Table Of ContentTheory and the Common
from Marx to Badiou
Previous Publications
Paperspace: Style as Ideology in Joyce’s “Ulysses” (1988)
Telling the Other: The Question of Value in Modern and Postcolonial
Writing (1992)
Cinema, Theory and Political Responsibility in Contemporary Culture
(1997)
Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race (1997)
Joyce beyond Marx: History and Desire in “Ulysses” and “Finnegans
Wake” (2001)
From “Shane” to “Kill Bill”: Rethinking the Western (2006)
Theory and the Common
from Marx to Badiou
Patrick McGee
theory and the common from marx to badiou
Copyright © Patrick McGee, 2009.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-61525-0
All rights reserved.
First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the
United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth
Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of
the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan
Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998,
of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above
companies and has companies and representatives throughout the
world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United
States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-37899-9 ISBN 978-0-230-62060-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230620605
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McGee, Patrick, 1949–
Theory and the common from Marx to Badiou / Patrick McGee.
p. cm.
1. Theory (Philosophy) 2. Common sense. I. Title.
B842.M34 2009
190—dc22 2008037887
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: April 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Foreword vii
1 Theory Postmortem: Derrida 1
2 Political Sense and Sensibility: Gramsci to Bourdieu 23
3 Genealogies of Common Sense: Marx and Nietzsche 49
4 Folklores of the Future: Wilde and Lawrence 87
5 The Transcendental Ordinary: Wittgenstein to Badiou 125
Epilogue: Not a Manifesto 193
Notes 201
Index 213
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Foreword
As a work in progress, the title of this book was “The Importance of
Being Common,” with two possible subtitles: either “Theory from
the Underground” or “A Personal Journey through Theory.” These
titles suggest the book’s hybridity as a work of critical thought and
an intellectual memoir. Some readers may question the personal and
even eccentric approach to the history of theory and the thought of
common sense that this book lays out in a nonchronological order.
For myself, I must confess that theory has always been a very personal
thing. I came to it because I found answers—however provisional and
hypothetical—to questions life imposed on me without my consent.
There has never been anything neutral about my relation to theory,
which has led me to question the significance of particular interests,
including my own. I wrote this book for anyone who cares to read
about theory from the perspective of someone who is not a master.
I wrote it especially for academics and students who feel sometimes
that the whole game of academic discourse is a masquerade that hides
the one thing you really want to say. I’m not calling for an end to the
masquerade. I only want the recognition that the truth may not be the
face behind the mask but the mask behind the face.
I want to thank Evander Lomke at Continuum Press for his encour-
agement at a critical moment in the history of this project. Most of
all, I thank Palgrave Macmillan and my original editor, Farideh Koo-
hi-Kamali, for taking the risk of sending the manuscript to a reader.
Brigitte Shull, my final editor, has been extremely patient and helpful
throughout the process. I thank Enda Duffy, who was my anony-
mous reader, for the best review of a manuscript I have received in my
career. I am indebted to John Pizer for checking my paraphrases of
particular passages from German texts. My conversations with Mus-
tapha Marrouchi during the period I was writing strongly influenced
this work. I owe special thanks to Dr. David Hayes for his friendship
and guidance. I also enjoyed the strong support of my friend Tim
Paulson, my wife Joan, and my son Sean. I dedicate this book to my
students whose skepticism, wit, and independence of mind inspired
viii Foreword
me to discover my intellectual voice. To my father, I can only repeat
the last two lines of a poem by James Joyce: “O, father forsaken, /
Forgive your son!”
4
C h a p t e r 1
Theory Postmortem
Derrida
J
acques Derrida is dead. To many in the world, this man was the
greatest abuser of common sense in history. The term “deconstruc-
tion” has become synonymous with a declaration of war on what is
common in the language of each one of us. In reading and rewriting
the words of scholars, philosophers, journalists, linguists, novelists,
poets, and every kind of verbal magician, Derrida turned them on
their heads—destroyed them in the view of some, reconstructed them
in the view of others. He was a trickster constantly playing jokes on
his readers, yet the key to the joke was that you were never quite sure
that it was a joke, and if you were convinced, you were never sure if
the joke was on you. Maybe the joke was on him.
Some years ago, Derrida gave a talk at the university where I teach,
later published as Monolingualism of the Other; Or, The Prosthesis of
Origin. In that talk and subsequent work, he said that he had only one
language, but it did not belong to him.1 That remark led the way to
selective but interesting references to his history as a French-speaking
Algerian Jew. His purpose was not to proclaim himself a representative
of the third world in the manner of so many contemporaries who want
to cash in (literally) on the West’s attempt to postpone its debt to the
worlds it has robbed by robbing them again, this time of their intel-
lectuals. For these intellectuals, the lure is high salaries, tenure, and
social recognition at conferences that are parties where the cultural
elite parade across the stage before the sea of nobodies and proclaim
themselves subalterns—a term that has come to mean a nobody who is
really somebody. For the rest of us run-of-the-mill nobodies, we emu-
late our new masters by mesmerizing our students with a mysterious
