Cusset and French Theory

This week’s reading imparted a closer view of the way theory and academic thought is transformed as well as informed by foreign readings and exportation. Francois Cusset emphasizes the transformative nature of the capture, transmittance, and re-evaluation of theory and knowledge. Concomitantly, Cusset demonstrates the contextual specificity of those interpretations and various methods by which theory may be transmitted across societies and cultures. Within the conclusion of Francois Cusset’s French Theory a quote from Oswald Spengler simplifies this view; “The more enthusiastically we laud the principles of an alien thought, the more fundamentally in truth we have denatured it” (337). I took this to mean that the more one understands and applies a foreign produced taxonomy to one’s own context, the less it tends to resemble the insider’s view of the theory. Alternatively, this means that theories, like those of Derrida and Foucault, which, over time, lost much of the power and essence of their traditional understandings in France were not exhausted theory. Cusset effectively demonstrates the way theory, imported into a different social and academic context in the United States, was interpreted and understood in alternate and viable mode. Consequently, whereas at the time Foucault and Derrida were marginalized in France, an understanding of their theories, birthed in the American context, allowed for a reapplication of those ideas. According to Cusset, not just the contextual mode of interpretation can affect a change in theoretical orientation and application. The mode of transmittance plays a large role in how theory is received and applied (90). Cusset identifies the literary vessels by which French Theory took hold in the United States as an exemplar of this principle. Though French Theory was also academically introduced to Americans, the multilateral reality of the literary and artistic expressions of this theory largely contributed to its altered American form. Cusset does well to remind us to question whether we can look beyond the criticisms inspired by our own experiences as well to show that theory is permenantly understood in the eye of the beholder.