Critical Inquiry — Volume 33, Number 1

Ian Hunter
The History of Theory

Do you see now why it feels so good to be a critical mind? Why critique, this most ambiguous pharmakon, has become such a potent euphoric drug? You are always right! When naïve believers are clinging forcefully to their objects ... you can turn all of those attachments into so many fetishes and humiliate all the believers by showing that it is nothing but their own projection, that you, yes you alone, can see. But as soon as naïve believers are thus inflated by some belief in their own importance, in their own projective capacity, you strike them by a second uppercut and humiliate them again, this time by showing that, whatever they think, their behavior is entirely determined by the action of powerful causalities coming from objective reality they don't see, but that you, yes you, the never sleeping critic, alone can see. Isn't this fabulous? Isn't it really worth going to graduate school to study critique?

— BRUNO LATOUR, "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?"(1)

One of the most striking features of recent discussions of the moment of theory in the humanities is the lack of even proximate agreement about what the object of such theory might be and about the language in which it has been or should be conducted. For Terry Eagleton the object of theory is culture — understood as the dialectical moment in which the making of meaning encounters its own social determination — and its language is a version of Marxian social theory, to which Eagleton has recently added some Aristotelian ballast. (2) For Robert Pippin, though, theory's object is the conditions of knowledge as first posed by Kant and then taken up in other disciplines, while the language of theory is that of post-Kantian critical philosophy. (3) Other commentators take the object of theory to be language or literature or the mode of literary production — an object possibly threatened with displacement by electronically mediated images and digitized communications — and locate theory's language in the discourse of literary criticism, albeit in diverse forms. (4) This diversity could be extended without much difficulty. Habermas makes discourse or the "ideal speech situation" into the core object of theory, discussing it in a highly elaborated post-Kantian social theory. For Derrida (as we shall see below) what matters is différance, understood as the liquefaction of formalized meanings and structures carried out in Derrida's improvisation on the discourse of transcendental phenomenology.

1. Bruno Latour, "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?" Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 238–39.
2. See Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York, 2003).
3. See Robert Pippin, "Critical Inquiry and Critical Theory: A Short History of Nonbeing," Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 424–28.
4. See Elizabeth Abel, "Mania, Depression, and the Future of Theory," Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 336–39, and Fredric Jameson, "Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory?" Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 403–8.

IAN HUNTER is a research professor in the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland, Australia. He has published various works on the history of philosophical and political thought, including Rival Enlightenments (2001), Natural Law and Civil Sovereignty (coedited with David Saunders) (2002), and The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe (coedited with Conal Condren and Stephen Gaukroger) (2006). Together with Thomas Ahnert and Frank Grunert, he has recently completed the first English translation of the works of Christian Thomasius: Essays on Church, State, and Politics (2007). His current research is concerned with the persona of the philosopher and the history of theory. His email is i.hunter@uq.edu.au