The Receptions of Poststructuralism more

The Receptions of Poststructuralism Paul Bowman1 Derrida’s Cat One of the most famous figures of poststructuralism, Jacques Derrida, died on the 8th October 2004. Over the following days, weeks and months, newspapers and other media the world over contained reactions, responses, comments and obituaries to Derrida. Many of these were surprisingly hostile; they were often irreverent and disrespectful; and often also mocking, joking and scornful. Some were starkly abusive and aggressive. In fact, many obituaries, reactions and responses to the news of Derrida’s death attacked or slandered not only his work but also cast aspersions on his character and personality. A large proportion made crass jokes about whether we could actually be sure that this character – who had infamously questioned the truth and reality of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’, and who had proposed that ‘there is nothing outside the text’ – had ever ‘really’ lived or died. The fact that such spite, spleen, slander and vituperation came in response to the news of a philosopher’s death would tend to suggest that the reception given to Derrida, in journalistic circles at least – but also in academic circles (many of the obituaries were written by prominent academics) – was far from hospitable. This is ironic, because much of Derrida’s work itself actually involved explorations of the questions and themes of ‘reception’ and ‘hospitality’. One of the many questions that Derrida often (re)posed, for instance, was that of how we should respond or react 1 First Draft Submission for The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism, Edinburgh University Press. whenever we encounter something ‘other’, something ‘different’. This is an important matter because, as Derrida reiterated, the decision about how we should respond to anything, or about how we can establish what is being asked of us or required of us, is both a daily occurrence and also a potentially interminable philosophical and theoretical puzzle, one which always has ethical and political stakes and consequences. The ethical and political stakes and consequences are present, according to Derrida, all the way through every decision and action we take or response we make. They are never ‘merely theoretical’. They are always active. How should we (re)act? On what basis? How should we respond, responsibly? – to anything, whether that be the call of a stranger or a family member, a friend, a foe, a preacher or beggar on the street, a migrant at a national border, a knock at the door, a strange new object or question or practice, a new technological innovation or scientific discovery, or indeed – to recall one of Derrida’s famous examples – the mewing of a cat (Derrida 1995a: 69-70). As Derrida points out, the decision to respond to his own cat’s apparent call for food or for affection should be assessed in the context of every other apparent call that one does not or cannot or claims not to be able to respond to: calls from other cats, for instance, or calls for assistance or hospitality from strangers versus calls for hospitality from friends, and so on. These questions of interpretation (how do we know how to ‘read’ any signifier, mark, image, practice, movement or sound) and of ethics (how do we know how to respond) and of politics (how do we know what the consequences will be) are central to Derrida’s (and others’) poststructuralism – aka deconstruction. They are often thought through in terms of questions of reception, response and responsibility. Derrida’s Reception Derrida himself – as well as his body of writing, which became known as deconstruction and which may be regarded as a pinnacle of post-structuralism – was from the outset no stranger to inhospitable reactions and receptions. This remained the case even (perhaps especially) after he attained a degree of success and recognition for his work. According to one obituary – an uncharacteristically wellinformed and competent piece of writing – which appeared in the British newspaper The Guardian on Monday 11th October: ‘The French academic establishment never took him to its heart, and academic philosophers everywhere were generally uncomprehending’ (Attridge and Baldwin 2004). Despite the many ‘uncomprehending’ responses and receptions to his work, Derrida nevertheless attained various forms of institutional and international success. But this was never simple or straightforward: Derrida was never ‘mainstream’, even if his name became more widely known than perhaps any other poststructuralist. But he was never simply ‘marginal’ either. As Derrida wrote about his own ‘reception’: the academic institutions that have hosted and even ‘crowned’ me, so to speak, were themselves marginal – prestigious yes, but not universities. You have to keep in mind that I did teach in major institutions, but during a time when entrance to the university was refused me. A closer look at the field of higher education in France would make it clear that – not only in my own case – installing someone in a major institution may be precisely a way of rejecting him, or a confirmation of his rejection on other institutional levels. (Derrida 2003: 17) Rejected on many institutional levels, and in many places, Derrida and deconstruction were nevertheless welcomed into others. At other times and in other places, deconstruction still made its presence felt, intervened and had palpable effects, however unwelcomed or disavowed they may have been. And deconstruction was certainly no stranger to hostility. But nor was Derrida ‘alone’. As he wrote of the many scandalized reactions to deconstruction: If it were only a question of ‘my’ work, of the particular or isolated research of one individual, this wouldn’t happen. Indeed, the violence of these denunciations derives from the fact that the work accused is part of a whole ongoing process. What is unfolding here, like the resistance it necessarily arouses, can’t be limited to a personal ‘oeuvre’, nor to a discipline, nor even to the academic institution. Nor in particular to a generation: it’s often the active involvement of students and younger teachers which makes certain of our colleagues nervous to the point that they lose their sense of moderation and of the academic rules they invoke when they attack me and my work. If this work seems so threatening to them, this is because it isn’t eccentric or strange, incomprehensible or exotic (which would allow them to dispose of it easily), but as I myself hope, and as they believe more than they admit, competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction in its re-examination of the fundamental norms and premises of a number of dominant discourses, the principles underlying many of their evaluations, the structures of academic institutions, and the research that goes on within them. What this kind of questioning does is to modify the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize the university scene… (Derrida 1995b: 409-410) We will return to this important idea of understanding poststructuralism in terms of it being part of a ‘whole ongoing process’ in due course. But what is most notable visà-vis the reception of Derrida and his work is that although he trained in philosophy and studied and worked in Paris, it was not in the disciplinary field of philosophy and nor in the context of French or even European intellectual life that Derrida made his initial or most dramatic or enduring impact. It was in fact in the USA that Derrida received his warmest reception; and instead of in philosophy departments, it was in the field of literary studies that his work found (or sparked) a hospitable readership. According to Attridge and Baldwin’s obituary: The event that projected him into the international limelight was a conference at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1966, where the relatively unknown (but incontrovertibly glamorous) young philosopher upstaged the likes of Lacan and Jean Hyppolite. This was to be the start of a long relationship with English departments in the US, where he was made more welcome than anywhere else in the world. (Attridge and Baldwin 2004) Given this complicated ‘position’ within both geographical and disciplinary ‘space’, it already seems incorrect to say that deconstruction and/or poststructuralism is somehow simply ‘French Philosophy’ or (even more vaguely) ‘Continental Philosophy’. Nevertheless, the widely received or assumed version of the