Theory's Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy by Zahi Zalloua

Abstract

Reviewed by: Theory's Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy by Zahi Zalloua Bruno Chaouat Zahi Zalloua, Theory's Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 240 pp. Zahi Zalloua's Theory Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy, proposes to re-legitimize "theory," which has been accused, by the proponents of the new speculative turn in the humanities and of so-called Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) of aporetic skepticism at best, and of nihilism at worst. I am sympathetic with Zalloua's desire to reclaim skepticism as an art of reading and reading as a hermeneutic of skepticism. Moreover, I share his passion for interpretive hunger—a hunger that cannot be satisfied unless one betrays the text. Zalloua follows the hunger metaphor throughout his book, hence the Dali illustration of Montaigne's Essais that adorns the book cover—a striking display of the Essayist staring into his open stomach and contemplating the macrocosm. Indeed, Western humanism has les yeux plus gros que le ventre,1 it bites off more than it can chew, as Montaigne lamented. And it tears oneself apart. Suicide by bulimic curiosity, self-evisceration by epistemophilia. Finally, and while I am not familiar with the new development in so-called OOO (Object-Oriented-Ontology), I can only share Zalloua's skepticism as to what appears as a naive return to a pure, immediate world, free from the mediation of experience, language, and subjectivity. But what does Zalloua mean by "theory"? He reserves this appelation for the philosophy's "other," or, as Derrida would have it, its margins. Theory, despite its name, is not pure contemplation of the essences, let alone scientific reasoning. Instead, it designates any discourse that contaminates the alleged purity of Logos. "Theory is a bastard," Zalloua writes, using a Derridian trope (see Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy," inter al.). Indeed, Derrida's pharmakon could serve as a metonymy of theory. Pharmakon, medicine and poison in one—a word meant to subvert the law of non-contradiction, is for Derrida, a metonymy for writing. In a field (literary studies) currently dominated by gender theory, Zalloua engages with the issue of "queer," understood as a principle of bastardization and hybridization, a principle of transgression of all epistemological and ontological borders. He defines autoimmunity as the openness to the other—a self-inflicted wound that exposes the discourse to the threat of the unknown or the event. This 1990s debate takes us back to an era when poststructuralism at once dominated the field of literary studies and was mocked by analytic philosophers. [End Page 349] And thus we are led to ask, What is groundbreaking in reclaiming the impurity of literature? What is new in this attempt to recover the indefinite suspension of meaning? What is original in conjuring up the "monstrous" as an other that cannot be reduced, tamed or assimilated? By resorting to those worn out topoi (impurity, monstrosity, and différance), Zalloua seems to be fighting the last battle. And the risk is to close himself up in an echo chamber or preach to the choir. To be sure, the veterans of theory will not disagree with him that theory is superior to philosophy, but it is also likely that such veterans will be the only ones to engage critically with this book. What sets apart Zalloua's endeavor may be his turning to Renaissance humanism and his enlisting of Montaigne's brand of skepticism. Thus Zalloua finds traces of "theory" in Montaigne and traces of Montaigne's disjointed humanism in the later Derrida. Skepticism, like the form of Montaigne's Essais, is an ethos of humility. Essayer is to experiment, to try, to test, to taste, and to fail. It is an inherently empirical process, and never reaches fulfillment. The essay, like the art of reading theoretically, is "non all," pas tout—to use Lacan's terminology. Or the feminine pas toute—such is also the "essence" of theory as a skeptical hermeneutic. Montaigne's dislocation of anthropocentrism ends up in an "aphanisis" of the subject (Lacan's word for the vanishing of the subject). In Zalloua's book this fading away of the solid Cartesian subject is labeled "traumatophilia," understood as...