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Getting off the Subject: Iconoclasm, Queer Sexuality, and the Celebrity Intellectual

1995; The MIT Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 2/3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3245788

1086-3281

Richard Burt,

Gender, Feminism, and Media

REVENGE OF THE NERD INTEl.I.lFCTUALS A fter he was released from a mental hospital in 1983 (having been put there for murdering his wife), the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser would sometimes go for walks. As Douglas Johnson relates in his introduction to Althusser's posthumously published autobiography, The Future Lasts a Long Time: In his despair he would walk the streets of northern Paris, a shabby, ageing figure, and would startle passers-by as he shouted 'Je suis le grand Althusser.' He was always in and out of hospitals. It was in one of them ... that he died of a heart attack on October 22nd, 1990. He was 72. Althusser's autobiography is the most recent in a series of major intellectual cause celebres, following quickly as it does upon posthumously written biographies of Michel Foucault and Paul de Man. Their publication (and in Althusser's case, translation into English) has coincided with the controversy over political correctness, a series of pedagogical sex scandals, the emergence of the celebrity intellectual, and the dominance of personal and autobiographical cultural criticism. This convergence raises questions about literary theorists' libidinal investments in theory, about the ways in which theory plays out in relation not only to the production of yet more theorized critical practices inside the university but to fantasies about the performance of what might be considered undertheorized intellectual practices outside it as well. At issue, I want to suggest, is how academic autonomy is exercised and regulated, and how personal, subjective, autobiographical criticism and pedagogy can be, the degree to which critical selfreflection requires embodying the critic and teacher, and if so, how. Althusser is for me a useful way into thinking about academic autonomy and autocriticism for several reasons. First, he deconstructs a number of oppositions on which academic legitimation tends to turn: between tabloid journalism and criticism; between the public intellectual and the celebrity intellectual; between fame or publicity and celebrity; between an earlier genuine public sphere and more recent corporatized simulation of it; between strong European theory and weak American domestications of it; between mere anecdotal dismissal of theory and serious engagement with it. Althusser's autobiography reveals autocriticism not to be the opposite of tabloid distortions but to be tabloid; that is, Althusser's self-criticism