ABSTRACT
In this coda-like chapter I want to move forward from my accounts of cultural studies and endgame capitalism by turning to the current intellectual situation, in which academic “theory” has become simultaneously more political and more theological in its orientation. I will do so in order to explore in more detail what is at stake when the academic humanities embark on a radical critique of capitalism. It is clear that the (so-called) post-structuralism developed by Derrida,
Foucault, Deleuze, and others in the 1960s no longer figures as the humanities’ avant garde. On one side, it has been displaced by an intellectual impulse to reconnect theory to radical politics more directly. In its most widely received form, we can call this impulse neo-gauchisme, since it is associated with the French May 1968 moment, especially with those whom Bruno Bosteels calls “post-Maoists,” among whom Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou stand out (Bosteels 2005). But post-structuralism has also been displaced by an interest in religion and a critique of secularism which takes a number of forms, including Charles Taylor’s revival of a Catholic transcendentalism. Taylor’s work has a distant but friendly relation with the more politically ambiguous “radical orthodoxy” associated with the English theologian John Milbank and his colleagues, whose cultural and political implications have not been fully spelled out, but which, according to Milbank himself, may return us to a form of Disraelian and anti-Erastian, Tory democracy1 (Milbank 2008). There has also been a revived interest in the avowedly conservative and less than enthusiastically democratic thought of Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, developed in response to European capitalism’s mid-twentieth-century political crisis, and which, most notably in Schmitt’s work of the 1930s, laments the separation of politics from revealed religion, i.e., the decline of theo-politics in the period after about 1880. What is particularly striking is that while theory’s simultaneous turns to
gauchisme and to religion happen along different tracks, they are by no means mutually exclusive. After all, a number of neo-gauchiste European political theorists have written quasi-theological texts over the past decade or so (e.g., Agamben 2005; Badiou 2003a; Žižek 2000). I’ll argue that neo-gauchisme is
now so engaging because it too embarks on a theo-politics, if one that is paradoxically, and like Leo Strauss’s, for instance, irreligious. In the first instance, I am interested in one particular consequence of these
broad developments and which was addressed in Chapter 6, namely the fact that theory is now increasingly remote from, and indeed oppositional to, cultural studies. (It is worth noting that, to date, these latest forms of theory have barely been absorbed into Anglophone literary studies either.) As we have seen, cultural studies’ relation to Continental theory was always beset by difficulties, but there can be no doubt but that Gramsci, Althusser, Foucault, Bourdieu, and de Certeau helped provide the new field with key concepts and analytical techniques. Today, however, exchanges of that kind have become rare. One key piece of evidence for this is that most essays in New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (2006), edited by Gary Hall and Clare Birchall, do not even claim to reconnect theory to cultural studies but rather hope “to invent a cultural studies … and the possibilities for doing cultural studies after Birmingham and after theory, too” (Hall and Birchall 2007: 23). And in fact most end not by suggesting concrete proposals for the reinvigoration of cultural studies by way of recent European philosophy or theory (and thence, at least implicitly, by facing the historical moment in which that theory is articulated) but by making vague requests for what one writer calls an “analysis of a social formation” grounded on what has been “not articulated” so far (2007: 67), or by no less vague prophecies of radical “mutations of practices that seek altogether another name” (2007: 142).2
