ABSTRACT
French theory in the United Kingdom has a long history, going back to the eighteenth century at least. At all events, the idea that somehow ‘theory’ was inveigling its way into British culture in the 1960s and 70s as an unrecognisable foreign agent could only be proposed by those with minimal sense of intellectual history. The problem for Marxist theory was that the French theorists included Louis Althusser, who sported impeccable credentials as a member of the French Communist party while he flirted surreptitiously with Maoism, which led to a bitter internal debate in France as in Britain. Theory has a comparably complex relation to literature in its own forms of self-expression. A major reason for the exclusion of the Europhilosophers was because from Soren Kierkegaard onwards, they had become increasingly literary and interested in issues of language and translation.
