Untying Things Together

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In 1905, Freud published his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the book that established the core psychoanalytic thesis that sexuality is central to formations of the unconscious. Inverting Freud's title, Eric Santner here takes up the sexuality of theory-or, more exactly, its sex-appeal, the modes of enjoyment to be found in the kinds of critical thinking that, since the 1960s, have laid claim to that ancient word, "theory." Untying Things Together is both an intellectual history of major theoretical paradigms and a call for their reexamination and renewal in light of the "postcritical turn" away from them. Santner organizes this intellectual history autobiographically as the story of his own encounters and involvements with key theorists and theoretical projects. He thereby shows that to reduce these theoretical projects to so many exercises in a "hermeneutics of suspicion" (a move associated with certain "post-critique" authors) is to miss what is most vital, most alive, indeed life-changing about them. It is to miss the "gay science" they elaborate. Santner's explorations yield new ways of accounting for the "sublime object" of theory, the libidinal charge it carries for those susceptible to its charms"--