The Birth of Counter Theory
13
from an assistant professor in terms of research is today a serious consideration for hiring
at an entry level position, and the assistant professor must produce the same amount of
research to become an associate professor that an associate professor had to in order to
become a full professor.
6 Ironically enough, “French Criticism” seems to work much better in English for it has
proven to be more successful in the United States than in France, and “deconstruction” is
still to this day much more disseminated through the American university landscape than
it is in Europe.
7 This confusion between Philosophy and Literary Studies has been pointed out on the
philosophical front by Argentinean essayist, Juan Jose Sebreli, in his very convincing,
albeit devastating critique of Post-modern philosophy, La perdida de la razon (The Loss
o f Reason). French thinkers such as Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossovsky, Louis
Althusser, or Michel Foucault revindicated and promoted irrationality, incorporating their
interpretation of some literary texts in their inquiries; psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan
brilliantly, if a little histrionically, exposed entire theories on the subconscious based on
word-play and neologisms, hence using language in a literary manner (294). As
Philosophical discourse thrived to fuse with literature, thinkers and philosophers saw
themselves as writers, creating works which supposedly deserved the same type of
critical attention as literary texts; most of Derrida’s works are both a perfect illustration
and a direct result of this process.
8 “// n y pas de hors-textef Grammatologie (227).
9 The closest expressions to be found in French using the same type of hyphenation
would be “hors-sujet” (“Beside the point”), “hors-jeu” (“off-sides”) and “hors-la-lo?’
(“outlaw”).
10 For Sebreli, Glas is to be considered as a novel of the Nouveau Roman school—
without characters, plot nor direction—rather than a treaty of philosophy (279); more
precisely, it could be categorized as conceptual or intellectual poetic prose. This
particularly strange book presents two columns in different fonts on each page, one
dedicated to the German philosopher Hegel and the other to the French poet, novelist, and
playwright, Jean Genet; both columns start and finish in the middle of a sentence, and
their respective texts are weighted with stylistic effects of a poetic, polysemic nature,
such as metaphors, metonymies, alliterations, and word associations, rendering the task
of its translation a truly impossible feat; for instance, Hegel is compared to an eagle, for
his name, when pronounced in French, resembles the word aigle (7); similarly, the sound
“g/a” is related to spit and sperm through its association with the word “glavieaux”
(spitball) (158-9); needless to say, these alliterations which allegedly justify the author’s
discourse are not translatable into English. The long first part of La Carte Postale,
“envois,” is a truncated diary which tells of an elliptical love story presented along a freeformed meditation concerning a postcard found in an Oxford library which represents
Socrates writing under the dictation of Plato; provoked by this uncanny representation,
since Socrates is precisely “the one who does not write,” the narrator reaches some very
personal conclusions, such as for instance: “N ’encule pas Socrate qui veut” (“Not
anybody who wants to can fuck Socrates in the ass”) (Carte, 217), the referential value of
which remain to be determined, not to mention their usefulness from the point of view of
textual interpretation.
11 “Literature as well as criticism—the difference between them being delu ͥٗ