Vico or Spinoza: An Other Way of Looking at Theory, circa 1983

Vico or Spinoza: An Other Way of Looking at Theory, circa 1983

This is an anachronistic attempt to revisit “Theory in the 1980s” by casting light from an Other angle, namely, two anti-Cartesian critical tours de force—Vichian criticism and Spinozist critique—heuristically corresponding to Edward W. Said's “secular criticism” and Paul de Man's “deconstructive critique,” respectively. Said's article “Secular Criticism” and de Man's Messenger Lectures, both appearing in 1983, are closely analyzed in light of topics, patent or latent, including “epistemology of error”; “truth-as-trope and the-True-as-occurrence”; “the literal and figural body”; “humanized and dehumanized conatus”; “Humanistic and dehumanized philology”; “secularism and worldliness”; “oppositional criticism and immanent critique”; and “Ethics-as-ethology.” The essay's end is emphatically not to “map”— let alone “define”—the entire discursive formation tentatively called “Theory in the 1980s,” but, rather, to essayistically open up the field of speculation beyond the spatio-temporal confines of individual oppositions or conflicts that informed those particular discourses. In the end, a possibility of reading the conjunction “or” in the title, “Vico or Spinoza,” as otherwise than oppositional, will be suggested in the form of a post-scriptum supplement.