What has been the most influential import from France to the U.S. over the last half-century? Is it the most radical-chic commodity, or the most controversial fashion, arriving directly from Paris? Instead of a perfume, a trend in haute-couture, a new new wave of independent cinema, or a political turn, the right answer could well be: theory. Yes, theory. Theory infusing curricula, academic careers, intellectual conflict, culture wars, the struggles of minorities, but also electronic music, neofigurative painting, cyberpunk science-fiction, and Web 1.0 hacktivism. Theory is seen as the source for a series of gender revolutions and the turn to identity politics, if not of progressivism as a whole. It is also a source of America’s radicalized neoconservative movement.
Theory is the source of all evil or all great advances, depending on where you stand in America’s ideological minefield. Theory may often be labeled “French” in the U.S., but it’s as if this Gallic qualifier is redundant, therefore useless: before being associated with such American names as Judith Butler, Fredric Jameson, or Edward W. Said, with their English counterparts such as Paul Gilroy or Stuart Hall, with such German names as Nietzsche, Marx, Theodor Adorno, or Walter Benjamin, or with such names from the Global South as Amartya Sen, Dipesh Chakrabarty, or Achille Mbembe, theory is first and foremost associated with a few French names from the last third of the twentieth century. These French names are familiar in American academe: Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, and others.
And yet, to complete the paradox of theory, even though it is implicitly French or is always spiced with a Gallic flavor, it remains a quintessential American invention: imported texts and concepts were combined and mixed, chemically refined and processed, bottled and repackaged in universities in all fifty states. The ingredients may be foreign, the natural (or rather, textual) resources often European, the abstruse logic typically French, yet the final product is unmistakably American. Over the past fifty years, the U.S. has produced not only weapons, computers, internet giants, countless marketing trends—and a renewed tendency toward a populist, reactionary type of politics—it has also produced theory. And a lot of it.
These dimensions have always made French theory a highly flexible, open-ended, inclusive category, to which its friends or foes will associate even more things: the former will add real liberty, anticonformism of all sorts, a loose community of interpretation (readers on the same wavelength), and an existential, emancipatory, California-style vibe reminiscent of self-help more than of classical philosophy. Foes will see in French theory the horrors of “cultural Marxism,” gender deconstructions, civilizational self-hatred, and terminal moral relativism (in the line of Nietzsche’s 1886 Beyond Good and Evil, widely quoted by the French). In its more than fifty years of existence, French theory has evolved over time, displaying changing facets according to its various audiences, contexts, and uses.