ABSTRACT
The temptation in relating history and critical theory, especially via a manifesto, is to participate in a cultural and intellectual tendency that has been pronounced in the West since Romanticism: radically to question everything established – to be outrageous, radically transgressive, sublimely transcendent, even terroristic – and then leave any putting together of the pieces to unspecified others.1 This seemingly irrepressible apocalyptic urge follows in its own exorbitant way the logic of the antidote: one fights a dubious constellation of forces by taking an extract of them and turning it back on the criticised object. The difficulty comes when one believes that the proper dosage is itself an overwhelming or excessive one, that the answer to a perceived excess (of staid research, of piling up facts to no end, of complacent style, of contextualising to the point of objectifying and neutralising the other) is to overdose on the antidote (Theory, Experience, Discourse, [Bio]Power-Everywhere, Violence-Everywhere, Experimental Writing, Disjunction, Sublimity, Shock Therapy).2 The difficulty is that one extreme is not an alternative to another. At best, it obscures as much as it illuminates. At worst, it is locked in the same repetitive cycle as its opposite number, threatens to become all too predictable, and offers little promise of effective change.