history of poststructuralism is that deconstruction somehow simply ‘is French’ and that ‘French poststructuralism’ was exported to and translated into English in America. Yet, even a surface knowledge of such events as this 1966 conference and its consequences, and a cursory consideration of Derrida’s influential relationships with American academics and universities (or, rather, academics in America) really muddies the familiar idea that poststructuralism was ‘originally’ the French version of a broader realm of Continental Philosophy that was then exported and translated into English. This is not to try to erase France, Paris, the French language or French intellectuals from the history of poststructuralism. Far from it. It is rather to point out that the familiar kind of narrative of ‘original’, monolingual or monocultural ‘origin’, followed by secondary ‘translation’ is precisely the kind of narrative or thought-process that poststructuralist thinkers such as Derrida worked so hard to teach us to distrust, to question, to challenge and to problematize. This is because, as Derrida himself would often elaborate in his writings, an ‘origin’ is never a simple, singular, or unitary event. Perceiving its complexity and lack of unity is the first stage of overturning or inverting conventional assumptions and displacing the terms of the debate. So, in this case, the inversion and displacement that takes place in the rethinking of the origins of ‘French theory’ is a movement away from ethnic, cultural or geographical essentialism, and a perception of the complex geographical, institutional and disciplinary processes involved in its ‘invention’- its constitution, foundation, inscription, and institutionalisation. Second things first: Poststructuralism Translated In one of his later works, Monolingualism of the Other; or: The Prosthesis of Origin (1996), Derrida actually argued, as the book’s subtitle makes plain, for the need to regard all ‘origins’ as involving paradoxical ‘prosthetic’ or ‘supplementary’ relationships between ‘things’ (‘things’ that don’t exist as such or in anything like the way they subsequently seem to exist ‘after’ the prosthetic supplementing of each with the other that ‘produces’ them as such. When it comes to origins (and indeed ‘ends’), Derrida argues frequently, temporality is jumbled up or ‘out of joint’ (Derrida 1994)). An origin is always a supplementing, a prosthesis, a grafting, argues Derridean poststructuralism – with a characteristic dizzying logic in which the ‘things’ which go into the production of one or more identity cannot be said to have existed in anything like the way they now (or subsequently) seem to before their interconnection or interimplication. This is why, in deconstruction and poststructuralism, it is often emphasized that ‘first things’ do not come ‘first’. Rather, things conventionally deemed secondary (such as a supplement, or a prosthesis) are argued to be strangely fundamental, ineradicable, and actually paradoxically ‘primary’. The examples of this ‘primacy of the secondary’, or the ‘constitutive character of the supplement’, are numerous, and have been documented widely in many places (See Bennington and Derrida 1993). Derrida himself carried out very many readings of philosophers, arguments, literary, artistic and other kinds of texts, throughout a long writing career in which he showed again and again that what is conventionally deemed to be primary relies on a secondary or supplementary dimension that is either overlooked, rejected, belittled, strictly policed, distrusted, repressed, or (mis)treated any number of other manners (Derrida 1981). Other poststructuralists, especially in Derrida’s wake, added to this already long list. Rather than reiterate the main ones here, it seems both illuminating and pertinent to point out that we can actually see a few ‘very poststructuralist’ processes involved in the institutional emergence of deconstruction and poststructuralism themselves. The starting point here, once more, relates to questioning the widely received standard narrative about the development of poststructuralism. This common understanding, as mentioned, proposes that (‘once upon a time’, as it were) there was an ‘original’ (and) ‘French’ poststructuralism. This entity was subsequently ‘translated’ into English. In this narrative, an ‘original French’ text is all too easily regarded as primary and authentic, whilst the translation into English is regarded as derived and secondary (supplementary). But what such a narrative completely overlooks is the complexity and constitutive (productive and constructive) role played by such multi-lingual, inter-national and cross-disciplinary institutional events as – for instance – the academic conferences (not to mention visiting professorships, publishing contracts, lecture tours, and the emergence of ‘secondary’ texts of commentary, discussion, definition, reaction and response) that substantially produced poststructuralism and deconstruction as such, in the first (or should that be second?) place. This putative ‘secondary’ elaboration of poststructuralism, in America and other contexts, this putative ‘translation’ of or from the French, is in fact rather more ‘primary’ than has often been acknowledged. Born in the USA: ‘French’ Poststructuralism To use a pair of terms that Derrida appropriated from linguistics, we tend to think in terms that are constative (as if things merely ‘are’), whereas in actual fact, there is a strongly performative dimension to acts, events, encounters, interpretations and interactions – including, of course, acts of speech and writing. That is to say, there was (and is) no ‘French Poststructuralism’ residing somewhere (in Paris, perhaps), like an essence, prior to its construction and (performative) elaboration in the texts and contexts that came subsequently to be regarded as those of ‘French Poststructuralism’. Moreover, much of the production of ‘French Theory’ didn’t happen ‘in France’. Nor was it derived from simply ‘French’ material (words, works, questions, topics, themes, problematics). Nor was it simply ‘Continental’ or ‘European’. Derrida, it deserves to be mentioned, was in no way ‘simply’ French himself: a French subject, yes, but also a Jewish Algerian, who had suffered the illeffects of the colonial French regime’s anti-Semitic policies during the 1940s. All of these pragmatic and practical historical, geographical, linguistic and sociological considerations might be brought to bear to make sense of some of even the most philosophical dimensions of poststructuralism. For instance, the critique of ‘self-presence’ or the philosophical critique of what Derrida called ‘the metaphysics of presence’ (for, in what way is poststructuralism or deconstruction, like any supposed being or thing, actually an ‘entity’ with one singular identity, an identity that is one and that is ever fully present in the here and now of consciousness?); or the critique of ‘being’ and of ‘essentialism’ (for where is the essence of poststructuralism? In what sense could it – or anything – be said to have or be an essential ‘is-ness’ or being, outside of complexity, partiality, process, or (to use the Deleuzean term) ‘becoming’?); or in the sense in which poststructuralism has always been connected with the critique of Eurocentrism (Derrida and other poststructuralists came from societies that were colonised by European powers, and poststructuralism arguably emerged against the backdrop – or perhaps a foreground – of what are now called post-colonial struggles and processes); etc. So, perhaps it might be better to think of deconstruction and poststructuralism not as ‘arriving’ in America or as being ‘translated’ into English, but as emerging performatively – being inscribed, being written into existence – in such institutional contexts as the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference. And it is important to note, too, that any academic conference itself is both constative and performative. For, although on the one hand, we might tend to think that speakers at conferences are speaking at conferences because they are already ‘names’ (whether experts, authorities, or, indeed, ‘stars’), on the other hand, and at the same time as this, ‘names’ and reputations are made at such events. To use Derrida’s borrowed terms again: academic conferences are not simply constative (descriptive of a state of affairs), they are also performative (productive of a new state of affairs). Indeed, it is