Camera Obscura (2013) - The Bachelor's Fantasy: Autoimmunity in Theory

Details

• article: The Bachelor's Fantasy: Autoimmunity in Theory
• author(s): Alexander R. Galloway
• journal: Camera Obscura (01/Jan/2013)
• issue: volume 28, issue 1 82, pages 103-123
• DOI: 10.1215/02705346-2016969
• journal ISSN: 0270-5346
• publisher: Duke University Press
• keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Analysis, Authors, Capitalism, Critical theory, Criticism and interpretation, Feminism, Fredric Jameson, Literary criticism, Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941), New York City, New York, Philosophy, Political theory, Robert Montgomery, Slavoj Žižek, Social conditions & trends, Stanley Cavell, Universal Studios, Vertigo (1958)

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Abstract

Rey Chow, in her nuanced and powerful book The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work, identifies a rise in self-referentiality across a number of domains of contemporary life. Fueled by Martin Heidegger's writings on "the world picture," Chow asserts that "understanding is now an act inseparable from the act of seeing." But this mode of seeing is not innocent; it is, to adopt Heideggerian language, a "challenging" or "enframing" of seeing, such that the quotidian processes of imagination and conceptualization evident in the human senses are instrumentalized according to specific interests and outcomes. Here, Galloway joins this conversation and realigns it slightly according to a certain technical and social landscape that one might call "viral," "contagious," "parasitical," or, even more broadly, "systemic." More specifically, she continues Chow's investigation into the self-referential nature of cultural and political theory by suggesting that the state of theory today is plagued by a form of autoimmune disorder. With reference to the work of Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere, Catherine Malabou, Susan Buck-Morss, and others, she considers the many scenes of self-reference and disavowal in contemporary theory, with an eye on how and whether this autoimmune disorder can be superseded.