This study locates itself in the wake of what has often been characterized as the “crisis” of postmodern theory, a crisis brought about by what Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, Gilles Deleuze, and other leading theorists of “the postmodern condition” have characterized (to use Lyotard’s phrase) as an “incredulity toward metanarratives.” According to Lyotard, whose work on the postmodern may be taken as exemplary, this crisis is twofold. First, “to the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy”—that is, of the traditional philosophical and critical paradigms of the...

In this chapter, I examine a range of theorists who have been associated with “pragmatism” or “neopragmatism,” a critical genealogy that stretches back to the Ralph Waldo Emerson of the 1830s, then to William James—who may be said to have given the theory (or, more properly, the antitheory) its name (which he adapted from the “pragmaticism” of Harvard colleague Charles Sanders Peirce)—then to John Dewey, and reaching forward finally to contemporary critics and philosophers such as Frank Lentricchia, Cornel West, and the figures I will examine in most detail: Walter Benn Michaels, Richard Rorty, and Stanley Cavell. These...

In the current social and critical moment, perhaps no project is more overdue than the articulation of a posthumanist theoretical framework for a politics and ethics not grounded in the Enlightenment ideal of “Man.” Within postmodern theory, that humanist ideal is critiqued as forcefully as anywhere in the early and middle phase of Michel Foucault’s career, whose “genealogical” aim is to “account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in empty sameness throughout the course of...

This chapter sets out from the convergence of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze on the problem that lends its name to this study, the problem of the “outside.” To delimit in this way our examination of the huge body of work produced by both is to at the same time tighten the focus on the specific brand of poststructuralism that joins Foucault and Deleuze and separates them from other theorists often treated under the same rubric: their engagement not only with what Deleuze will characterize as “the form of expression” but also with “the form of content.” For both Foucault...

Throughout the preceding chapters, I frequently have made recourse to how a post-Marxist critical perspective can reveal the political limits of many of the theoretical paradigms I have examined thus far. As we have seen, the work of Rorty, Cavell, Michaels, Luhmann, and Maturana and Varela (among others) runs aground time and again on the ideological recontainment of a potentially liberating epistemological and philosophical pluralism by a pluralism of a very different and more familiar sort—aliberal humanistpluralism (or something very much like it) that pays little attention to how real inequality in the economic and social sphere...