Introduction Becoming theoretical The contemporary discipline of art history is indelibly colored by the reception of critical theory, beginning in the 1970s. Critical theory signifies the methodologies and insights offered by modes of thinking such as psychoanalysis, deconstruction, post-colonialism, feminism, and other critiques of the political economy of capitalism. But no matter what heading or watchword you place the contents of Theory for Art History under—whether postmodernism, poststructuralism, or continental philosophy—what remains undeniable is that the work introduced in this text constitutes a rigorous, varied, and often poetic thinking about our historical and contemporary experience of the work of art. Simply put, critical theory offered art history a new set of interpretative tools and methods that reconstructed the traditional study of art and its history. Critical theory provided a conceptual framework through which it became possible to rethink the very premises of art history as a modern academic discipline. It did so by opening art historiography to an interdisciplinary array of alternative, often politically engaged, viewpoints that transformed how art history is conceived, researched, and written. In fact, critical theory instigated an intense debate within the study of the humanities as a whole. Within art history, this call for critique and self-reflexivity was not met with enthusiasm by all. In the 1970s, traditional art historical practice was threatened by the emphasis on language (critical theory is often termed “the linguistic turn”), subjectivity (individual and collective), and politics (economic, racial, gender, and sexual) that critical theorists championed. Some art historians considered these emphases to be extraneous to the core concerns of the discipline, which, in the aftermath of theory, we now view as an often masculinist, elitist, and formalist endeavor that served to fuel connoisseurship and the art market. From the 1970s through the 1990s, it was common for those opposed to critical theory to view its diverse set of practices as marking the arrival of the excluded, the marginal riffraff—supposed sophist usurpers—bent on undermining tradition and denying any claim to aesthetic beauty and/or historical truth. We can state confidently that the initial art historical reception of critical theory was split. It was characterized by a tinge of conservative hysteria as well as a clamoring for its radical, liberating alterity. Ultimately, critical theory forced art historians 2 Introduction to rethink the very foundations of the discipline. How they defined works of art. How they justified moving from the detailed formal description of a work within a specific context to larger generalizations about culture and history. In other words, how they negotiated the demands of formal analysis and sociopolitical reality. Critical theory is an interdisciplinary approach to cultural analysis that draws on philosophy, literary criticism, gender studies, sociology, anthropology, and economics. From Marxism onward, critical theory sought to engage the complex social, political, and ethical interdependence at work in any form of cultural production. As such, it intervenes and participates in a wide range of debates. The Frankfurt School, for example, is an influential version of cultural criticism articulated by Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and to a certain degree Walter Benjamin. It was Adorno and Max Horkheimer who first used the term “critical theory” to describe their method in Dialectic of the Enlightenment (1947, first English translation 1973). Their work challenged orthodox Marxist thought by developing innovative critiques of Western capitalist culture by engaging rather than dismissing modernist literature, visual art, and music. But our term “critical theory” no longer refers only to this Frankfurt School methodology. It now covers a wide range of approaches such as queer studies, critical race theory, semiotics, affect theory, and others. Nonetheless, critical theory remains linked to articulating the politics inherent in any cultural production. It has also changed the very idea of being a critic or historian in that one no longer studies only literature or art without also becoming versed in a variety of theoretical perspectives on those subjects. What enabled critical theory to broaden out from the Frankfurt School approach was the “linguistic turn” that structuralism and then post-structuralism enact. Structuralism is the analysis of the underlying linguistic structures of human behavior and society. It reads all aspects of social and political life through a linguistic lens, thereby attempting to expose the systems that attempt to structure (organize, control, contain) human life. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, the literary critic Roland Barthes, and the philosopher Michel Foucault all discovered problematics, methods, and solutions by extending the linguistic work undertaken by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in the early twentieth century. Saussure’s emphasis on language as a “system” that structures and orders the level of individual speech has proven remarkably insightful and useful for the interpretation of culture in all forms. Structuralism argues that language as such is a homogeneous system that is actualized following rules for specific languages. Structuralist thinkers move beyond the human subject as a site of agency, autonomy, and authority to the underlying system and its rules for actualization. In doing so, structuralism exposes a “symbolic” realm between the real and the imaginary in which a hidden yet ever-present subterranean set of rules comes to light as it encounters new ideas, images, and desires. Introduction 3 The first generation of structuralist thinkers provided innumerable insights and truly ingenious interpretations of human societies, psychology, contemporary mythology, and capitalist ideology. However, the next generation of primarily French thinkers sought to foreground how and why any structural system cannot be closed or complete. This generation of post-structuralist philosophers insists that we acknowledge and map the structures that restrict, stifle, and suffocate life by creating