“Theory” is a label that first gained significance in the context of American (and multinational) universities in the late 1960s onward, in reference to the groundbreaking work led by European (and mainly French) scholars, whose writings (both literarily and philosophically inflected) were cutting across the disciplines and vigorously reassessing epistemic prejudices and consensus, in a way that also seemed to respond to the demands of the times—and to the political crisis in the West. In the 1960s and 1970s especially, a whole generation of European intellectuals found very little assent in the social institution of their countries of origin—whereas American Academia seemed to offer an external scene of legitimization for such authors. The relative openness of US institutions to those new ideas is based on many factors: the reopening of a “European tropism” owing to the US participation in World War II; the surreptitious increase of the “Americanization” of Western Europe through military occupation, the Marshall plan, and cultural commodification, making the more or less temporary exile of intellectuals in America an easier endeavor than before; the success of the previous influx of European scholars and scientists during the 1930s and 1940s.Here, it should be noted that the phrase “critical theory” gained currency in the United States before the 1960s, thanks to the exile of several prominent figures of the Frankfurt School. “Critical theory” (as developed by Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and their colleagues) presented itself as both a method and a discourse transcending the compartmentalization of knowledge, linking a critique of the contemporary with longstanding scholarly traditions and the conceptual methods of philosophy in particular, finally offering a political value for the present—often in a (post-)Marxist, or “radical” perspective. Those features undoubtedly influenced the reception of (post)structuralism in the United States and partially explain why the name “theory” gradually became a convenient appellation for very diverse approaches, despite (ironically) a wide rejection of this very term by most of the “big names” of so-called “French theory.” The sense of “theory” in the absolute (with its more relative undertones, linking it to literary studies and to a philosophical ascent) is perceptible in the creation in 1976 of the “School of Criticism and Theory” (now hosted at Cornell University) or the 1982 article by Paul de Man, “The Resistance to Theory.”Theory, then, as a collective noun referring to quite different and often incompatible thoughts, is, at its core, a multi-national category. It first has been co-elaborated by and through the circulation of ideas, persons, and texts between two main poles: Europe and the United States. In its factual definition and its currently vague but heuristic sense, theory depends on migrations and displacements. Without them, one would mainly speak along the more traditional lines of disciplinary and discursive divisions (referring to “philosophers,” “essayists,” “critics,” etc.). Now, in its first wave, theory was transnational but neither global nor detached from very local particularities (mainly the more open-ended structures of American Academia and the polymathic training of French élites). Thanks to the imperial role of the United States, the further dissemination of theory paved the way for a more globalized moment. It is no accident that postcolonial theory emerged from scholars who had been involved or educated in the first moment of transmission. At the same time theory was somehow receding in American universities (for reasons both internal and external to the “marketplace of ideas”), its globalized becoming was even more obvious through the unexpected means of the postcolonial. As was the case before, this new (and now more than multinational) circulation was of course deeply altering the contents and goals of the previous projects. One could say that, by the end of the 1990s and in the early 2000s: (1) The name of theory became a truly “global label,” while still bearing a kind of American imprint; and (2) The practice of theory was no longer perceived as being exclusive to a meta-European frame. From that point on, the so far untranslated part of Anglo-American “theory” became more readily available in other languages, allowing for some new feedback effects (like the reintroduction of Michel Foucault through the study of Judith Butler's queer theory in Continental Europe). Furthermore, the idea of writing theory in another language than the ones of the “holy triad” of yesteryear (French, English, and German) became more “legitimate” from an institutional viewpoint. At the same time, it is fair to say that the newly globalized dissemination of “theory” did not consolidate its status in the main centers for academic legitimation, where a more quantitative and technocratic paradigm for the evaluation of research is now fostered. Furthermore, old habits die hard: many promoters of “theory” still expect it to originate in Continental Europe before “blooming” in America then “seeding” in “the rest of the world”; while others consider it a mission to “go back” to the first canon of theoreticians. Such reactions show that the current circulation of theory is very poorly understood: the dominant view is still largely entrapped in antiquated models of transmissions (traditionalism, diffusionism, translatio studiorum, action–reaction, and the like).What Plato named the “ancient discord” between philosophy and literature was at the core of the first success of “theory,” in American Academia and beyond. Despite the tremendous divergences among the major “theoreticians” of the 1960s and 1970s, there was a widely shared belief: the idea that literary oeuvres could challenge the limits of thought and offer the potential for a renewal in discursive research and knowledge. Today, many of the most notable European thinkers who are de facto incorporated into the new canon of “theory” still grant a very specific (and sometimes maximal) role to literature. Remarkably, most, if not all, the major European thinkers who partake in the life of “theory” have received advanced training in literary studies. In the United States, the category of “theory” undoubtedly gained currency because of the previous dissemination of “critical theory” on the one hand, and of the emerging field “theory of literature” (as popularized, in the aftermath of Russian formalism and New criticism, by authors such as René Wellek and Austin Warren). This is to say that, both institutionally and intellectually, theory has always been close the literary, while maintaining some differences (in all the meaning of the word). However, currently, the global field of theory (if