This special session on “Theoretical Anachronisms” takes a cue from Carolyn Dinshaw’s assertion that “asynchrony interrupts and perturbs the hoped-for wholeness of the present day, splits, upsets, queers the now.” By heeding Dinshaw’s claim that “temporal critiques remain urgent,” we aim to redirect the urgency of the now towards a critique of presentist temporality, itself, in order to examine how and why “anachronistic” modes of theorizing remain viable and necessary today. In addition to engaging with Dinshaw’s How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (2012) and Kathleen Davis’s Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (2008)—texts that directly engage questions of anachronism and periodicity—the session contributes to the intersection of two discourses. The first asks how we might expand the historical boundaries of modern theory and includes texts like Amy Hollywood’s Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (2002), Bruce Holsinger’s The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (2005), Andrew Cole’s The Birth of Theory (2014), and Alex Dubilet’s The Self-Emptying Subject: Kenosis and Immanence, Medieval to Modern (2018). The second examines the limitations of critical theory or what we might call “critical fatigue” and includes Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015), Nico Baumbach, Damon Young, and Genevieve Yue’s special issue of Social Text titled The Cultural Logic of Contemporary Capitalism (2016), and Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski’s Critique and Postcritique (2017).
While critical theory evokes a temporality of crisis and immediacy, the papers in this session move against the assumption that crisis leaves no time for the practice of rereading, on which the return to older texts depends, and insists, instead, on the imperative to reread, relearn, and revive repeatedly the lessons of the theoretical past. As the #MeToo Movement demonstrates, for example, it is not as if we have exhausted the lessons of feminist theory; in fact, putatively new lessons often feel new because of ignored or forgotten cultural labor performed, in this case, by women of color. Thus, despite characterizations of feminism, psychoanalysis, queer critique, and even Marxist and critical theory as outdated, anachronistic, and, therefore, irrelevant modes of theorizing, these papers argue together that to dwell with theoretical anachronisms and asynchrony may generate more thoughtful, robust, and flexible engagements with the present crises.
Eleanor Craig’s paper “Ineligible for Transcendence: Alienation, Labor, and Asian American Settler Colonialism,” for example, turns to the case of Marxist theory and grapples with Alexander Weheliye’s claim that ethnic studies has kept Marxist theory alive, which, as Craig explains, implies both that it putatively does not to live on as vibrantly in other fields and that its supposed outdatedness requires its sustaining in the first. While Craig agrees intensely with Weheliye’s claim, she wonders how this methodological framing of ethnic studies might also generate intellectual blind spots in the narratives written by and about the field. In order to address this tension, Craig takes Marxism up as a theoretical anachronism for ethnic studies and analyzes how framing the relationship between this theory and field as anachronistic might enable the recovery of an overlooked history of Asian American settler colonialism.
Amy Hollywood’s “Theoretical Refusals: Mysticism, Psychoanalysis, and the Necessity of Theoretical Failure” offers a particular formulation of theoretical anachronism grounded in failure and addresses the presumed anachronism not only of psychoanalysis but also of Christian mysticism. Through a comparative reading of Leo Bersani’s The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (1986) and Jacques Lacan’s various citations of Christian mysticism, Hollywood argues that failure in theory is required for its operativity as theory. Following Bersani’s claim that psychoanalysis entails its own theoretical failure, Hollywood turns to Lacan’s reading of the thirteenth-century beguine mystic Hadewijch in whom she locates a medieval version of failure exemplified by the paradoxical intersection of faith and unfaith. This failure, she argues, is crucial to Lacan’s reading of Hadewijch but also his understanding of psychoanalysis as well. Ultimately, Hollywood urges us to understand both psychoanalysis and mysticism as significant modes of theorizing.
Finally, Kris Trujillo’s paper “Queer Theory and the Persistence of Jouissance” examines the phenomenon of queer theory’s many deaths. Emblematic of this fretting over the death of queer theory is the special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly edited by Janet Halley and Andrew Parker titled After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory (2007) wherein they explain that they had “been hearing from some quarters that queer theory, if not already passé, was rapidly approaching its expiration date.” Trujillo argues that the persistent worry over queer theory’s survival has historical roots in the field’s emergence during the context of the AIDS crisis. In order to make this claim, he turns to the durability of the term jouissance and its formulation and reformulation by queer theorists like Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, and Amber Jamilla Musser. He suggests that Bersani’s influential formulation of jouissance in the context of AIDS haunts subsequent engagements with the term and, as a result, implies the impossibility of getting over the pandemic—or, indeed, the importance of recognizing that even today we do not, in fact, live after the time of AIDS.