new lines of escape that touch an outside, by identifying that on which the structure depends but cannot include within itself (the unemployed poor in capitalist societies, nonsense in the production of meaning or sense). Post-structuralist thought identifies precisely how and why desire, nonsense, and marginalized groups expose the arbitrary limitations of any structure that purports to construct order, hierarchy, and definitive meaning. This is done in part by reaffirming chance, anarchic play, the limitations of human intentionality, and the vital role nonsense plays in the construction of sense and meaning. Whereas structuralist thought sought immutable universal rules to order all particular utterances, post-structuralist thought follows the movement of the particular (the material, the concrete, the idiosyncratic) to show how it appropriates and reinscribes (changes through repetition and difference) the virtual totality of the universal structure itself. Post-structuralism is nothing other than the attempt to articulate a theoretical practice that situates itself in the threshold between the universal and the particular. What makes it so compelling is that this attempt itself manifests itself in a specific historical and cultural context: post-World War II France. One of the most important living philosophers Alain Badiou wagers that postwar French philosophy is an event of thought on par with classical Greek thought (Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and others) and Enlightenment German philosophy (Kant, Hegel, Schiller, and even later Nietzsche). He argues that between Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential masterpiece Being and Nothingness (1943) and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? (1991) “the moment of French philosophy develops.”1 He claims that postwar French philosophy “constitutes a new moment of philosophical creativity, both particular and universal” because it “develops new relations to existence, to thought, to action, and to the movement of forms.”2 If nothing else, postwar French philosophy— including both structuralism and post-structuralism—gives the concept of “critical theory” a broad array of methods and approaches to conceptualize the relation between thought and life, knowledge and representation, culture and politics. For many art historians beginning in the late 1960s, post-structuralist critical theory was transgressive, exciting, challenging, and vital. It allowed for new concepts to be created, for new statements to be made about cultural history, and for new objects to become visible as art historical subject matter. Collectively, these insights come to construct what is called the “new art history” and visual culture studies. Both of which were constructed by rethinking art 4 Introduction history along these four lines: discourse, subjectivity, critique of institutions of art, and philosophy of history. Discourse is a set of statements that defines what can be said and known in a particular historical period or in any collective symbolic system. It is the structure into which specific, individual utterances are received and rendered comprehensible. When we study the discourse of a particular field, we realize that discursive formations and statements are not enunciated by individual subjects as much as discourse is an inter-subjective phenomenon governed by tacit and invisible sets of rules. But within, any discourse patterns emerge. The regularity of certain statements and subject positions is enacted at the level of language through phrases like “it is said” or “one says.” These phrases reveal how discourse preexists each of us as individual subjects. Moreover, they help explain how and why discourse situates and compels us to speak in certain ways. Although we are not the “authors” of discursive statements, these statements expose the very rules of the game, enabling us to discern them and ultimately to change them. Critical theory encourages the analysis of discourse rather than individual statements because it is discourse that perpetuates socio-political complicity and ignorance. Interpreting discourse means to trace lines of argument; to uncover archival structures that uphold the statements being made in the present; and to draw attention to aporias (logical gaps), silences, or absences within the discourse itself. It is within these aporias that a given discourse reveals not its “naturalness,” necessity, or truth but rather its artifice, its symbolic value, its complicity with extra-discursive institutional and political powers. Hence, thinking and analyzing discourse forces an art historian beyond the specific “art” object in question. The specific object is not an artwork in and of itself. Rather it becomes an artwork discursively, that is, through the effects of language, subjects, and institutions. In The Archeology of Knowledge (1969), Michel Foucault voiced these new types of questions: “How have my objects of knowledge and the questions that I address to them been produced?” Or, to rephrase another of Foucault’s famous questions, we must ask “What is an artist?”3 What types of figures, with what specific roles to play, with what specific gender and sexual identities, are termed “artists” within a particular historical, cultural, political discourse? This line of questioning contradicts the assumption of a putatively universal, timeless definition of that curious subject the “artist.” Critical theory, therefore, challenges humanist notions of subjectivity by foregrounding how the subject is created as an effect (a variation) on discourse rather than as a cause. In other words, how the subject’s fiction of autonomy and self results from an unconscious absence or void (psychoanalysis). Subjectivity is thus conceived as something contingent, relational, and performed rather than as autonomous, essential, or given (ahistorical). Moreover, subjectivity is produced and regulated through institutions and other apparatuses of social and political power. Thus, subjectivity is always constituted in a relation to power; it is always already inter-subjective (a complex relation between self and other). For instance, shifting our focus to the role of museums and dismantling Introduction 5 that institution’s claim to