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The Sad State of Post-structuralism

TO THINK TODAY IN FRANCE is to give the present moment a history which must of necessity be arbitrary. Today in France began in Britain in 1993, for me. This history is more than arbitrary insofar as it engages with some kinds of symptom and blockage in the present which are key for ways in which some people think, today. France, as a site of theory, became a problem for me around 1993; I wanted France to be the place of theory, of what we then called post-structuralism. I think that many of us still hope for something like this from France, but—as this essay will try to explain—that hope is aligned with a certain failure of worldiness. The wishful construction of French theory (a construction which happens to a certain extent within institutions in France and to a certain extent within institutions of the Anglophone academy) is to some extent wilful denial of relations between France and other parts of the world, the replacement of France in the world with a place of theory. The sadness—the sad state of poststructuralism which this essay will chart—measures both the loss of the world attendant on the construction of theory and the fears of its heavy return. I began to think about this question in 1993 when I was writing about Wyndham Lewis, the British modernist writer and painter. In 1931, he had just published Hitler, his apology for National Socialism. Partly to escape the consequences of this act, he set out immediately for the Maghreb, for the French territories of North Africa. According to Filibusters in Barbary (1932), his account of the trip, he planned to travel in search of the Berber nomads of the Western Saharah, a group who had successfully resisted domination by colonial power. He initially identifies his authorship with this position of dissidence. But he soon discovers that this project is impracticable. “No European, I discovered to my extreme astonishment, is able to set foot upon these forbidden sands and steppes.” He is forced to stop “short of this line of dissidence.”1 Cultural identity has interrupted the possibility of material identification. The trope of identification persists: Lewis continues to speak of himself as nomadic, mobile, evasive of consolidated structures of power, but in the process the Berber people have disappeared, de-materialised. In a further revealing move, Lewis aligns his authorship with Lyautey, the ex-Governer of the protectorate of Morocco. Lyautey’s policy was to use the mobile systems of power within the territories he policed, rather than to introduce centralised structures of government. For Lewis, “he had the secret, better than any eng-