Introduction 1

1. Geneaology 1: Hegel’s Plague 21

2. Genealogy 2: The Avant-Garde at Theory’s High Tide 47

3. Theory, Science, Technology 93

4. Theory not of Literature but as Literature 117

Conclusion 141

Notes 151

Index 164

Jean-Michel Rabaté is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published books on Beckett, Bernhard, Pound, Joyce, Lacan, psychoanalysis, and literary theory. His recent books include The Ghosts of Modernity (1996), Joyce and the Politics of Egoism (2001), and Jacques Lacan and Literature (2001). He has also edited several collections of essays, including Writing the Image after Roland Barthes (1997), Jacques Lacan in America (2000), and The Cambridge Companion to Jacques Lacan (2002).