Offering Theory. John Mowitt
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called the passing of Theory is precisely the reorganization of the university as a business, begun—if we are to believe James Buchanan’s account in Academia in Anarchy (Buchanan 1970, passim)—during the student movements of the 1960s whose 50th anniversary many around the world began marking in 2018.
To pursue further the matter of how we might carry on within the general project of the critical humanities I will bear down a bit more systematically on the senses of “offering” in my title. As with “passing,” “offering” invites distinct but related glosses. In the case of “offering,” at least two. Perhaps its more immediate sense arises when we speak, as so many of us do, of “offering” classes or seminars. Here “offering” means presenting or giving, and my title certainly aims to posit the notion that Theory should continue to be available as an area of inquiry in any and every setting that regards itself as a locus of education. At the risk of moving too quickly, I would even go as far as to propose that in the absence of Theory education ceases to be about learning. It becomes about training. And, as an aside, this problem was one among several agitating members of GREPH when they fought to keep philosophy on offer in high school curricula in France during the 1980s.
The less immediate sense of “offering” is surely the sense of it that arises in the biblical formulation of a “burnt offering” where it touches immediately on the matter and practice of sacrifice. Perhaps less immediate still, at least for those unaware that the word “holocaust” derives from the Greek for “completely burned,” is the join, the knot within sacrifice between veneration and execration. Indeed, the staggering ambivalence that binds denying and affirming sacrifice is precisely one of those problems that calls insistently for theoretical attention. Thus, with a certain night and foggy vividness, my title is also a call to “sacrifice” Theory, to treat it precisely as a “burnt offering,” whence my earlier invocation of Derrida’s (and earlier T. E. Hulme’s) figure of the cinder. But now what can this mean given that I have also parsed the title to posit the necessity of offering Theory as part of what it means today to educate? Am I talking, for instance, about sacrificing the Theory that Theory has passed into, that is, a largely Northern, Western canon of “great ideas,” a canon long valued for its role in initiating certain people, largely but by no means exclusively white men (what, e.g., at Duke were once referred to as “Fred’s Boys”), into the cult of knowledge? Yes, of course. But one understands vaguely if at all what it might mean to sacrifice Theory properly if we leave it at that. Setting aside the antagonistic theoretical profiles of the four posts—postmodernism, postfeminism, post-Marxism and postcolonialism—the concept of Theory that followed in their wake is one whose papers are patently not in order. It is, as Arendt said about the refugee, stateless. In effect, just passing through. Passing through its own peace.1
In the book whose argument these remarks introduce, I engage this snarl of issues by thinking about the various tensions between Theory and identity. Two aspects of this tension are foregrounded. On the one hand, when Eagleton in After Theory tells us that the context in which Theory mattered is now lost to us, he is effectively giving Theory an identity, even a purpose, and the gist of his analysis is to illustrate that this identity, like the context that determined it, has been lost. Put differently, through the device of the concept of “context” Theory is given an identity, a time and place of belonging, indeed the very identity whose birth Cole has so assiduously reconstructed. If this loss can be characterized as a sacrifice, our relation to it is cast as largely devotional if not nostalgic. Through such an analysis we are coaxed to mourn the loss of an identity and to organize the reactive crusade aimed to confront what ineluctably looms up as blasphemy. If we are book publishers we seek out, translate and distribute any shred of paper on which a “theorist” wrote something including a note like “I forgot my umbrella” or, far less trivially, the fragile transcripts of lectures recorded at the College de France. Febrile archiving indeed.
On the other hand, and this point is a difficult one, the tension between Theory and identity also manifests as a conflict between Theory and identity, not then the identity of Theory, but the Theory of identity, a Theory that disappears as theorizing, in its prioritization of a practice, the act of identification. Here, Theory is sacrificed to a politics of identity that in its most dangerous forms resuscitates ethnocentrisms of all sorts. The “Nation State Law” mooted in the summer of 2018 by the Israeli Knesset is a handy and glaring example. So, when I assent to the proposition that the sacrifice of Theory is part of what must be on offer in a place calling itself a university, this sacrifice of loss, this conflicted pairing of identity and Theory is among the things that must go.2
But go how? The takeaway of these introductory remarks can be phrased as a response to this question. Beyond sacrificing the Theory that has passed, how should Theory, in general, be sacrificed properly? Or, rephrased more directly, is there a sense in which Theory sacrifices itself? If so, by what means?
A few more dates. Same cautions as before. In 1995 the first of Giorgio Agamben’s multivolume treatment of homo sacer appeared. Although much effort of late has been devoted to tracing the shafts of sunlight that separate these studies, they can all be said to explore how political sovereignty founds its constitutive instability on a particular type of political actor, the figure of homo sacer. Brazenly collapsing a host of subtleties, I will thus parse Agamben’s discussion of sovereignty by foregrounding its provocative juridical character. Following Carl Schmitt, the one who is sovereign, the decider, is the one who is in a position to suspend the law in order to preserve it. In the rhetoric of statecraft this constitutes a declaration of “a state of emergency” where the state, to protect the identity given it by its ruling oligarchy, violates the principles on which it is founded in order to eliminate what the state believes threatens it. In other words, the “one” (the unity of the state) is almost always more than one. Significantly, for Agamben, this structure of standing outside and above the law in order to preserve the essence of its rule is the very same invaginated structure that isolates homo sacer as the one whose expulsion from society, from the human community, is precisely what preserves that community as a biopolitical formation. In a different terminological register, this is the scapegoat, and in most contemporary regimes, whether democracies or not, this figure is now (at least since Covering Islam) the “terrorist,” who, according to Boris Johnson, walks among the people of Britain disguised as mailboxes. Although Agamben has himself offered various iconic incarnations of such a figure, he has consistently placed important stress on the occupants of the extermination camps during World War II, especially the living corpse called “the Muselman,” the Muslim. What does this stress clarify?
It clarifies the simple fact that homo sacer is not and cannot be a “burnt offering.” As Agamben writes: “The protagonist of this book is bare life, that is, the life of homo sacer (sacred man) who may be killed and yet not sacrificed” (Agamben 1998, 8).3 Indeed, the whole point of this inaugural volume is that homo sacer is one (or ones) who can be eliminated by the sovereign without sacrifice, that is, without producing a significant relation to something, or someone, absolutely other. The sovereign may sacrifice him or herself to the potent instability that sustains it, but homo sacer is beyond sacrifice. It is precisely unsacrificable and in this sense “holocaust” may be the wrong word for those consigned to crematoria in the Nazi extermination camps. Those exterminated there may have been “completely burned,” but they were not sacrificed. They were purely and simply slaughtered. Hopefully now the reader can sense where I am heading. If, in offering Theory, we sacrifice it, we precisely do not treat it as an incarnation, however uncanny, of homo sacer. We do not treat it as something we can expel from the sociopolitical order without effect, without losing our constitutive relation to someone, or something, other, even or especially when this otherness might designate the biopolitical plane of immanence on which life itself slips and slides. Although Eagleton, in After Theory, has a somewhat different point to make in invoking the “bloodlessness” of Theory (he predictably deplores its apolitical abstraction), the adjective “bloodless” nevertheless invites comparison with Agamben’s discussion of homo sacer, who