possible to observe that the ‘reception’ of Derrida in America shows one way we can deconstruct the binary of origin/translation or production/reception: the reception of poststructuralism in America was ‘originary’, generative: it helped to produce poststructuralism as such, and not merely ‘American poststructuralism’, but also the very idea of ‘French poststructuralism’. The reception given to Derrida and to poststructuralism more generally in America was provided by English Literature departments in elite Ivy League institutions (the principal figure guiding this reception arguably being Paul de Man). All of which ought to help us recast our understandings both of the relations between origin and translation or original and secondary and between politics and academia, as well as margins and periphery, inclusion and exclusion. Merely Academic (or) Hyper-Political It is significant that poststructuralism was (to use some of its own terms) ‘performatively elaborated’ and ‘institutionally inscribed’ in and through the disciplinary sites of elite academic subjects such as comparative literature in elite academic institutions such as Yale and Johns Hopkins. But this should not lead us too quickly to the conclusion that deconstruction is therefore ‘elitist’ or ‘merely academic’. This is so even though in many ways Derridean poststructuralism is avowedly hyper-academic: Derrida made no bones of the fact that he regarded his approach as hyper-analytic and hyper-questioning, always involving the putting of every statement, phrase, formulation, claim, argument, connection or other construction through what he would often call ‘the harrowing ordeal of the undecidable’ – by which he meant the process of demonstrating the uncertainty of every foundation, every connection and every step – a process which inevitably makes Derrida’s work difficult to follow, often digressive, discursive, as well as allusive and saturated in philosophical and literary references (Derrida 1998: 29). But, despite this, deconstruction is not merely academic. There are various ways to demonstrate this. It is possible, for instance, to ‘historicize’ poststructuralism and to relate the deconstructive questioning of institutions and of the status quo per se (a questioning characteristic of poststructuralism in general), to broader historical processes of critique, contestation, uprising and struggle – as found in the postcolonial struggles of once-colonised areas of the globe as much as in countercultural movements in the West. However, it is also possible to show that poststructuralism was never ‘merely academic’ even when it is regarded as avowedly ‘hyper academic’. For, deconstruction in particular is certainly hyper-academic, but it is so in a very particular sense: it aims many of its questions at the university, but the university regarded as an institution: a social and culturally consequential institution, one that is instituted and orientated in particular contingent ways, and which could always be reorientated, with different biases, and with different consequences. So, unlike other academic ‘methods’ or ‘approaches’, deconstruction is less concerned with ‘establishing’ or even ‘transforming’ meanings, readings and interpretations of texts, and more concerned with how meaning is made within various forms of institution (whether by ‘institution’ we mean an approach, a discipline, a department, a school, or a style of scholarship and the type of hermeneutic or disciplinary field it maintains, etc.). For, it is a deconstructive contention that meanings are made. Meaning is forcefully, culturally, and institutionally forged. As such, deconstruction is less concerned with the interpretation of this or that (for example) literary text as such than with the institutional and cultural biases and forces which tend to select, ‘see’, conceptualize, produce and maintain this or that reading of this or that kind of ‘text’. This dimension to poststructuralism can be seen most clearly perhaps in the work of Roland Barthes, especially in such influential essays as ‘From Work To Text’ and ‘The Death of the Author’ (1997), in which he argues (among other things) that the belief in the ‘author’, and the belief that an author’s ‘intentions’ are to be sought out and respected when reading a work, is a type of almost religiously deferential orientation, which produces passive readers who defer to the authority of ‘the critic’. Barthes proposes instead that one should not regard a work as the product of one ‘intending’ mind (the author), but instead should be regarded as a web-like work constructed and stitched together from wider discourses of textual (textile-like, thread-like, fabric-like) material. (Barthes is discussing literary works, but ultimately, his argument can be extended and applied to many other things – any other ‘text’). As such, the author is neither to be regarded as the origin of his or her work, nor the owner of it, nor the ultimate authority on what it could or should mean. Thus, contrary to the way that many people and institutions tend to approach works, Barthes argues that ‘the author’ is neither the origin nor the owner of nor the authority on his or her productions. Their works are, in other words, not theirs. For these productions are constructed from pre-existing references, allusions, citations, cultural traces and materials, and are disseminated widely and received unpredictably and diversely. So, people who read works with one eye on the question of ‘finding’ the ‘proper interpretation’ are, according to the Barthesian critique, inadvertently subordinating themselves to ‘authority’ – the authority of the critic. As such, there is a sustained micro-political focus in the textual approach to literature, culture, and reading – a focus which deepens and intensifies the concerns of earlier cultural theorists such as Gramsci, Adorno, Horkheimer, Althusser, or Barthes’ contemporary Foucault. This is so even though Barthes would often focus on questions of pleasure, desire, enjoyment, emotions and textual details, rather than telegraphically announced ‘political’ matters. The General T-Shirt of Force and Signification Despite this investment in undisciplined productivity and creativity, Barthes was initially and most widely received in Anglophone academia as a key figure of the discipline of semiotics. His name remains to this day indelibly attached to the extremely widespread study of processes of signification in culture. This is because of the influence of his early work Mythologies (1957), in which, through journalistic cultural criticism, Barthes offers an account of the way that ‘ideology’ may be rethought not as a monolithic entity, but rather as something that happens through ongoing productive and inventive practices of ‘myth-making’. In the collected case studies that make up Mythologies, Barthes shows the ways that such cultural institutions as newspaper headlines, adverts, cover images, and the relations between image and text in conventional combinations like captions and photographs, as well as in various other forms of popular cultural practices and institutions (Hollywood film conventions, wrestling, strip-tease, tourist and cookery guides, even arguments in courts of law, etc.), all rework repositories of cultural ‘myths’ in order to produce or reproduce social meanings. According to Barthes, signifiers become transformed into ‘myths’ by virtue of the power of the connotations that certain stock images, formations and formulations hold in certain cultural contexts. Mythologies contained a long final chapter which sought to clarify the technical operation of mythical language. Employing the terminology of Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics, Barthes constructed what became the famous diagram of first and second order signification (denotation and connotation), and in doing so offered the world a clear and compelling framework for the analysis of all sorts of signs and signifying systems. As such, in the wake of this influential early work, Barthesian semiotics travelled widely through cultural and humanistic disciplines such as literature, art, anthropology and sociology; and to this day, Barthesian semiotics maintains its palpable presence across a wide range of disciplines, from those using the most empirical and empiricist of approaches in the analysis of culture and society to those using the most literary, textual, theoretical, rhetorical and philosophical. This range exists because Barthes’ other