En Vrac

Student reading habits are dictated by both enthusiastic recommendations and class requirements. Today, many students will first encounter – as I did – the foundational texts of continental philosophy in easily digestible short-form versions: a teaser from Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1976), choice cuts from Jean-François Lyotard’s 1979 The Postmodern Condition, a smattering of Gilles Deleuze’s writing on cinema and perhaps the whole of his and Felix Guattari’s ‘Treatise on Nomadology’, first published in English by Semiotext(e) in 1986. (Even these gobbets are seductive, offering a frisson of Gallic cool delivered with a tempting lack of precision.) A long established practice, providing excerpts in place of sometimes intimidatingly long books remains a quick solution to a necessary overview, though I would argue that many students today will have already encountered – perhaps unwittingly – theory’s dispersed legacy in unexpectedly various ways.