A few years ago Continuum publishers, now owned by Bloomsbury, put out an excellent series of books called ‘Live Theory’ concentrating on work as diverse as Helen Cixous, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Gayatri Spivak, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. The main focus of my forthcoming book, Theoretical Times, is the singularity of the theory of such theorists, especially the related but separate trio of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek and Jean Baudrillard, and the way in which theory, life and work has become caught up in social media driven celebrity intellectual culture or what Baudrillard saw as ‘hyperreality’. Baudrillard, Zizek and Badiou all featured in superb volumes in the ‘Live Theory’ series. Since then, Jean Baudrillard has died of cancer (in 2007), though with important posthumous publications like the The Agony of Power and The Divine Left in his publishers’ catalogues, and both Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek have gone on to become international superstars and global theorists par excellence.
The European Graduate School features the likes of Baudrillard, Badiou and Zizek as star professors whose lectures are then posted on YouTube. YouTube promotes hour-plus long presentations all around the world by theorists such as Zizek and Badiou as if they were rock stars like Bruce Springsteen giving extended shows, an essential part of ‘showbiz’ academia, indistinguishable from all other contemporary ‘creative’ performers. Recently Marcel Gauchet in conversation with Alain Badiou has rather cynically suggested that this intellectual movement, especially that variant around the Badiouian notion of the ‘communist hypothesis’ and ‘communist modernity’, is ‘typically imbued with the values of capitalism, of the media-mercantile climate we’re steeped in – an attractive brand name, a company label’. He may have a point. Theorists today are sitting astride the globe like giants whilst whole disciplines wither on the vine. In some senses disciplines have been superceded. We have become post-disciplinary in our trans or inter disciplinarity and devoted in our studies to the life and work of singular theorists with near global followings. Dictionaries have been produced concentrating on theorists such as Baudrillard, Zizek and Badiou in the intellectual space where whole disciplines would have featured in the past. My forthcoming book is a part of long term work on theory, and the history of theory in the post-crash global condition and the narrow critical theoretical ledge some of us now inhabit in its wake. Although couched in general terms, my Theoretical Times concentrates on the work of Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou both in terms of taking seriously their theoretical analyses for our sometimes profoundly untheoretical times and their participation in the hyperreal world of theory today. Theorists like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek have become integrated into a form of ‘hyperreality’ which Jean Baudrillard in particular has theorised and, for a fleeting moment, captured. Debates and controversies have presented these theorists either as gods or charlatans. As Geoff Pfeifer in his book The New Materialism has argued, ‘it seems that any serious study of the work of Slavoj Zizek must say something about the machinery that surrounds him both as a persona and the seeming never-ending string of denunciations and devotions that are constantly being aired in the media, on blogs, in the halls of the academy, and in other such places. This is also increasingly true of Alain Badiou, though on a much smaller scale than that of the former.’ Pfeifer is right to bring up the issue of social media in celebrity intellectual culture. Alain Badiou for example has been subjected to an internet hoax which declared that he was, at 79 years of age, dead, and stimulated thousands of his ‘fans’ to write in obituary mode on facebook. Indeed such ‘theory’ fandom in celebrity intellectual culture has become a phenomenon worthy of study in its own right. I look in the book at the idea of hyperreality and related concepts to make sense of it all. Undead Theory!
