Table Of ContentFrench Thought and Literary
Theory in the UK
This collection presents a sort of counter-history or counter-genealogy
of the globalisation of French thought from the point of view of scholars
working in the UK. While the dominating discourse would attribute the
US as the source of that globalisation, particularly through the 1966
conference on the Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man at
Johns Hopkins University, this volume of essays serves as a reminder
that the UK has also been a principal motor of that globalisation. The
essays take into account how French thought and literary theory have
institutionally taken shape in the UK from the 70s to today, highlight
aspects of French thought that have been of particular pertinence or im-
portance for scholars there, and outline how researchers in the UK today
are bringing French thought further in terms of teaching and research
in this twenty-first century. In short, this volume traces how the country
has been behind the reception and development of French thought in
Anglophone worlds from the late 70s to the present.
Irving Goh received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell
University. In 2015, the Royal Society and the British Academy for the
Humanities and Social Sciences awarded him the Newton International
Fellowship in the Department of French at the University of Cambridge
for his work on ‘prepositional existence’ in French thought. That work
now appears as L’existence prépositionnelle, published by Galilée in
2019. He is also the author of The Reject: Community, Politics, and
Religion after the Subject (Fordham UP, 2014), which won the MLA
23rd Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Stud-
ies. He is currently President’s Assistant Professor of Literature at the
National University of Singapore.
Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature
60 Black USA and Spain
Shared Memories in 20th Century Spain
Edited by Rosalía Cornejo-Parriego
61 Ezra Pound and 20th-Century Theories of Language
Faith with the Word
James Dowthwaite
62 Gombrowicz in Transnational Context
Translation, Affect, and Politics
Silvia G. Dapía
63 The British Stake in Japanese Modernity
Readings in Liberal Tradition and Native Modernism
Michael Gardiner
64 Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing
Writing in the Wings
Graham Wolfe
65 The Nationality of Utopia
H. G. Wells, England, and the World State
Maxim Shadurski
66 New Oceania
Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific
Edited by Matthew Hayward and Maebh Long
67 French Thought and Literary Theory in the UK
Edited by Irving Goh
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com
French Thought and Literary
Theory in the UK
Edited by Irving Goh
First published 2020
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
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© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of Irving Goh to be identified as the author of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
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ISBN: 978-0-367-40822-0 (hbk)
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Contents
List of Contributors vii
Opening Remarks from an Outlier: The Sur-vie of
French Thought in the UK xi
IRVING GOH
Theory, Philosophy, Literature 1
ROBERT J.C. YOUNG
1 ‘We Are All Theorists Nowadays’: The
‘Institutionalisation’ of (French) Theory 15
LAURENT MILESI
2 Lingophobia 32
NICHOLAS ROYLE
3 Creative Criticism: A Histori-Manifesto 46
CLARE CONNORS
4 Thoughts from France on the Animal-Human
Borderline: Derrida and Animal Rights Philosophers 63
JUDITH STILL
5 ‘French Thought,’ Postcolonialism, and Islam: Jacques
Derrida and Abdelkebir Khatibi 80
JANE HIDDLESTON
6 Paul Virilio’s Global Britain 96
MARK FEATHERSTONE
7 Critiquing Poststructuralism: The Recent Politics of
French Thought 111
SIMON MORGAN WORTHAM
vi Contents
8 The Business School and French Philosophy 131
MARTIN PARKER
9 Inheriting the Question of Technology: Grammatology,
Originary Technicity, Ecotechnics 139
JOANNA HODGE
Après-coup – Deconstruction Is/In the UK 160
NAOMI WALTHAM-SMITH
Index 169
Contributors
Clare Connors is a Senior Lecturer in Literature at The University of
East Anglia, where she teaches and writes about contemporary fic-
tion, critical theory, literature and deconstruction, and creative criti-
cism. She is the author of Force from Nietzsche to Derrida (Legenda,
2010) and Literary Theory: A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld, 2010),
and co-editor, with Stephen Benson, of Creative Criticism: An An-
thology and Guide (EUP, 2014). All of her writing is indebted to the
thinking-writing of Jacques Derrida, including recent articles on style,
on rhythm, on rhyme, and on grace in the works of J. M. Coetzee and
Ali Smith.
Mark Featherstone is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Keele University,
UK. He is the author of Tocqueville’s Virus: Utopia and Dystopia in
Western Social and Political Theory (Routledge, 2007); Planet Uto-
pia: Utopia, Dystopia, and the Global Imaginary (Routledge, 2017);
and a range of articles in journals including Review of Education,
Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, Cultural Politics, Journal of Cul-
tural Research, and Theory.
Irving Goh is President’s Assistant Professor of Literature at the National
University of Singapore. Prior to that appointment, he was Newton In-
ternational Fellow in the Department of French at the University of
Cambridge. He is the author of The Reject: Community, Politics, and
Religion after the Subject (Fordham UP, 2014), which won the MLA
23rd Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Stud-
ies, and of L’Existence Prépositionnelle, published by Galilée in 2019.
