Ethically Challenged: The Impasse between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory

Abstract

The study of would seem to have come upon hard times of late, having been routed by the wildly uninformed attacks of conservative politicians, cultural critics such as Lynne Cheney and William Bennett, and journalists and scholars outside the field, who have habit of not reading the things on which they make confident pronouncements. In this important book, however, Beatrice Hanssen, theorist and historian of philosophy, reassesses the wars, which she contends are far from over, by first dissecting the way key concepts and terms have been used in these wars with little, if any, awareness of their constantly shifting historical contexts. She does this both relationally--that is, within the broader context of various disciplines in the academy-and internally by examining the two theoretical approaches she believes have been the most influential: Frankfurt School critical and poststructuralist theory, in particular Foucault's discursive histories, or genealogies, and the deconstructive poststructuralism of Judith Butler's performative of resignification. Along the way, Hanssen isolates various issues that should be familiar to those working in the university. On the one hand, one hears from variety of directions that is elitist, male-identified, reifying, totalizing, totalitarian, specular, spectatorial, obscurantist, apolitical, universalizing, hegemonic, occidental, imperialistic, Eurocentric, antidemocratic, and violent-to cite just few of the most commonly heard invectives (232). And theory is often now used merely as a placeholder for structuralism or neo-Marxism (232), as term more useful for name-calling than for any reflective purpose. On the other hand, as Hanssen argues, although we now seem to be in period of post-theory, approaches associated with the Frankfurt School and poststructuralism remain widely influential in such fields as literary and political theory, postcolonial, queer, psychoanalytic, and feminist theory, geography and theories of spatial meaning, and many others. The very ubiquity of the term post is itself one sign of the problems addressed by these two schools, for the term suggests model of history that posits intellectual development as series of fads that deviate from some supposed universal form of reason. In that model, one could compare universal reason to body of