The steady unsteadiness of theory: on D.N. Rodowick's Elegy for Theory

Abstract

The following is a review of D.N. Rodowick's Elegy for Theory, one that attempts to understand Rodowick's genealogical approach to the significantly varied relations that have pertained between philosophy, theory, and science since the eighteenth century with respect to the critique of rational first principles that one finds in the work of philosophers like Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell. Following a close reading of Elegy for Theory, which is performed as an explication of its method, I turn to a discussion of the potential relevance of Rodowick's discussion for the larger institutional and disciplinary questions about the increasingly vexed relation of film theory and film philosophy in the discipline of film studies.

Keywords::

• film theory
• film philosophy
• genealogy
• epistemology
• contingency
• D.N. Rodowick
• Richard Rorty

Notes

^1. A very useful reminder of how deconstruction played out in the academy, internationally, is to be found in Benoit Peeters' (2012) recent biography of Jacques Derrida.

^2. I owe this particular conception to Ernesto Laclau (1996), especially as he articulates the logic of equivalential relations in his hugely important essay, ‘Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter for Politics?’ For Laclau, the equivalential relation is at the heart of his conception of the potentially emancipatory conception of hegemony within the framework of a populist politics. While I am utterly sympathetic with Laclau's conception of hegemony, I intend here only to describe the equivalential relation as a way of understanding the work of theory or philosophy itself as a form of creative expression, whichever term we should decide to use.