Jane Hiddleston is Professor of Literatures in French at the University of
Oxford and Fellow of Exeter College Oxford. She has published widely
on postcolonial theory and francophone literature, including Post-
structuralism and Postcoloniality: The Anxiety of Theory ( Liverpool
University Press, 2010), Decolonising the Intellectual: Politics, Cul-
ture, and Humanism at the End of the French Empire (Liverpool Uni-
versity Press, 2014), and Writing after Postcolonialism: Francophone
North African Literature in Transition (Bloomsbury, 2017).
viii Contributors
Joanna Hodge, MA, D. Phil., is currently Professor of Philosophy (Aes-
thetics, Critique, History) at Manchester Metropolitan University,
UK. She worked for her first degree and completed her doctorate at
the University of Oxford, UK, with a dissertation ‘Martin Heidegger’s
account of truth: a study of Sein und Zeit.’ She has two well-received
monographs, Heidegger and Ethics (London: Routledge Taylor and
Francis, 1995) and Derrida on Time (London: Routledge Taylor and
Francis, 2007), and is currently working on a third, Political On-
tology: Reading Jean-Luc Nancy. She is currently also working on
refinements in feminist ontologies, on film, philosophy, and spectral-
ity, and more generally on commitments to innovative conceptions
of materiality, thus returning to an interest from her post-graduate
days. Her areas of interest are feminist aesthetics, phenomenology,
and critical materialisms.
Laurent Milesi is Tenured Professor of English at Shanghai Jiao Tong
University and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Cardiff Univer-
sity. He has written extensively on Joyce and modernism, twentieth-
century poetry, postmodernism, and poststructuralism, especially
Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous, several of whose works he has
also translated. His edited collection James Joyce and the Difference
of Language was published by Cambridge University Press in 2003.
He is one of the general editors of the ‘Critical Perspectives on Theory,
Culture and Politics’ book series at Rowman & Littlefield Interna-
tional, where Credo Credit Crisis: Speculations on Faith and Money,
co-edited with Christopher John Müller and Aidan Tynan, appeared
in 2017. With Arleen Ionescu, he serves as joint Editor in Chief for the
international journal Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies
and Linguistics. He is currently completing a monograph on Jacques
Derrida and the ethics of writing.
Martin Parker is Professor of Organization Studies at the School of
Management, University of Bristol, UK. He writes about culture, the-
ory, and alternative forms of organising. Some of his recent books are
Daniel Defoe and the Bank of England: The Dark Arts of Projectors
(with Valerie Hamilton, Zero Books, 2016) and Shut Down the Busi-
ness School (Pluto Press, 2018).
Nicholas Royle is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He
is the author of many works, including Telepathy and Literature:
Essays on the Reading Mind (1991), After Derrida (1995), Decon-
structions: A User’s Guide (2000, editor), The Uncanny (2003),
Jacques Derrida (2003), In Memory of Jacques Derrida (2009),
Veering: A Theory of Literature (2011), An Introduction to Lit-
erature, Criticism and Theory (Fifth edition, 2016, with Andrew
Bennett), and Hélène Cixous: Dreamer, Realist, Analyst, Writing
Contributors ix
(2020). He has also published two novels, Quilt (2010) and An En-
glish Guide to Birdwatching (2017). He is co-editor of the Oxford
Literary Review.
Judith Still is Professor of French and Critical Theory at the Univer-
sity of Nottingham. She is the author of Justice and Difference
in the Works of Rousseau (1993), Feminine Economies: Think-
ing about the Market in the Enlightenment and the Late Twen-
tieth Century (1997), Derrida and Hospitality (2010, Gapper
Prize winner 2011), Enlightenment Hospitality (2011), and Der-
rida and Other Animals: the Boundaries of the Human (2015).
She is the editor of Men’s Bodies (2003) and co-editor, with M.
Worton, of Intertextuality (1990) and Textuality and Sexuality
(1993); with D. Knight, of Women and Representation (1995) and
Theory-tinged Criticism (2009); with S. Ribeiro de Oliveira, of
Brazilian Feminisms (1999); with Atack et al., of Women, Genre
and Circumstance (2012). She is on the editorial board of French
Studies, Nottingham French Studies, and the Journal of Romance
Studies. She is President of the Society for French Studies and a
Fellow of the British Academy.
Naomi Waltham-Smith is Associate Professor in the Centre for Interdis-
ciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. Engaging with
questions of sound and listening in recent French thought, especially
deconstruction, her work appears in various edited collections and in
journals including Boundary 2, CR: The New Centennial Review,
Diacritics, Parrhesia, Journal of Music Theory, Music Analysis, and
Music Theory Spectrum. She is the author of Music and Belonging
Between Revolution and Restoration (Oxford UP, 2017), and her sec-
ond book, The Sound of Biopolitics, is forthcoming with Fordham
University Press in the Commonalities series. She is currently a fellow
at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, where she is undertaking a project,
focused on the Parisian banlieue, entitled ‘Cart-otographies: Sound-
mapping Urban Political Economies.’
Simon Morgan Wortham is Professor of Critical Humanities at Kings-
ton University. His books include Hope: the Politics of Optimism
( London: Bloomsbury, 2019), Resistance and Psychoanalysis: Im-
possible Divisions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017),
Modern Thought in Pain: Philosophy, Politics, Psychoanalysis (Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), The Poetics of Sleep: From
Aristotle to Nancy (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), and The Derrida
Dictionary (London: Continuum, 2010). He is currently working
on a joint-authored book on The Leap: Hopes of the Political, with
Emily Apter, Etienne Balibar, Jacques Lezra, and Catherine Malabou,
due to appear with Fordham University Press.
