Theoretical times is the slightly ironic label I have given to a continuing project looking at the way in which certain theorists have begun to displace academic disciplines in the ‘now’, or the fleeting contemporary world. I am interested in how we might generate more meaningful and appropriate concepts and theories for the illumination of the state of the post-crash contemporary globe through this process. It is also the working title of this blog. The blog is informing the writing of the new book on Theoretical Times and in some ways the book is being written from the blog and vice versa; all sorts of social media feedback on the blog has already shifted my thinking on both how to write the book (partly through e-mails, tweets, messages, blogs and so on) and how to critically reinterpret some of my previous thinking on the lives and work of the theorists themselves. An array of new concepts – claustropolitanism, foreclosure, reproletarianisation, accelerated culture – and fresh approaches (claustropolitan sociology, bunker anthropology) have been generated in my work as part of this focus on what I call ‘theory at the speed of light’ – especially in my 2011 book We Have Never Been Postmodern: Theory at the Speed of Light and in the forthcoming book called Theoretical Times. But their intersecting lives have also been a major focus of the work. For instance, one of the theorists Jean Baudrillard was the subject of a previous book. I never met Baudrillard himself but even as he was terminally ill from cancer I got to know that he was signing permissions for his work to be used for the Reader on him that I was preparing. Wow! It piqued my interest in the lives of theorists and their relationship to other theorists. In the Theoretical Times project pairs of theorists, who were also friends, and correspondents, were also explored: for example, Louis Althusser and Lucio Colletti, Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard and Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek. Or, alternatively, Althusser/Colletti, Virilio/Baudrillard and Badiou/Zizek. These pairs were the most obvious historical partners but some theorists cut across these pairings – Alain Badiou for example was a student of Louis Althusser’s in the 1960s. However there has been relatively little cutting across of my original pairings. In the case of Slavoj Zizek and Jean Baudrillard they both came originally from the Marxist left, and both drew heavily on psychoanalysis, especially that of Jacques Lacan, but rarely mentioned each other in their work when Baudrillard was alive. Nevertheless there was an important implied shared critique of Michel Foucault’s anti-statism (and closet neo-liberal sympathies) in the work of Baudrillard and Zizek which bound them together.
How can we find out more about the intersecting lives of thorists? Biographies are one method. There is something of a contemporary vogue in global intellectual culture for biographical work on the golden generation of French social theorists who have now passed on – Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari amongst others. Major substantial, doorstopper biographies have recently been published, including Francois Dosse’s Deleuze and Guattari: Intersecting Lives and Benoit Peeters’ Derrida which allow new analytical perspectives on the relationships between for instance Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida on the one hand and Gilles Deleuze, Paul Virilio and Felix Guattari on the other. As a result of this new biographical material, it can be seen that there is a substantial link between the lives of figures in this generation which gives rise to new interpretations of their work. In my previous work I have looked at some of the myriad intimate connections between the late Jean Baudrillard and his long time friend and colleague, Paul Virilio. Jean Baudrillard died of cancer in March 2007 but left some significant work to be published posthumously. Virilio, still producing pithy and provocative books is, alongside Helene Cixous, Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar and Jacques Ranciere, one of the last living representatives of the post-war generation of radically influential French social theorists who exported what Mike Gane labelled ‘French Social Theory’ all around the world.
Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio have both been regularly categorised as postmodernists (as well as poststructuralists) by scholars in various different fields. Further they have, alternatively, been described as post-hypermodernists. However, in fact, some of these characterisations are deeply misleading and have held back much needed sensible discussion of the contributions Virilio and Baudrillard could make to contemporary theory today, and their legacies for understanding the ‘radically uncertain’ future of the world in the twenty-first century. For example, Paul Virilio demonstrably has deep roots in French phenomenology, let alone Teilhard de Chardin and (in his own self-labelling) ‘Anarchistic Christianity’, rather than the milieu of the postmodernists and the poststructuralists with whom he is frequently bracketed. Indeed Francois Dosse in his spell-binding, mesmeric historical account of the intimate connections between Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, what the biographer sees as the indelible ‘intersecting lives’ of Deluze and Guattari, reminds us that ‘Deleuze was ambivalent towards phenomenology, keeping his distance and at the same time using several Husserlian notions, such as “passive synthesis” and “transcendental empiricism” for his own purposes. His friend Paul Virilio, who emphatically proclaims his ties with the phenomenological program, says that Deleuze greatly appreciated Merleau-Ponty’s last book Visible and Invisible, and also drew from Husserl, for whom sense is what is expressed or the expression and who questions the sense of perception that cannot be reduced to the physical object or to psychological experience.’
As I have discovered, Theoretical Times require Theoretical Lives.