works are considerably less formalizable and considerably more complex than the enduringly popular Mythologies, and they focus on linguistic, literary, rhetorical and often highly technical aspects of cultural phenomena and practices, such as listening to music, the significance of vinyl recordings and photography. However, the semiotics of Mythologies is undoubtedly much easier to grasp, formalise, teach and communicate than Barthes’ other texts, and this surely accounts for its more widespread influence. In the UK context, Barthes’ work on myth and on the signifying power of almost any cultural material was picked up in the immediate prehistory of the establishment of the messy field of cultural studies. According to Stuart Hall, the key ingredients that went into the establishment and institution of British cultural studies were the class analyses and the ambivalent and critical relations to Marxism that could be found in literary studies and sociology. But cultural studies – as a named institution – was established in the UK in 1962, with the establishment of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies as a postgraduate programme in Birmingham University. Much has been written about the institutional history of cultural studies as a discipline, but here it need primarily be mentioned that, under the directorship of Stuart Hall, cultural studies self-consciously and deliberately sought to tackle ‘theory’. As Hall wrote in a 1992 retrospective on cultural studies and its ‘theoretical legacies’, there was a sense that there should be ‘no theoretical limits’ from which cultural studies should turn back (Hall 1992). This is because, according to Hall, cultural studies was always both an academic endeavour and a political project: a politicized academic endeavour which sought to engage rigorously, comprehensively, unrelentingly with all aspects of culture, power, structures, processes, formations, deformations and transformations. In his interpretation of this endeavour, Hall regarded theory – and poststructuralism in particular – to be of fundamental and foundational importance. Hall notes that poststructuralism was crucial to cultural studies because one of the formative problematics of cultural studies was the matter of critiquing, overcoming and surpassing Marxian economism – or, that is, escaping the stranglehold of interpretations, such as ‘crude Marxism’ which reductively regard the economy as determinant in the last instance of social relations (Hall 1996: 148-149). According to Jennifer Daryl Slack, both cultural studies and the post-Marxist theory that was developed by thinkers like Ernesto Laclau during the 1970s amounted to the ‘struggle to substitute the reduction that didn’t work’ – namely Marxist economic reductionism and structuralist theory’s reductionism – ‘with … something’. The problem with theories saturated in economic or structuralist determinism is that they are fatalistic or even anti-political in that they have often decided in advance that individuals, groups, agents, and indeed culture and politics in their entirety are epiphenomenal and inconsequential. This, says Daryl Slack, pointed to the need to retheorize processes of determination. The work of cultural theorists in the 1970s and early 1980s, especially the work of Stuart Hall, opened up that space by drawing attention to what reductionist conceptions rendered inexplicable. It is as though a theoretical lacuna develops, a space struggling to be filled…. In theorizing this space, a number of Marxist theorists are drawn on: most notably Althusser (who drew on Gramsci and Marx), Gramsci (who drew on Marx) and, of course, Marx. Its principal architects have been Laclau and Hall. (Daryl Slack 1996: 117) Daryl Slack finds it remarkable that ‘in spite of the importance of Laclau’s formulations, he has been excluded – as has Mouffe – from most of the popular histories of cultural studies’ (Daryl Slack 1996: 120-121). Rather than this, Daryl Slack emphasises the founding importance of the poststructuralist post-Marxist theory of Laclau and Mouffe for cultural studies (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). As do Morley and Chen, for instance, who begin their ‘Introduction’ to Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies by reminding us that ‘back in the mid-1980s, as an alternative to formalist and positivist paradigms in the humanities and social sciences, British cultural studies, and Stuart Hall’s work in particular, began to make an impact across national borders, especially in the American academy’ (Morley and Chen 1996: 1). Immediately after making this contextualising point, the very first point that they mention – the very first book, very the first problematic, and the very first orientating discussion within cultural studies that they mention – is Stuart Hall’s discussion of Laclau and Mouffe’s ‘seminal book, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (a key statement of postmodern political theory)’ (1). They conclude: ‘When we look at it retrospectively’, this engagement ‘can be seen as a starting-point’ (2), a constitutive cultural studies engagement with the ‘postmodern’ political theory of post-Marxism. However, Morley and Chen are perhaps too swiftly prepared to deem this encounter with post-Marxist poststructuralism something ‘from which cultural studies moved on, through another round of configuration’ (2). But Stuart Hall himself was never prepared to do this. For him, the problematic established by this encounter with poststructuralist post-Marxist political theory is constitutive, and hence ineradicable. Indeed, Morley and Chen also deem Laclau and Mouffe’s theory to be ‘seminal’, like Stuart Hall. But Hall insists on the need to maintain fidelity and reference to this ‘starting-point’, arguing: one cannot ignore Laclau and Mouffe’s seminal work on the constitution of political subjects and their deconstruction of the notion that political subjectivities flow from the integrated ego, which is also the integrated speaker, the stable subject of enunciation. The discursive metaphor [central to postMarxist theory] is thus extraordinarily rich and has massive political consequences. For instance, it allows cultural theorists to realize that what we call ‘the self’ is constituted out of and by difference, and remains contradictory, and that cultural forms are, similarly, in that way, never whole, never fully closed or ‘sutured’. (Hall 1996: 145) Hall even declares, ‘if I had to put my finger on the one thing which constitutes the theoretical revolution of our time, I think that it lies in that metaphor’ (145): the metaphor of ‘discourse’. For Stuart Hall, then, the question of the political, of intervention and responsibility that comes to light in the cultural studies engagement or encounter with post-Marxism is not something that will – or should be permitted to – simply go away. This is why, after some qualifications and caveats, Hall maintains that he remains ‘a post-Marxist and a post-structuralist, because those are the two discourses I feel most constantly engaged with. They are central to my formation and I don’t believe in the endless, trendy recycling of one fashionable theorist after another, as if you can wear new theories like T-shirts’ (Hall 1996: 148149). Cultural Studies and ‘Theory’ In this formation, then, cultural studies is, was, should be or should have been hospitable to poststructuralism. Certainly, key poststructuralist categories, such as text, context, intertextuality and discourse were appropriated within cultural studies (and much more widely, besides… Indeed, which disciplines in the arts and humanities today do not make use of the initially poststructuralist concepts of text and discourse?). But, as Hall’s point about ‘trendy recycling’ announces, there was always a hesitation, in the work of prominent thinkers associated with UK or Birmingham Centre Cultural Studies, to welcome ‘theory’ tout court with open arms or with unconditional hospitality. Rather than this, one finds in the writings of the most theoretically informed or theoretically alert thinkers of cultural studies a regular caveat: one should certainly not retreat from theory, but theory should be approached always with at least one eye if not a firm focus on the question of its political point, purpose, orientation or utility. Reciprocally, given its messiness, its newness, its eclectic character, and its incorporation of poststructuralism, cultural studies was not welcomed with open