Philosophy after theory: transdisciplinarity and the new

Abstract

In what sense is something called ‘theory’ over? And in what way might the manner of its passing have opened up a space for its renewal? At first sight, these questions appear parochial and outmoded. ‘Theory’ did not end, it lost a brief and extraordinary institutional hegemony; a hegemony that was restricted to particular disciplinary sites within the Anglophone humanities during its heroic ‘French’ period (19751995): primarily, literary studies of various sorts (Cussett 2008). Yet, to confine this episode to the past would itself be to fall prey to fashion. For there are deep-seated issues at stake in the struggles around ‘theory’, going as far back as German philosophy in the last decade of the eighteenth century, which not only retain their relevance today, but have acquired new pertinences – and not merely for reasons of expediency, associated with the global expansion of the English-language academic publishing industry. (‘Theory’ is also a marketing category, of course.)1 These issues concern, among other things, the possibilities and manner of knowing the whole – the totality of conditions that pertain to experience – a question which has been given a new lease of life by the tendentially global dominance of a single economic system. It appears today, in part, as a question about the possibility and modes of knowing oneself (Socrates’s old question) as a subject of capitalistic social relations, social relations into which is inscribed a relentless production of both novelty and crisis (Osborne 2010a). To see how this might be connected to the fate and prospects of ‘theory’ in the Anglophone humanities, it will be useful to start with a sketch of the two main traditions of theory at issue in these debates.

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