Theory & Event

One does not really have to look further than the signifier itself – "French theory" – to realize that what the term signifies will most likely be a product of translation: a member-group constituted of individuals unaware of either the existence of the group or their membership in it. Although the term collects thinkers and concepts stretching back to the mid-twentieth century, it is only recently, with François Cusset's French Theory (2005), that the French were formally introduced to the foreign term.² At the turn of the seventies, when things started to pick up, French concepts were crossing the Atlantic as academic capital in order to reinvigorate Anglo-American fields of study (literary studies in particular was shopping for a replacement paradigm for the New Criticism). Although positioned academically upon arrival, the concepts that landed in America were often born of extra-academic investments in both France and the United States.

Pierre Bourdieu talks about the way that intellectual history is prone to characterizations that glaze over subtler points, things that are in the air, so to speak, unreferenced texts and contexts that nevertheless have a profound influence on the way that thought is expressed.³ French theorists like Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault wrote articles in popular and underground magazines and newspapers (including Actuel and La Cause du peuple), but most of this work is either untranslated or is reprinted out of context. Case in point are Paul Rabinow's "Essential Works of Foucault" volumes which reorganize the chronological Dits et écrits according to themes and concepts familiar to Foucault's Anglo-American readership. Generally speaking, context is relegated to endnotes and it therefore appears in fragments reordered according to the thematic rendering of an oeuvre. Thought is reshaped, and much is left out, when it travels. Below I explore neglected arrivals and crossings that redress the turn of the seventies as a moment marked by multiplicitous crossings, a complex assemblage of interpenetrating French and American theories, cultures, and practices that complicate conventional accounts of theory's arrival in America in the late sixties as a conflicted form of Structuralism (that would become Post-structuralism over the course of the seventies).

While I share with Cusset some grounding in Bourdieu (who shows how factors including the hierarchal organization of presses, universities, and critics have an impact on how translated texts are received), I am further intrigued by Bruno Latour's recent work on assemblage theory, which is also a theory of translation. One of the limitations of Bourdieu's work on fields is that, while it helps to illuminate how and why things are circumscribed as they are, it does not allow for inquiry to stray too far from the predetermined track. As Latour explains, assemblage theory begins from the premise that "there is no society, no social realm, and no social ties, but there exist translations between mediators that may generate traceable associations."⁴ Cusset's narrative is admirably construed, but it also begins with "French theory" as its premise: the task of his book is to explain what the term entails and how it came to be. My aim is not to contest this narrative, but to complicate its status by tracing other associations.

In my brief intervention into this history I latch onto Jean-Jacques Lebel – who participated in revolts on either side of the Atlantic and maintained significant relationships with Deleuze and Guattari, Beat writers, Abbie Hoffman, and a New York anarchist group – as a mediator in order to demonstrate how American and French icons represent ideas and acts that are in circulation. Icons, ideas, and acts are assembled, embodied, and dispersed by intermediary figures like Lebel, and publications like underground newspaper RAT Subterranean News. Via Lebel I complicate notions of influence, entry, and contact, demonstrating how Deleuze and Guattari in particular surveyed the American landscape before landing on American soil in 1975, and how their theories were not only informed by, but also informed anarchist and liberationist movements growing out of New York at the turn of the seventies.

Expelled from the surrealists...