arms into the university. Stuart Hall’s account of the experiences of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University can be taken to exemplify many of the initial, initiating and ongoing sorts of reactions to and receptions of cultural studies. Hall writes: On the day of [The Centre for Cultural Studies at Birmingham University’s] opening, we received letters from the English department saying that they couldn’t really welcome us; they knew we were there, but they hoped we’d keep out of their way while they got on with the work they had to do. We received another, rather sharper letter from the sociologists saying, in effect, ‘… we hope you don’t think you’re doing sociology, because that’s not what you’re doing at all’. (Stuart Hall 1990: 13) These reactions arose because of the new combinations of poststructuralist theory and various modifications and manipulations of method and practice that were emerging in cultural studies. In different times, places, incarnations and orientations, work in cultural studies has experimented with various methodological options and orientations. This is why, in much cultural studies work one finds strongly poststructuralist language and categories, but employed within very heavily empiricist endeavours – often kinds of empirical work that one would normally regard as anathema to the poststructuralist questioning and problematization of positivist, empiricist and otherwise ‘naïve’ ontologies. Nevertheless, where both Derrida and Foucault, for instance, had each argued for the necessity of prioritising the philosophical or theoretical as the only way to avoid falling into what they both regarded as clumsy, naïve or indeed ‘incompetent’ empiricism, many working within cultural studies would never follow Derrida or Foucault very far down this line, fearing that poststructuralism’s hyper-academic and excessively philosophical approach would have ‘depoliticizing’ consequences, and preferring instead to employ selected poststructuralist theoretical insights in empirical, sociological, anthropological, social science or ethnographic studies of ‘obviously’ political issues. Of course, it is equally the case that many academics and intellectuals working within cultural studies and related disciplines refused to accept either the subordination of theory to ‘obviously’ political issues or ‘obviously political’ ends (Hall 2002), and of course poststructuralism was disseminated extremely broadly across and incorporated very diversely into Anglophone disciplines in the UK, USA and elsewhere. But it was in the disciplinary contexts of literary theory, comparative literature, cultural studies and then media studies and film studies that poststructuralism was most prominently ‘tackled’ and negotiated in Anglophone contexts. Some of these fields selected only the choicest morsels of poststructuralism, while others arguably morphed into scenes dominated by the problematics of poststructuralism. But this negotiation never took place univocally or entirely in any one disciplinary context. For disciplinary borders are always shifting, contested, and cross-fertilized or pollinated in unpredictable ways and from disparate sources. Moreover, in every discipline there have always been ‘divides’, disputes, disagreements and schools of thought at odds with each other. But it is important to note that in Anglophone contexts at least, the name of the main structuring divide of the arts and humanities disciplines has long been ‘Theory’ (Hall 2002; Hall and Birchall 2008). ‘Theory’ has since the 1970s been the enduring name of the disagreement not only about how to do work in this or that discipline but also about what this or that discipline actually ‘is’, ‘does’ or ‘should be’ (Bowman 2007). And the term ‘Theory’, of course, refers, ultimately, to poststructuralism, whether it has travelled under this or another alias, such as, depending on the discipline: deconstruction, Continental philosophy, postmodernism, poststructuralism, French theory, the textual approach, the discourse approach, post-Marxism, or some other similar term. Feminist (Language) Differences Poststructuralism was transported by various key carriers. Feminism was one key carrier, Foucault another, and the critique of structuralism, Marxist orthodoxy or the status quo per se, another. We could add more. The point is, however, it is difficult to isolate, pin down, or specify a single ‘cause’ of or for poststructuralism’s widespread reception. It is possible to connect poststructuralism to several different post-War critiques of various kinds of institutions, such as countercultural movements, civil rights and anti-racist movements, second generation feminism, postcolonial struggles and even liberalism. But feminism is an important and illuminating example to consider. For feminism ‘itself’ has never actually been simply univocal or singular. It has multiple variants, concerns, inflexions, theories, aims, modes of operation and existence, and so on. But what came to be known as ‘French Feminism’ became a strong entity in very many contexts, insofar as ‘feminism’ is a force that is not discipline-specific, enabling all different ‘kinds’ of feminism to cross the borders of disciplines and fields – often like wildfire. So-called ‘French’ feminism was heavily influenced by modernism, by de Beauvoir, by Jacques Lacan and a passionate, often ambivalent relationship with psychoanalysis generally. The complex relation to psychoanalysis arises insofar as Freud might be regarded simultaneously as an obvious agent and theorist of patriarchy (‘penis envy’ indeed!) and yet nevertheless as someone whose work offers a way of conceptualising and hence possibly subverting or changing patriarchy. Thus, ‘French’ feminism followed the theoretical insights of the ‘French Freud’, Jacques Lacan, and elaborated itself as a concern with viewing (or ‘scopic’) relations, processes of identification, cultural phantasy and gender performance or performativity. Like other forms of intellectual activity informed by poststructuralism, ‘French’ or poststructuralist feminism also often displayed an investment in avant-garde modernist aesthetics and hence involved a very stylized or ‘difficult’ theoretical language. Given the often reactions of non-specialist readers to the language used by such notable contemporary figures of poststructuralist feminism as Judith Butler, for example, many would say that it still does. This use of complex theoretical language and the attendant engagement with complex theoretical problematics would often cause critics of poststructuralist feminism to propose that poststructuralist feminism is not really feminist at all, in that it does not seem to concern itself with urgent or pressing political issues but rather contents itself with very abstract or ‘entirely academic’ philosophical pseudoproblems. In response, poststructuralist feminists themselves have been known to propose that other (non-poststructuralist) forms of feminism are – despite appearing to be militantly politicised – nevertheless not political/feminist enough, insofar as they un-self-reflexively use the language, terms and concerns set out by the dominant patriarchal modes of discourse. The argument here is that in being ‘militant’ and in using the dominant styles of discourse (such as polemic and strident, often aggressive critique and complaint), ‘mainstream’ feminists remained unaware of the extent to which their language and their orientations were therefore unwittingly patriarchal – insofar as their discourse was militarized, masculinized, aggressive, etc. So, in preferring to try to construct ‘other’ styles of writings and ‘other’ styles of discourse, poststructuralist feminism (like poststructuralism per se) regarded itself as being political through and through.1 (This debate continues to this day, most often focused around such prominent poststructuralist feminist figures as Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak – two very different scholars who nevertheless share a deep commitment to poststructuralist styles of discourse.) Alterity: Don’t Even Go There This investment in alterity (otherness, other discourses, etc.) is another familiar trait of poststructuralism. For, if the mainstream – for instance, mainstream language – is saturated by ‘patriarchal’ codes, orientations and values; if everything familiar has been ‘hegemonized’ or ‘colonized’ by the most subtle, invisible and saturating kinds of power (discursive power), then ‘alterity’ – otherness – whether in the form of foreignness, the elsewhere, the marginal, the overlooked, the drowned out, the subaltern, the unheard, the unseen, the unconsidered, the repressed, the alien, the abject, the exotic, the mystical, the unknown, or the yet to be constructed – all of this, gains an automatic value. And poststructuralism has certainly displayed a wide array of different sorts of interests and investments in all kinds of alterity – linguistic, ethnic, geographical, sexual, aesthetic, ideological, etc. (This investment became so much the case that when in the 1990s and early 2000s Simon Critchley took to pointing out that ‘other’ is not automatically a synonym of ‘good’ or ‘better’, his observation was taken to be something of a remarkable point to make – and an important redressing of the balance, or pointing out of the biases and implicit assumptions of much poststructuralism, cultural studies and cultural theory (Arditi and Valentine 1999).) However, to propose that poststructuralism championed alterity tout court or without condition would used be alterity a caricature. prominently. Nevertheless, Jacques key figures in poststructuralism Derrida launched deconstruction’s critique of Eurocentrism in Of Grammatology (1974) by evoking what he represented as a kind of absolute difference of China and Chinese writing from Europe and European alphabets. Before this, Martin Heidegger had made the same kinds of claims (as had many earlier thinkers and philosophers, of course, including Hegel, and as do many thinkers and writers to this day). But Heidegger’s insistence on the absolute difference and distance of European and East-Asian thought and existence would lead him ultimately to settle on a strong preference for Europe and European philosophy, despite his fascination with the alien world of East Asian thought (Heidegger 1971; Sandford 2003). 2 However, for Derrida, the encounter with alterity in the form of European versus Chinese writing does something different. Like Heidegger, to whom he is definitely indebted, the Far East for Derrida certainly equals a kind of inaccessible otherness. This ‘encounter’ (or non-encounter) primarily leads Derrida’s thought to turn back towards the Europe that he problematizes through the contrast with China, and to launch a critique of European thought, a critique which unsprings the unthought, repressed, unexplored, and stymied directions that European philosophy did not take. In other words, despite Derrida’s frequent mentions of China, for instance, especially in his earlier works, he never actually explores this geographical, sociocultural or linguistic alterity. Rather, Derrida’s work is concerned with the handling of alterity within the canons of Western philosophy. Perhaps the clearest early example of this is in the essay ‘Différance’ (1982), in which Derrida explores the way that several fascinating and hugely stimulating figures, from Saussure to Freud and Nietzsche, handle the ‘problem’ of the excess of signification, an excess that is also strangely also a lack or an absence – a lack of finality, a lack of presence, a lack of fixity, univocality or identity – that permeates all language, and which Derrida calls ‘différance’. (Derrida famously coined this neologism to make a performative point about writing’s unacknowledged ‘priority’ over (or ‘superiority’ to) speech – i.e., you can perceive the difference between ‘difference’ and ‘différance’ only when reading, and not when listening – despite Western thinkers so often prioritising ‘speech’ and regarding spoken language as prior and primary to writing – a prioritization that Derrida calls phonocentrism, something he regards as one of many kinds of manifestations of Western philosophy’s privileging of the notion of presence). If, when it comes to geographical alterity (i.e., foreignness), Derrida does ‘not even go there’, other poststructuralist thinkers certainly did. Julia Kristeva wrote about Japan, Japanese culture, Japanese women and especially Japanese peasants, and treated them as the bearers of a fascinating alterity. Roland Barthes went to Japan and delighted in being unable to read the signs, and hence in being entirely free to produce his own readings of everything, and regarding the whole experience as an illustration par excellence of the most emancipatory way of relating to any written signs or texts at all. Luce Irigaray wrote (extremely problematic) ruminations on cultural difference, the body and spirituality, inspired by her taking up of yoga. While others such as Avital Ronell and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick mined the reserves of eastern mystical pedagogical traditions in studies of culture, teaching and learning. And so on. But, perhaps most influentially of all, Gayatri Spivak studied and wrote about those she regards as the poorest of the poor and the most other of the others – for example, the most impoverished women of Calcutta and elsewhere across the Continent of India, and implicitly also the rest of the developing world. All of these forms of treatments of and relations to alterity are different, of course, and they all have different sorts of significance. They have had widely different kinds of impact. It almost goes without saying that Gayatri Spivak’s studies of those who are absolutely excluded from power and even from the ability to ‘speak’, to produce discourse, or to be ‘heard’ by power (those she calls ‘subaltern’) is obviously of a different status to those writings of Luce Irigaray which were inspired by taking a yoga class. And Spivak’s work in this regard has rightly been considerably more influential. Disjointed Connections: Postcolonialism & Poststructuralism Spivak was the translator of Derrida’s Of Grammatology, which, with its initial (albeit unfinished) critique of ‘Europe’, could reasonably be regarded as one of the founding texts of the field of postcolonial studies. She followed up on this with a series of hugely influential essays and monographs on postcolonial and feminist issues, all of which can be characterized as poststructuralist, as well as groundbreaking, controversial, influential and notoriously difficult to follow. Nevertheless, what remains clear is that the initiation, the history and the growth of the field of postcolonial studies was ineradicably marked from the outset by the influence of poststructuralism from these sources. Of course, the intervention of Derrida and Spivak in postcolonial studies is less widely recognized than that of figures like Franz Fanon or Edward Said. But even these figures can be connected to similar theoretical impulses and problematics. Fanon’s thought on race and ethnicity was informed by his psychiatric training, and Edward Said’s influential work Orientalism (1978/1995) is steeped in the notions of ‘discourse’, ‘discursive formation’ and ‘power/knowledge’, which were provided directly by the work of Michel Foucault. Indeed, so Foucauldian is Orientalism that it is in many ways possible to regard Said’s text as a preeminent example of Foucauldian post-structuralism applied to the unmasking and delineating of a globally present ‘discourse’. For, although Foucault developed and elaborated his theoretical contributions through considerations of the history of psychiatry, discourses of madness, penal institutions and practices, and mechanisms of discipline, surveillance, and so on, Edward Said picked up the Foucauldian theoretical, perspectival and methodological baton and ran with it, taking the themes of discourse and power/knowledge right out into the open – characterizing the entire approach of Western scholarship, philosophy, popular, pulp, low and high culture to ‘the Orient’ as overwhelmingly dominated by a reductive, stereotyping bias that he calls orientalism. Said’s work certainly guaranteed the development and proliferation of postcolonial studies. As a new or emergent field, postcolonial studies was ‘instituted’ either as a style of scholarship or set of animating problematics within extant disciplines such as literature, anthropology, sociology and history; or as an interdisciplinary field in its own right. Thus, postcolonial studies took (and takes) many forms. But what is prominent in all of its incarnations is the focus on the issues and ongoing problems faced by once-colonised countries – problems of culture, power, tradition, language, memory, the writing of history and the establishment of cultural identity in the wake of colonialism, imperialism, and what