of poststructuralist, postmodernist, and postcolonial theory destroys the very possibility of intellectual critique in the sense that Marxism inherits from the Enlightenment. We close, however, by giving Foucault the final word, and his final word is, once again, “Nietzsche.”
Lesson 10: “One is not born a woman”—on making the world queerer than ever
The lead sentence for this lesson is, of course, from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (while the subtitle hails from Michael Warner’s introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet). The lesson begins by considering a quite recent objection to Beauvoir’s axiom, articulated by Francine du Plessix Gray in the pages of the New York Times. Laying waste to Gray’s objection, and to other similarly clueless resistances to basic feminist analysis, allows me to pay ironic homage to Cleanth Brooks by posting four “articles of faith” in what I call “My (male feminist) Credo.” Here, I argue that to become not a woman, but a feminist theorist, one must learn:
The last “article of faith” takes us directly to the lesson’s second section, called “The Future is Kid’s Stuff” (after Lee Edelman). The section begins with Gayle Rubin’s assessment of the analytical limitations of feminism in her essay “Thinking Sex,” charts the way theorists like Edelman, Lauren Berlant, Michael Warner, David Halperin, Eve Sedgwick, Carla Freccero, and others have redefined and redeployed the word “queer,” and ends with an extensive consideration of Edelman’s rudely worded and identity-disturbing critique of “reproductive futurism” in his incomparably “negative” No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive.
The last lesson, and the book itself, would thus seem to end on a note of death and destruction. But the book also ends with my resurrection of the claim, first made in the introductory chapter, that theoretical writing, as a vital mode of writing against, is not only “not dead,” but will most likely “live forever”—or at least, for as long as “the humanities” remain an ongoing concern within a recognizably human reality. For as Jean-Michel Rabaté puts it in his book The Future of Theory, theory is that relentless kind of writing that “never stops coming back” (2002: 10).
In the end, Ten Lessons is a textbook that never stops coming back to “the basics” of literary theory; it is written to serve as a stylistically performative introduction to the most fundamental assumptions, motivations, tenets, and terminologies of theoretical writing. In other words, believe it or not, Ten Lessons is written to give pleasure. Of course, the book’s overarching aims are pedagogical; these are indeed lessons that are made of sentences that are written to be studied. But these sentences are written quite particularly for those diligent students who can delight in difficult instruction, who can engage in close but identity-disturbing reading, who are capable of learning to relish the experience of letting their common-sense perceptions and assumptions be completely shattered and undermined, and who may be willing to risk “losing their religion” in order to find what they might not have otherwise known they had—not exactly the courage of their convictions, but, as Nietzsche somewhere puts it, the courage for an attack on all their convictions.
In other words, the sentences in this book are written for “good students” who aren’t so thoroughly “good” that they can’t finally bring themselves to “give way to literature.” On the one hand, though clearly “instructional,” Ten Lessons is not written as a facilely commodified “user-friendly guide” to theory or as an overly convenient theoretical “tool-box.” On the other hand, while not without its practical uses, the book is written to be enjoyed, even if “enjoyment” of the sort this writing aspires to provide proves arduous and unsettling. As a professor of theory, I hope that you’ll learn to enjoy the genuine difficulties, the “provocative and perverse challenge[s]” (Jameson 2009: 4), of this genre of writing. As a theoretical writer, I hope that you’ll simply like the writing itself, that you’ll end up falling for it, that “for some reason or another” you’ll value it highly. As one animal at the mercy of language writing to another, I hope you’ll find “something worth reading” in these Ten Lessons in Theory.