Conclusion: Recontextualisations

Abstract

Much ‘theory’ has been extracted from the texts of Lacan, Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, and diverse attempts have been made to translate it directly into ideas and methods which can be readily adopted and applied by those of us who do not read, write or teach in France. As a result the representations we have been given of their texts have not always been faithful repetitions, even allowing for what Lukacs called ‘normative misunderstandings;’ and signification, connection and context have been lost. They were lost when, as in the case of the Yale critics, translation also involved a considerable amount of transformation. American doctrines of ‘revisionary misreading’ and of the ‘creativity’ of criticism, together with French views of the intrinsic fictionality and supplementarity of academic writing, freed those who introduced French ideas into the Anglo-Saxon world to do their own, often quite diverse, things. It is one of the tenets of ‘theory’ that representations of texts need not be ‘true’ (to them),¹ and there is no specific exemption for the French. Signification, connection and context were lost again when, in desperation, some of us sought to abstract from the confusion of texts a few clear and distinct ideas or methods — like the political power of the intellectual, the institutionalisation of academic writing, intertextuality, the decentred subject, the death of the author, demythologising, exclusion or aporia.

‘Recognise him or not?’ our hero wondered in indescribable anguish, ‘or pretend that I am not myself, but somebody strikingly like me?… I’m alright. I’m quite alright. It’s not I, it’s not I, and that’s the fact of the matter.’ Dostoyevski, The Double