ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by claiming that postmodern theory is not a matter of defining or refining our metalanguage; such would indeed be a modernist project along the lines of the work of Gadamer or Habermas. It discusses the intersection of postmodernism with the epistemological claims of theoretical knowledge. The chapter proposes romance as the genre within which theory becomes postmodern; this has the advantage of forcing us to recognize that postmodernism is not so much a rejection of the modern as the recognition that we have always been in love with modernism. It traces in the writings of Kathy Acker and Jacques Derrida an encounter with theory in the field of romance rather than "real knowledge," a brief and somewhat slippery encounter that helps us to understand what is at stake in recent recognitions of the importance of the term "seduction," as we move from a theory of seduction to an attempt to think theory as seduction.
