Crimes of the Future Theory and its Global Reproduction

by Rabaté, Jean-Michel

• ISBN13: 9781441146342
• ISBN10: 1441146342
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-04-24
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

The decade since the publication of Jean-Michel Rabaté's controversial manifesto The Future of Theory saw important changes in the field. The demise of most of the visible French or German philosophers, who had produced texts that would trigger new debates, then to be processed by Theory, has led to drastic revisions and starker assessments.

Globalization has been the most obvious factor to modify the selection of texts studied. During the twentieth century, Theory incorporated poetics, rhetorics, aesthetics and linguistics, while also opening itself to continental philosophy. What has changed today? The knowledge that we live in a de-centered world has destabilized the primacy granted to a purely Western canon. Moreover, much of contemporary theory remains highly allusive and this is often baffling for students. Theory keeps recycling itself, producing authentic returns of basic theses, terms and concepts. Canonical modern theorists often return to classical texts, as those of Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche.

And now we want to know: what is new?

Crimes of the Future explores the past, present and potential future of Theory.

Author Biography

Jean-Michel Rabaté is one of the world's foremost literary theorists. He is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. Rabaté has authored or edited more than thirty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, philosophy, and writers like Beckett, Pound and Joyce. Recent books include 1913: The cradle of modernism (2007), and The Ethic of the Lie (2008), and The Ghosts of Modernity and The Future of Theory. He is of the founders and curators of Slought Foundation in Philadelphia (slought.org) and the Managing Editor of the Journal of Modern Literature. Since 2008, he has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is currently the president of the American Samuel Beckett Studies Association.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. How global should Theory be?
2. Fugitive Theory
3. Derrida's futures
4. Divisible Derrida
5. The future is a beast: Levinas, Derrida and Agamben
6. The No Future of an Illusion: Freud, Lacan, Derrida
7. Performative Theory: Hélène Cixous and Carolee Schneemann
8. Sexual Relation and the Exception: Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy and Lacan
9. Lying about the Future : Althusser's long-term stakes
10. Walter Benjamin and Fashion Theory
Conclusion: Kant's Imagination of the Future vs. Beckett's On-tologyBibliographyIndex