French Theory's American Adventures

In this article, the author discusses how it is simply too late to be still speaking about French theory and its role in the intellectual life of the United States today. It seems to many observers that the gap between real-life politics and theory's guerrillas is much too wide already, after 30 years of academic fever, for the two worlds to even speak a common language. If theory is to be of any use nowadays, the many tricks and games implied by its cultural metamorphoses should be taken seriously: by addressing the American identity of French theory, and even by pondering the strange feedback effect of a recent return of French theory to France, where it is now coming back under cover, under the disguise of an American type of threat against France's age-old abstract universalism.