Francois Cusset’s French Theory (FT) is more inclusive than Stanley Fish’s April 2008 reduction of FT to the “farce” of deconstruction (Stanley Fish, “French Theory in America,” “Think Again” New York Times blog, April 6, 2008: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/french-theory-in-america/). This book straddles theory; intellectual history; cultural exchange; American university dominance and academic trench warfare; relations between FT, aesthetics, and the art world(s); global FT; and more. Its historiographic scope is conceptually useful, more genealogy than narrative history.

Cusset affirms FT‘s work-up of the “undecidability of meaning” for new audiences and readers. There is a persistent tone to this book that draws on language-discourse for an understanding of politics. He insists that a certain “heroism” comes with “misprision, misreading and misuse,” devices of cultural exchange, and an affirmation of a “lawless zone” between academic careers and future cultural workers (337–38). Practices of cultural-political sabotage and desertion might support different communities (331). FT is an optimistic and engaged text, a serious argument about the possibility of joining conceptual critique and social activism. The future of FT is not its mixed genealogy or quick history.

Cusset offers that theories written in France were structurally misunderstood in the United States. The “blind spot” affecting nearly all academic readers in the United States was capitalism—“denial of market forces, of capital and its strategies” (xv). (He will contradict this later when he mercilessly notices U.S. research institutions are places of economic competition [193–94].) This is a book about asymmetry: the transformation of FT as a written analytics of discourse, society, power, technology et al. into the American reading and application of FT to identity politics and textual strategies (xiii). Cusset is excellent at his three “mis’s,” above. In France, FT was marginalized, Foucault misused to legitimize technocracy, criticism in France a conjunction of moralism and sophistry (320, 324). Foucault the anarchist in France became the critical theorist in the United States concerned with “autonomy . . . unmasking and delegitimizing power,” misrepresented as giving an axiology of power instead of an analytics (279); Derrida’s analysis of metaphysical presencing was turned into pedagogy, ridiculed by Derrida (281). Similarly Deleuze and Guattari were taken in by the “academic institution,” which ignored their war-discourse (282), making them a “theatrical evocation” via an at times “magical mode of incantation” (283), their “indeterminations” misfigured (150). Baudrillard was scapegoated by U.S. Marxism and other Left factions. Scholars and publishers alike were initially appalled at such theory that had “no other object than its own enigma . . . a discourse on itself . . . and therefore on the university” (99).

How did such difficult texts (e.g., Lyotard’s The Differend) “come to be woven so deeply into the American cultural and intellectual fabric” (10)? How did FT’s analysis of “power over life, subjectless tribes, faceless terror, an imperial network” bypass the American “reactionary sword, and . . . identitarian church” (13)? Intellectual debate circa the later 1960s was mostly a specialized activity (37), with separatism at every level (39), universities torn between business and citizen formation (43)—“learn to earn” (45), “doing,” not “learning” (120), a weak secular-generalist intellectual tradition. FT entered between religion and politics, between formalism and the market place (50–51). But it also entered against the interests of many progressive thinkers. Earlier imports—Surrealism, Existentialism, and the Annales School—were “domesticated” (23–24), their specificity and strangeness adapted to American “themes of the moment.” But FT “will constitute a creation ex nihilio” because it arrives during multiple “axiological” crises “in the universities” (27): of functionalism (sociology as quantification and marketing), legalism (civil rights), technocratic legitimacy (biopower, machines), utopianism (desiccated), administrative reason (rampant managerialism), and politics (Watergate), which converged around a “university that was renouncing its humanist principles [and that had] opted for headlong flight—specialization, competition, adaptation to the new constraints of the job market” (28). The structuralism that was read here (Barthes, Foucault, Lacan) was met with indifference until the 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins University—post-structuralism came forward (31), from the rarified (Todorov, Genette) to the playful (Derrida): “all the Americans present at Johns Hopkins in l966 realized that they had just attended the live performance of its public birth” (31). By l980, fifty percent of peer-reviewed articles on Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, and Althusser were written from literary studies (77). FT as post-structuralism suspected “that logocentrism determined philosophy, that colonialism was the subtext of the literary canon, that the social sciences were guilty of cultural imperialism . . . literary scholars became the champions of subversion” (83). Hallucinating a bit, “the English dept. became a new Rome from which prodigious conquests were launched, crusades to evangelize distant territories” (83).

FT returns again and again to American university conflicts, to our “utilitarian precept,” eventually polarized as identity-based discourse and deconstruction’s recurring elements of “aporias, mises en abyme, negative figures, signifiers in excess” (120). By calling into question the subject of knowledge, the autonomy of reason, and the logic of representation, FT exacerbated American contradictions between the cognitive and moral, scientific and liberal practices, minoritarian identity and the paradox of identity as such. Cusset sharply notices that FT was a “thinking of struggle, a resource of opposition” (105); within the university it was both “wily, mobile, corrosive, an enemy of first truths” and became part of “theoretical careerism” (106). In this, Derrida’s work gives the most consistent sense of FT = post-structuralism = deconstruction: Derrida provided the target called logocentrism to any group troubled by the past/present with an identity issue to grind (the Lacanians in the United States a preeminent academic instance); Cusset calls this deconstruction a specific utility (121–22)—every logocentrism is an apparatus (practical-discursive) to be critiqued. Cusset is not happy that deconstruction, in its rigorous conceptual-analytic mode, did not lead to a “general battle against domination,” but instead led to a junction of literary theory and the political Left and critique of white male subjectivity.

