The Future of Theory

The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory January 1, 2003

Source

Taylor & Lambert - The Future of Theory - JCRT 4.2

Victor Taylor
York College of Pennsylvania

Gregg Lambert
Syracuse University

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There are four legends concerning Prometheus:

''According to the first he was clamped to a rock in the Caucasus for betraying the secrets of the gods to men, and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was perpetually renewed.

''According to the second Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.

''According to the third his treachery was forgotten in the course of thousands of years, forgotten by the gods, the eagles, forgotten by himself.

''According to the fourth everyone grew weary of the meaningless affair.' The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily.

''There remained the inexplicable mass of rock.' The legend tried to explain the inexplicable.' As it came out of the substratum of truth it had in turn to end in the inexplicable.

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'Franz Kafka, Prometheus

The future of theory, similar to its past, will be Promethean. The legendary, heretical writings since 1967 ('Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences") or 1916 (Course in General Linguistics) or ca 330 B.C.E. ("Encomium of Helen") forming the corpus of theory remain the "inexplicable mass" giving rise to a desire to explain, to refute, to show, and to occasionally hide the contours of its own "image of thought."

> Let nobody suppose that one could possibly avoid such crippling by some artifice of education. On this earth one pays dearly for every kind of _mastery_ . . . For having a specialty one pays by also being the victim of this specialty. But you would have it otherwise--cheaper and fairer and above all more comfortable--isn't that right, my dear contemporaries. Well then, but in that case you also immediately get something else: instead of the craftsman and master, the "man of letters," the dexterous, "polydexterous" man of letters who, to be sure, lacks the hunched back--not counting the posture he assumes before you, being the salesman of the spirit and the "carrier" of culture--the man of letters who really _is_ nothing but "represents" almost everything, playing and "substituting" for the expert, and taking it upon himself in all modesty to get himself paid, honored, and celebrated in place of the expert.

'Victor Taylor and Gregg Lambert

Acknowledgements:

This first special issue of the JCRT made it to the present (and future) through the very difficult work and generosity of the following people and institutions: Carl A. Raschke (senior editor), Clayton Crockett (managing editor), Neal Magee (technical editor), Jeff Robbins (associate editor), and Kerin Ogg (editorial assistant). York College of Pennsylvania partially funded the editorial work of this special issue through a Research and Publications grant.

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We are also tremendously grateful to our contributors for engaging the future of theory: John D. Caputo (Villanova University), Gregory Flaxman (UNC, Chapel Hill), Stephen Nichols (Johns Hopkins University), Vincent Pecora (UCLA), Jean-Michel Rabat' (University of Pennsylvania), Avital Ronell (New York University), Craig Saper (University of Central Florida), and Jeffrey Williams (University of Missouri-Columbia).

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Notes

Victor Taylor teaches in comparative literature and humanities at York College of Pennsylvania. His books include Para/Inquiry: Postmodern Religion and Culture (Routledge 2000), The Encyclopedia of Postmodernism (Routledge 2001), Postmodernism: Critical Concepts (Routledge 1998), and The Religious Pray, The Profane Swear (Pen Mark Press, 2002). He is executive editor of the JCRT and currently completing work on two volumes, Intimacy and Mourning: Myth and the Postmodern Imagination and Cultural/Rhetorical Theory.

Gregg Lambert is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies of English and Textual Studies at Syracuse University. He is the author of The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (Continuum, 2002), Report to the Academy (Davies, 2001), The Return of the Baroque: Art, Culture, and Theory in the Modern Age (Continuum, forthcoming), and co-editor (with Ian Buchanan) of Deleuze and Space (Edinburgh UP, forthcoming). His essays on theory and continental philosophy have appeared in many international journals and collected editions, including essays on aliens in contemporary art and on psychoanalysis and religion in earlier issues of The Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory (see archive).

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