Jul/Aug 2007

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Last year I was leading a student through the dark wood of postmodern theory. A week or two into the term, he observed that postmodernism felt like a rarefied form of courtly love. Whatever they call it—the Transcendental Signified, the Other, God—theorists know the Good they long for remains forever out of reach. Derrida. Lyotard. Levinas. They're all panting for la belle dame sans merci who bats her green eyes and toys with them, scornfully hiding behind her veil. That's as good a description of postmodernism as any, and it turns out that the similarity is no accident. Theorists are the frustrated courtly lovers of philosophy because their theories are (sorry, theory is) cobbled from fragments of medieval poetry, literature, and theology.

Medieval influences on theory are widely ignored. They shouldn't be. In The Premodern Condition, Bruce Holsinger, professor of English and music at the University of Virginia and author of Music, Body and Desire in Medieval Culture, examines the influence of medieval studies on a circle of French avant garde intellectuals, several of whom founded the influential journal of theory, Tel Quel, in 1960. By "medieval studies" he means both historical investigations, particularly those of Marc Bloch and others of the Annales school, and theorists' own study of medieval texts. Far from looking to the Middle Ages with quaint Victorian nostalgia, theorists have plundered medieval texts for fundamental philosophical concepts and language, theories of textual meaning, models of inquiry. Theory is a critique of modernity from the perspective of modernity's Other, the benighted Age of Faith. Renaissance Humanists and Enlightened philosophes reached back to pagan antiquity for weapons to ...