Cusset quite clearly sees just how mandarin the American research university was and is, e.g., university presses decided “the American destiny of French texts” (89), a marketing phenomenon for them. The difficulty of Derrida was “bankable” (107). With some exceptions, the university as such found quotation of FT (91) an easy vehicle of dissemination, “furtive appropriation” (92), an orgy in the 1980s of “paraphrastic metadiscourse,” much of it “against the White Western Oppressor” (112ff). Thus, once the big plates of identity, culture, and Marxism (the latter “blind” to enunciation-power ¹⁵⁶) were engaged, there ensued the nastiness of writers like Eagleton who blasted “anticonformist merchandising” or the hyper-semiologization of cultural studies with accusations of defeatism—but Cusset is quite clear that Marxists and Post-ists played to dominate the academic marketplace (155). He has the nerve to cite Baudrillard that capitalism is an “extermination” process, intolerable to most professors (160). The arts and humanities became a tower of babble whose metadiscourse was unreadable by their own constituents. The very success of many new stories and group emergence about “marginal cultures . . . to make them visible, recognizable, and even legitimate” multiplied cultural and political conflict (159). Cusset insists that FT’s critique of authority was tightly controlled by academics (161), a victory for American “user-friendly” attitudes or a “protectionist withdrawal inside the boundaries of the literary world” (165).

FT as a cultural and intellectual force comes in the 1970s as an “anarcho” temptation (54). The marginal and the alienated gravitated to FT, which “intervened precisely on the border separating the counterculture from the university, at the point where their propositions become indiscernible,” where artistic experimentation and innovative courses on theory joined (70). Cusset confers value on FT as offering “liberatory experiences” to the Duchamp-Cage-Warhol axis (Marx and Freud), but “liberatory” is not exactly right. Be that as it may, Cusset falls back and historicizes the period 1974–78 as a “chaotic and idyllic interlude” (70), and relies a bit too much on Sylvère Lotringer’s descriptions (74, 294), e.g., that Semiotext(e)’s publication of Deleuze’s Nomadology was part of the period’s “ransacking” of texts, their “inversion,” even though it was published by Semiotext(e) in 1986, not the mid-1970s.

The 1970s is also when the notion of an art world replaced ethereal art (230), realized in the 1980s. The “indistinction” of art in relation to signs, markets, etc., is suggestive yet slightly evasive, and it is a little peculiar to cite Rancière that art (is now) part of infinite critique, since that is a continuation of high-modernist progressive utopianism, at odds with most FTists. With 1980s art, FT has its “most intensive uses,” and its “most dazzling successes but also its crudest distortions” (231). He quotes Robert Storr that Baudrillard was the “foamy crest,” while Barthes, Foucault, and Kristeva were “deeper currents” (232). That is questionable in the extreme (including putting the three of them together), as it goes to the difference between which, and how, FTists were given academic credence (institutionalization) and which were not. In any case, Cusset says that all FTists set aside any theory of art that kept aesthetics a separate domain so as to favor a “convergence” of the “practice and discourse of art,” where discourse, art, practice, and aesthetics exhaustively work each other. Cusset calls it “providential” that FT arrived when art suffered a loss of roles and autonomy (234), giving art “new life” and “possibly the illusion of a transgressive force.” He moves too quickly from artist-thinkers like Judd in the 1960s to Acker-types, here strangely put with a “band of orphans without any theoretical reference point or aptitude for self-reflection” (235). Point of comparison? In any case, Cusset lauds the new trans-avant-garde, puts in one pot New York neo-conceptualists named Sherman, Levine, Koons (with “Archie Pickerton”?), each doing a social critique of signs (!)—and cites a “rare” instance where the theoretical referent of FT was integrated into the artist’s work, e.g., Tansey’s photomontages of Derrida and de Man.

His analysis of 1980s-and-after ideological backlash is at times opaque (171), but is sharp on a conservative Left versus a cultural Left mutually obliterating “dialectical pluralism” (190) His chapter on academic “stars” allows him to emphasize the “ruthlessly competitive university sector” (193), but is overall weak, his discourse wavering between calling such “stars” the “chosen” (194), media subjects (195), and re-appropriationists (216). His chapter on students and other “users” speaks to the “profitability of theory” (215)—FT at times a “menu” for consumers” or a generalized parataxis (219). He thinks FT to be a lasting epistemic change, but the argument for this relies on the permanence of reading lists, a questionable basis (271). Suspicious of cultural studies, he nonetheless makes the claim that the lasting value of FT is cultural: its seduction and irony of American readers (277) lent itself to effects that are “polyphonic, coolly critical, obscure, seductive and crafty . . . French theory has clearly become a cultural norm” (277).

He affirms, instead of analyzing, a new (290) “transnational academic class,” a new “international network of universities,” or is less critical than Bourdieu and many others of this “true international avant-garde” (291). Its themes—denationalization, exile, miscegenation—are idealized as he closes FT with a call for positive idleness (332), proliferation of “fragile and experimental communities,” a joyous materialism distrustful of “ideologies of discontinuity and their false distinctions” (334). He wants continuity with that “experimental ease with which a young, pluralistic country is ready to ‘move on to something else’” (335). Cusset recoils at his own knowledge of just how cynical American life can be. FT’s “theoretical grasp of the world” continues by “placing into discourse what remains of life” even against the academy’s “intimate cruelty” (336).

In sum, Cusset reads as genealogy—multiplying perspectives, avoiding the false coherence of a smooth narrative, and thus keeps certain cultural-intellectual problems alive.