ABSTRACT
For Alan Sinfield and Michel Foucault respectively, the twentieth century can be summed up by two proper names: those of Oscar Wilde and Gilles Deleuze.1 Now into the second decade of the twenty-first century, we are perhaps better placed to evaluate these claims. While Deleuze remains an inf luential figure in contemporary philosophy,2 Wilde’s stylized brand of aestheticism might seem, at least on the surface, to be significantly dated. Of course, Sinfield’s comments are not responses to Foucault’s, and neither is placing Wilde and Deleuze into confrontation. I have constructed here what may seem an artificial opposition between Wilde and Deleuze, one that Wilde is destined to lose. Moreover, there is an essential irony to the entire operation, since both Wilde and Deleuze are thinkers who deconstruct the binary operation. But by juxtaposing Sinfield’s and Foucault’s estimations, we are drawn to a key motivating question for this study: does Wilde, or the late nineteenth century itself which he challenged, still have relevance today? Or rather, to specify more clearly: does Wilde, a writer and thinker who engaged with the thought of his time in order to break with it, still have relevance in the postmodern age? Perhaps, as we shall, see, any either-or choice presented between Wilde and Deleuze is misleading: the twentieth century was Wildean precisely insofar as it was Deleuzian. It is with this juxtaposition of two names that this book will begin.
