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This public conversation was recorded at an event held at The Slought Gallery, Philadelphia, November 1, 2002, as part of a series called “Conversations in Theory,” organized by Aaron Levy, curator.

Lambert: To begin with I want to recall a line from Difference and Repetition, which forecasts a style of philosophy for the future, regarding what Deleuze describes as “a bearded Mona Lisa and a clean shaven Marx.” This line returned to me, Jean-Michel, as I read your account in The Future of Theory, particularly regarding your description of what you call “an hysterical Hegel.” Now, I always thought Marx was the hysterical one in relationship with Hegel, but here you seem to be saying something different. In the book there is a very dominant thesis that that Theory constantly risks becoming a little bit hysterical, or that its discourse itself is, in some way, hystericizing. Can you talk a bit about your use of the term “hysterical” with regard to the discourse of theory?

Rabaté: I love your question, Gregg. Yes. Let’s begin with this image of the bearded Mona Lisa and the clean-shaven Marx. Having just read Williams’s biography of Karl Marx—a really wonderful book—I learned that the last photograph of Marx was taken in 1882, while he was in Algiers. Of course, that period, for me, was interesting—Joyce had just been born—and this last photograph shows a bearded Marx, but since he was under the sun of Algeria, had later decided to shave his beard and get a very short haircut, although he was never photographed clean-shaved. This is the last Marx I would like to keep in mind—an unimaginably clean-shaven Marx, balding like Lenin! We have already seen the somewhat comic portrait of Freud shaven, which is as unorthodox as the beardless Marx. And here, of course, Deleuze sends us to the bearded Mona Lisa transformed by Duchamp. If Duchamp, [End Page 39] the exemplary artist-philosopher-theoretician of art, could paint Mona Lisa with a mustache and a beard and a goatee, which he signed L. H. O. O. Q. (“elle a chaud au cul”—there is no need to translate it), it was so he could later on reprint the Mona Lisa without a beard, a reproduction of the usual Mona Lisa entitled: “Mona Lisa, Shaved.” For me, this could allegorize what Theory does to canonical texts: first, it adds to the portraits of their authors a waggish beard or a funky mustache, then it lets them come out, as it were, “clean and shaven.” As I suggested in the book—there will always be a “future of Theory” since “tomorrow you will get a free shave”!

I think that all of this has to do with the latent hysteria contained in Theory. The central question of hysteria in Lacan’s account is ultimately something like: “Am I a man or a woman?” Here is one of the questions that Theory should start asking of us. Not just because I’m interested in gender theory, but because one can take Judith Butler, who is emblematic of a certain discourse of gender theory when it tries to go elsewhere, although not necessarily further. When Judith Butler continues writing Theory while denouncing Theory, or pretending that she is beyond Theory—then I see her doing Theory, but “shaved.” In other words, to use a musical image, we seem to be always between Le Nozze de Figaro and the reprise of the Figaro theme (“Se vuol ballare ...”), which is curiously heard at the end of Don Giovanni. My idea of the hysterization that Theory engenders takes its cue in Lacan. My starting point is Lacanian, although The Future of Theory is not a Lacanian book, strictly speaking. I have been interested in the theory of the “Four discourses” in Lacan, and I was trying to see why Theory, as it has been famously or infamously displayed, or produced, had to face the discourse of the university while, at the same time, never quite being reducible to the discourse of the university...