BioTheory

For the last few years some of the remaining luminaries of the theory era have taken a new approach. They talk about themselves. Their lectures are accessible, filled with reminiscences about their early career.

The grandiosity, the tendency for jargon to generalize remains in the habit of these speakers to equate their own careers with “the discipline.” When Gayatri Spivak or Fred Jameson chat, they define Comparative Literature through the arc of their own professional life.

Theory has become personal in a new way, it has become identified even more intensely with the names of its protagonists, yet this latest phase of biographical theory talk, the reminiscences of what it was like back in the day, gives the strongest sense that theory ain’t what once was, maybe it just ain’t.

In the last works of Derrida and Foucault, one might feel that they are looking back, but that impression could just as easily be our projection. Do the last volumes of History of Sexuality really express Foucault’s own self-understanding? Does a work such as Who’s afraid of Philosophy? recount Derrida’s place in France’s academy?

Still there is a fundamental difference between these works and the current round of old school stories. Most members of the theory fan club, waited eagerly for personal statements from their old masters. Who did not expect Derrida to confess, American-style, what his personal feelings about the Paul de Man revelations were? It took a while for people to understand that Foucault was never going to wear the t-shirt of sexual identity.

The old guard mediated their personality through their theory. They did not break down on camera or in front of three hundred acolytes. Derrida is cagey as ever in the documentaries about him. And while this reticence to speak publicly about their personal, to say nothing of their sexual, lives may seem quaintly old fashioned, old-European, it also shows a commitment to intellectual complexity, that their writing was not just a hat worn outside the house, but a constant habit trained into their every phrase--giving us the impression that the current autobiographical inclination in theory lectures is something of a slackening.