we now call globalisation, neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism, etc. Given poststructuralism’s formative role in the emergence of postcolonial studies, it might seem that poststructuralism found a home or at least one of its proper locations there. In her reading of the history and dissemination of poststructuralism, Rey Chow (1998) argues that poststructuralism was always implicitly connected to a critique of European institutions, values, practices and power – and as such always had a fundamental affinity with what later came to be so widely ‘baptized’, canonised or institutionally inscribed as ‘postcolonialism’. Moreover, Chow proposes, ‘postcolonialism’ can be understood as the academic-institutional response to (or reception of) diverse social and cultural problems of ‘reconstruction’ faced by once colonised countries, and that this understanding can recast not only academic postcolonialism but also poststructuralism as such in a new light. For, just as academic postcolonialism reflects and registers older historical cultural and political struggles, problems and projects, so poststructuralism can be relocated and recategorised as emanating from those same historical impulses and antagonisms. As already mentioned, Derrida’s status as a French colonial Jew from Algeria had a marked influence on his writings – perceptible in his early work and (or perhaps because) explicitly engaged with in his later writings of the 1990s. But from this, Chow notes a peculiar paradox: on the one hand, the avowed politics of poststructuralism are characterized and animated by a concern for the marginal, the exploited, the silenced, the oppressed and the other, and they carry a very strong anti-Eurocentric and hence anti-status-quo edge; but on the other hand poststructuralism was nevertheless elaborated in a hyper-literate, hyper-theoretical ‘literary’ language in some of the most elite and privileged academic institutions in the world. (Chow actually proposes that poststructuralism, in its investment in, elaboration through and ‘performance’ of complicated and hyper-self-reflexive ‘literary’ language, amounts to a kind of return of Literature in a slightly displaced and modified location and mode of articulation.) Visual Pleasure and Poststructuralism Disciplined The status, the routes of navigation and the various different ways of attempting to resolve – or at least make sense of – this paradox of poststructuralism’s investments, languages and locations are all ongoing. What is clear is that at one extreme, poststructuralist impulses have seen and elaborated themselves as anti-institutional or anti-disciplinary (Mowitt 1992; Bowman 2007); at another, poststructuralism, like other ‘politicized’ academic endeavours, has sought outlets, connections, interventions and activities outside of the university, often turning to the realms of art, performance practices, literature, technology, new media and myriad forms of creative cultural production. In the blossoming of the heyday of this impulse (during the 1980s and 1990s in particular), for many commentators (and still, to this day) poststructuralism became synonymous with that much-maligned term, postmodernism. At another extreme, the critical insights of poststructuralism became bound up in various forms of empiricism and positivism, taking the form of various types of discourse analysis, often involving moving from theoretical propositions and hypotheses about (most commonly) the political biases of culture, society and its institutions into various forms of sampling, measuring, quantifying, coding, indexing and – ultimately – counting. But it is not just in its incorporation into social- or semi-scientific practices that poststructuralism became disciplinary. For, as ‘radical’ or ‘anti-institutional’ as it often seems, poststructuralism nevertheless has often worked to discipline, to stabilise, to normalise, and to institute. For instance, Chow (2007) clarifies the way that an encounter between disparate forms of film criticism and psychoanalysis (particularly Lacanian psychoanalysis) became what she calls the definitive ‘disciplining moment’ of film studies. That is to say that, whereas the prehistory of the discipline(ing) of film studies included disparate and heterogeneous approaches with multiple orientations, there came a point after film studies’ ongoing engagement with the groundbreaking work of thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Christian Metz and others, at which film studies became a discipline. Chow connects the moment of the disciplining of film studies with an engagement with Lacanian psychoanalysis. This can be seen most clearly the 1970s feminist essay of Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), in which a coherent psychoanalytic paradigm emerges to the fore. Mulvey’s enduringly (in)famous essay is steeped in Lacanian psychoanalysis, like many others published in the influential journal Screen at that time. But perhaps uniquely, Mulvey’s essay is such a stark polemic which sets out the terms of a debate about patriarchy and the power of ‘the male gaze’, that it still gets film studies academics heated and animated to this day, and as such might be said to define the polemical disciplinary space of film studies: being for or against Mulvey can often be translated into being for or against Lacan-informed poststructuralism. This ‘for or against’ structure can be taken as an index of the extent to which poststructuralism informs the discursive constellation of positions ‘within’ film studies. Of course, in film studies, as in many disciplines, the ‘for and against’ structure or disciplinary divide is not ‘one’. For, if in film studies, there is this strongly implicitly or explicitly Lacanian poststructuralist school or tendency, it does not simply have ‘one’ other, or one alternative disciplinary school or approach, one alternative that is somehow ‘not poststructuralist’ (whether that be positivist, empiricist, historicist, or whatever). Needless to say, as in all other disciplines, there are resolutely antitheoretical positions. But in film studies, if the first generation of film studies might be classified as Benjaminian, Adornian, Metzian, etc., and if a second generation can be characterized as Lacanian (Mulvey, Heath, de Lauretis, Silverman, etc.), then a third generation can be called Deleuzean, Rancièrean, Badiouian, or Žižekian. In other words, still ‘theoretical’, still strongly poststructuralist, but now yet another variant of poststructuralism – often a variant which underplays its connection with the poststructuralist legacy from which it has arisen. Preeminent here is Gilles Deleuze. The work of Gilles Deleuze is often held up in the fields of film and philosophy as anti-Lacanian. But this is a simplification. Deleuze certainly sought to be anti-Freudian, but closer inspection of his work reveals that he was heavily indebted to Lacan and was in no way anti-Lacanian as such (Valentine 2006). Nevertheless, Deleuzean approaches to film (among other things, including philosophy, politics, geography, music, culture and technology, to name but a few) are widely regarded as a rejection of former poststructuralisms, such as Lacanian, Derridean and Foucauldian. A putative difference between Deleuze and his poststructuralist others is widely assumed (Žižek 2004), even though Deleuze openly acknowledged his debts to and affiliation with Lacan’s work, and even though Derrida often remarked that he personally never disagreed with anything his friend Gilles Deleuze wrote, and even though Deleuze arguably picked up the baton passed to him by Michel Foucault, whose work he clearly admired. But, in any case, Deleuzean theory, in its own right, has, since the early 1990s at least, had a growing impact on arts and humanities disciplines of all sorts. This impact is characterized by a rejection of ontologies of ‘lack’ and ‘absence’ associated with Lacan and Derrida (but which Deleuze and Guattari suggest has been inherited by such poststructuralists through their critiques of Freud and Saussure: Deleuze and Guattari regard this ontology of ‘scarcity’ as too heavily indebted to capitalism to be reliable), replaced instead by a focus on the productivity of desires, of intensities and flows of forces, and so on. With this change of emphasis in the theory of ontology and certainly in vocabulary, the language, questions and foci of ‘theory’ transform again. So much so, perhaps that many might ask what remains of