ABSTRACT
The argument of this book is simple, modest, and against the grain: that criticism after theory is a single movement of thought defined by synthesis and continuity rather than by conflict and change. In the introduction to Ferdinand de Saussure’s foundational Course in General Linguistics (1916) that I edited with Haun Saussy in order to restore Wade Baskin’s original translation (Columbia, 2011), our principal goal was to remind readers that it was Saussure and his very precise vocabulary that showed that the world was a text—a scroll of signification—and that linguistic metaphors were the most exact and most unifying way to yoke together all the events of life, labor, and love under a single idea. Our knowledge today that everything is discourse is the direct effect of Saussure’s epochal discovery. The most influential figures in criticism since Saussure—Bakhtin, Derrida, and Foucault—are wholly consistent with Saussure’s Course no matter the traditions of complaint that have followed in their wake. These complaints vitiate—despite themselves and often hilariously so—the misconceptions that have made cottage industries out of quarrels with Saussurean semiology that are based, as Saussy and I pointed out, on notions of Saussure that are incorrect. New Historicism, postcolonialism, gender studies, environmental criticism, archive studies, even shared and surface reading are, like deconstruction, the by-products of Saussure’s structuralism, not its foils. I propose to elaborate this argument in the chapters that follow. I have not sought to advance a summary account of how and why criticism after theory is now plain-spoken and continuous. I will let my examples do the talking, first, in a discussion of some familiar theoretical problems in my first three chapters, followed by a series of related practical studies in literature in Chapters 4–8 and in psychoanalytic studies in Chapters 9 and 10. A Coda in life-writing about the author’s epileptic disability concludes this book by showing that illness, too, is a language, and in two ways: as the language of the body and the language of a patient trying to describe disability to deaf ears.