there is such a thing) threatens to be split in two. On the one hand, one finds authors who mainly work on literary and art works within a “theoretical” frame, but without putting a particular emphasis on philosophy or even an awareness of its most recent developments. On the other hand, a growing portion of scholars considers “theory” as a proxy for “chic Continental philosophy with a contemporary twist”—and they often retain only a very fleeting interest in the literary. Of course, there is no absolute divide. Or: there is not one yet. But the discrepancy is already marked enough.In a sometimes oblique though definite way, the 2016 book coauthored by Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller positions itself in this transcontinental, and conceptual, space-time. Thinking Literature Across Continents clearly opts for the literary as a source of renewal for any “theory” to come, while situating the new task in what Ghosh names “the ‘across’,” or beyond the dual structure of intellectual transmission and interaction (the “Old” and the “New” World, or the “West” and the “rest,” to quote Naoki Sakai). While the authors say more than once, and rightfully so, that they do not speak on behalf of a given culture (and, I would say, of a generation), there remains that the highest appeal of the volume lies in their recourse to supposedly incommensurable discursive and artistic practices. Each issue at the core of the five parts of the book is treated back to back by Ghosh and Miller, with a laudable desire to engage in some ways of exchange. This goes beyond conversation, without, in my view, actually creating the conditions for what I would prefer calling a dialogue, or the sustained engagement of other (and others') ideas through a morphing process.1 One difficulty, here, may be tied to a relative lack of reflection, in this volume, to the poetics of literary criticism and theory. The part devoted to teaching offers valuable perspectives that are often concealed in books on literature, but, overall, the dual question of epistemic and poetics is neglected. This is a common trait of our present, though one could wonder how and why the at once theoretical and practical insistence on the differential modes of writing—a concern that was on the fore in the works of Derrida, Deleuze, or Blanchot, to mention three scholars who are often mentioned in the book—has been largely lost from view. I do not want to fault the authors so much for such an omission (in the light, especially of Miller's own oeuvre and of Ghosh's constant reference to Tagore). Still, it also accompanies a culturalist and historicist conception of literature that I find dubious. Of course, sahitya is not literature, and literature is not even the same as Dichtung or poiēsis, but literature “qua” literature has very little fixed meaning: it mainly creates its own signification. Thus, “what we Westerners have meant by literature for the last couple of centuries”2 is something I do not know much about, as I do not believe that “we Westerners” exist and am rather convinced that, if “we” ever were a group endowed with some consistence or content, we would yet be unable to determine consensually what “literature” means. As for its date of birth (“three centuries old,” says Miller), we have so many different options on the table (from late antiquity to the end of the eighteenth century) that I doubt even more seriously of any valuable chronological response. One consequence is that the signification of “literature,” or of any other term we would like to employ here, is never a datum and may subsequently be produced in other periods and civilizations: whatever the history of this or that term could be, it neither explicates nor creates signification.3 This is to say that I share Miller's scruples: we should not smoothly, routinely, import the ways of reading we have been accustomed to. We should not trivialize and standardize all literary oeuvres and apply to them a hybridized discourse of the “third kind.” But the motivation has nothing to do with the historicist and culturalist trap most humanists have fallen into. If, in fact, literary texts occur verbally, then social formations matter through their verbal interpreter that is language (to retain Émile Benveniste's formulation), and cultural traditions or social conditions do not come first—or, if they do, the literary process of signification predates them. In this respect, Miller's remarkable investment in literary idiosyncrasies and irreducibilities cannot wholly eschew a postulation toward the general. Even if one abides by singularities, each reading and each oeuvre are also producing ideas that bypass their very boundaries. The singular is a condition of possibility for the general, beside the universal. Hence, the bipolarity between textual (in)fusion borrowing to different cultures (Ghosh's way) and idiosyncratic approaches to the intricacies of the local (Miller's fashion) is heuristic enough, but it ultimately misses the possibility for the extraordinary communication across the dissimilar that we experience in thinking, and in particular via the literary. There, in my view, Ghosh is sometimes so committed to the emergence of new intelligible constructs that he unduly favors “theory” (in the absolute). “Theory” threatens to become a neutral, organized, speech, with its autotelic drive and its common universe of reference (a constellation of names and quotes), and whose relation to the literary looks overly transcendental.I am ending these remarks with a few additional words on the phrase “more than global.” This expression came to me more than six years ago, as I was trying to find new directions for diacritics, and it circulated among scholars, carrying a very open-ended meaning, that I hoped to be conducive to different methodological approaches. Ghosh immediately “heard” me and he gradually came up with his own understanding, a conception he develops in Chapter 5. To me, being more than global cannot be opposed to the irreducible, as it depends on the inner fault lines of each culture, civilization, and society. It proceeds from the repeated experience of the incommensurable, despite the complementary acknowledgment of the powerful unifying forces that new communicational and technological capitalism subjects us to (after millenia of, other, manners of “worlding”). Being more than global, then, requires being fully of several times and places at once; it is no creolization, no parataxis, no syncretism, no cultural tourism, no general openness to “the other.” This demands from us a vast reshaping of our own habits and traditions, where the best qualities of every one of us (as Ghosh's taste for transcultural readings or Miller's reflexive philology) would be reclaimed and reassembled.