After Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of Theory

Mima Vulovic is a sessional lecturer at York University who also works
at the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General.

After Poststructuralism is an important contribution to the annals of
critical theory—a major effort to chronicle the emergence,
dissemination, and institutionalization of theoretical ideas beyond the
conventional historical approach. Following a descriptive rather than
prescriptive model, the work is meta-theoretical in that it not only
theorizes theory, but also recognizes how theory itself profoundly
alters the process of writing about it.

The volume’s 13 essays are organized into four key sections (or, to
be more precise, “tropes”). “Genealogies” (anchored in
Foucault’s influential concept) sets the stage for an attempt to
define the boundaries of theory beyond the linear accounts of
“history.” Drawing on the dialogical nature of the arts,
“Performativities” goes beyond the limitations of genealogy and
addresses the discursive nature of theory and its history.
“Physiologies” is concerned with genotextual rather than
phenotextual arguments, with the subjective readings of theory
facilitated by discourse of psychoanalysis and biology. Finally,
“Technologies” deals with the intersection of theories of technology
and technology of theories. The essays examine a wide range of seminal
authors such as Plato, Hegel, Rousseau, Marx, Heidegger, Bakhtin, De
Man, Sartre, Foucault, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Bataille, Kristeva, Lakan,
Derrida, and Žižek.

Tilottama Rajan is a professor of English and director of the Centre
for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western
Ontario. Michael J. O’Driscoll is an assistant professor of English at
the University of Alberta. The book’s contributors—Ian Balfour,
Stanley Corngold, Peter Dews, Rodolphe Gasché, Mani Haghighi, Victor
Li, Arkady Plotnitsky, Linda Bradley Salomon, Anthony Wall, Brian Wall,
and Orrin N.C. Wang—are leading scholars in the field of theory.

ted in the development of intellectual ideas and unorthodox ways of
contextualizing them.