poststructuralism in Deleuze and other current theoretical luminaries as Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Giorgio Agamben, and even the hyper-formalist Hegelian-Lacanian Slavoj Žižek. From Poststructuralism to Post-Foundational Thought Rather than enter into a dissection of the lines of connection, disconnection, convergence and conflict that characterize the contemporary scene and connect or disconnect it from the recent past, it might be more helpful to conclude by proposing the usefulness of a less overburdened term than poststructuralism to help us to make sense of both the ongoing legacies and the prehistories and wider significance and status of what we has long been called poststructuralism. Oliver Marchart (2007) offers an analysis which helps to clarify the fundamental way in which it is possible to identify a certain topos, ethos or common ground defining the problematics shared in common and confronted differently by multiple disciplines and diverse thinkers – the topos or ethos that we have been calling poststructuralist. This ‘fundamental’ connection is figured in Marchart as a certain shared engagement with questions of fundamentals: the ontology, the grounding of society, the foundations of culture, society, politics and philosophy. This widespread – even epistemic – engagement with a shared problematic, Marchart calls post-foundationalism. Post-foundational thought is defined by a particular line of thought that problematizes origins, foundations, certainties, unities, and essences. Marchart finds exemplified in (but not limited to or defined by) the work of Heidegger. And certainly, the status of Heidegger’s philosophy for work in poststructuralism has been widely acknowledged. Despite being tarred by association with a terrible politics (Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party), his philosophical ruminations have nevertheless been extremely influential. Marchart undertakes an interrogation of why and what it is about Heideggerian thinking, that has such far reaching implications for our understanding of a whole range of important contemporary intellectual landmarks, including those of thinkers such as Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau, but also thinkers such as Machiavelli, Gramsci, Schmitt and Arendt, recent beacons such as Levinas, Lyotard, Deleuze, Lacan, Habermas and Derrida, as well as contemporary theorists including Mouffe, Rancière and Žižek.3 It is the significance of a shared understanding of the relationship between politics (understood as contingent and variable ‘ontic’ social arrangements) and the political (understood as the ‘ontological’ condition of inevitable contingency permeating and defining any possible social formation) which perhaps constitutes the abiding connection between poststructuralism ‘proper’ (or the named thinkers we have come to associate with the term) and contemporary mutations, transformations and variations in this ongoing strand or impulse of thought. And it is in this sense of coming in response to a shared problematic about ‘foundations’, certainties, stabilities, identities and essences that poststructuralism can be said to continue as a problematic even after the end of the writing careers and indeed the lives of the first generation poststructuralists. Works Cited Arditi, Benjamin, and Jeremy Valentine (1999), Polemicization: The Contingency of the Commonplace, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Attridge, Derek and Thomas Baldwin (2004), The Guardian, Monday October 11. Barthes, Roland (1972), Mythologies, Paladin: London. Barthes, Roland (1977), Image – Music – Text, Fontana, London. Bennington, Geoffrey and Jacques Derrida, (1993), Jacques Derrida, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London. Bowman, Paul (2007), Post-Marxism Versus Cultural Studies: Theory, Politics and Intervention, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Chow, Rey (1998), Ethics After Idealism, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Chow, Rey (2002), The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, New York: Columbia University Press. Chow, Rey (2007), Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films, New York: Columbia University Press. Daryl Slack, Jennifer (1996), ‘The theory and method of articulation in cultural studies’, in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, Eds. (1996), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques (1974), Of Grammatology, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1981), Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques (1982), Margins of Philosophy, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Derrida, Jacques (1994), Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques (1995a), The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques (1995b), ‘Honoris Causa: This is also extremely funny’, Points… Interviews, 1974-1994, Stanford, Ca.: Stanford. Derrida, Jacques (1996), Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1996. Derrida, Jacques (1998), Resistances of Psychoanalysis, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Jacques Derrida (2003), ‘I Have a Taste for the Secret’, in Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, Cambridge: Polity. Hall, Gary (2002), Culture in Bits: The Monstrous Future of Theory, London: Continuum. Hall, Gary, and Clare Birchall, eds. (2008), New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hall, Stuart (1990), ‘The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities’, October, 53, 1990. Hall, Stuart (1992), ‘Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies’, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula Treichler (eds.), Cultural Studies, New York and London: Routledge. Hall, Stuart (1996), ‘On postmodernism and articulation: an interview with Stuart Hall’, in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, Eds. (1996), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin (1971), ‘A Dialogue on Language: Between a Japanese and an Inquirer’, On The Way To Language, New York: Harper Collins. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe (1985), Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso. Marchart, Oliver (2007), Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press. Morley, David, and Chen, Kuan-Hsing, Eds. (1996), ‘Introduction’, Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge. Mowitt, John (1992), Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object, Duke: Durham and London. Mulvey, Laura (1975), Screen 16.3 Autumn 1975 pp. 6-18. Said, E. W. (1978/1995), Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Penguin, London. Sandford, Stella (2003), ‘Going Back: Heidegger, East Asia and ‘The West’’, Radical Philosophy, 120, 11-22, July/August. Valentine, Jeremy (2006), ‘Denial, Anger and Resentment’, in Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp, eds., The Truth of Žižek, London: Continuum. 177-196. Žižek, Slavoj (2004), Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, London and New York: Routledge. 1 Rey Chow (2002: 54-60) provides an excellent analysis of the complexities of this disagreement. Heidegger formulated the difference between Europe and East Asia, it deserves to be noted, in essentially linguistic terms, in the form of a declared fundamental untranslatability between Japanese and European languages, which for Heidegger signalled an essential uncrossable border and an absolute difference. The centrality of Heidegger to post-foundational political thought relates to his philosophical engagement with questions of ontology and difference. This has been called the ontico-ontological difference, and it has many dimensions. Here it pertains directly to those questions which became, in debates in French, for instance, carried out in terms of the difference between le politique and la politique, or politics construed as ontic arrangements of society, its institutions and orders. These contingent (‘political’) arrangements arise as such (with different aspects of them becoming at different times the stuff of ‘politics’) because of the nature of ontology – an ontology that has come to be thought of as ‘political’. That is, it is only because the ontological level enables/necessitates contingent arrangements that politics is both possible and indeed inevitable. Thus, contingency is necessary for fundamental reasons. The ‘foundations’ of society are fundamentally contingent. Politics is contingent. Ontology is political. 3 2