objectivity and neutrality exposed a racist history of exhibitionary practices that abetted art history’s Eurocentric and masculinist rhetorical language and canon of artists. Theory focused much attention on the rhetorical language of art history, what Donald Preziosi calls “the art of art history.”4 It made us attentive to our own historical and contemporary discourse, notably the invention of art history as a humanist and later quasi-scientific academic discipline. This is not to say that Giorgio Vasari’s Renaissance Lives (1550) created art history. Quite the contrary. It is more accurate to state that critical theory assisted in dismantling the myths about the discipline’s origins. The discipline’s history was not a progressive, dialectical development of ideas as much as a terrain wherein contentious approaches and assumptions about art and its history coexist and continue to haunt the art historical present.5 Art historians such as Heinrich Wölfflin, Aby Warburg, Alois Riegl, Erwin Panofsky, and others all played roles in initiating an art historical discourse that, often despite themselves, remains richer for being contradictory, haunted, unending, and consigned to an open future. The pressing question of methodology came to the foreground in the 1980s and 1990s. Examining art historiography allowed for a detailed investigation of how European prewar (1920s–1940s) art historians addressed “the fundamental methodological issue” of art history: “the way a single object or group of objects may be made to speak, to tell a story within a larger historical or philosophical picture.”6 How an art historian makes “the mute material object speak” is the methodological and theoretical wager that has produced some remarkable art historical concepts such as Riegl’s Kunstwollen or Panofsky’s “iconology.” Both attempts move from the study of form and style of particular works of art to larger questions of cultural meaning. Within art history itself, we can trace a desire to address works of art scientifically (Kunstwissenschaft, meaning the scientific study of art) and even structurally (the desire of both Panofsky’s iconology and Hans Sedlmayer’s Strukturanalyze, structural analysis). The issue at stake is how to justify moving from precise ekphrasis (detailed verbal descriptions of artworks) to more far-reaching assertions about entire historical periods, worldviews, or, more problematically, a supposed underlying cultural cognitive structure that determines meaning in advance of any particular encounter. Such a justification is an essential part of the discourse and methodology of art history both historically and in its current form. Moreover, the turn to critical theory instigated a feverish examination of the implicit philosophy of history that animated each art historian’s influential methodology. As Preziosi explains in the brilliant introduction to The Art of Art History: Art history is one of the interrelated institutions and professions whose overall function has been to fabricate a historical past that could be placed under systematic observation for use in the present … From its beginnings, 6 Introduction and in concert with its allied professions, art history worked to make the past synoptically visible so that it might function in and upon the present; so that the present might be seen as the demonstrable product of a particular past; and so that the past so staged might be framed as an object of historical desire: figured as that from which a modern citizen might desire descent.7 Examining the underlining philosophical assumptions and the structural constraints of the history being composed makes evident the limitations of formalist, dialectical, and psychological models of stylistic development, artistic influence, and “great works.” This attention to the very discourse and philosophy of art history itself has helped correct disciplinary biases, myopias, and conceits. One result is the idea that there is no such thing as art history; instead, there is only a multiplicity of histories being written. Art history has become a proper name that encompasses a multiplicity of methods, strategies, and aims. One could say that critical theory changed everything and yet it never actually “arrived.” It never “arrived” because in many ways, it has always been immanent within art history itself. Critical theory is not external to art history. It is not a second-order discourse of mastery and meaning; it does not transcend art history as a mode of aesthetic and historical knowledge. Rather, the relation between the two is not one of transcendence but one of immanence. Because of their shared genealogy in aesthetics, critical theory and art history are siblings. From this perspective, the “reception” of critical theory in art history in the 1970s begins to look more like the parable of the prodigal son than any kind of foreign intrusion. Ideally, what theory provides art history is an ethical suspension, a critical reflexivity that returns unannounced to interrupt and estrange the normative practices of art history often by devising new relations between art and politics. Even though critical theory was undoubtedly a primary discursive event for art history beginning in the 1970s that transformation has now been stabilized or even neutralized. Theoretical readings abound in all fields and sub-fields, in all historical periods. Some of these readings are innovative and insightful. But some are quite reductive, giving tiresome readings of artworks utilizing a very limited knowledge of a given theorist or theoretical concept. We could say that critical theory itself has become institutionalized within art history. The existence of this book is proof of that reality, let alone the existence of theory/methodology courses or entire approaches like visual culture studies. However, herein lies the danger. Is critical theory merely a historical phase of art history—an interpretative fashion existing for two decades beginning in the 1970s? Or does its presence at the very heart of the discipline not require us to think another relation to it? Critical theory is not a script to be learned and performed. Instead, it is an event that although dated nevertheless keeps producing effects into the future. If critical theory is a specific historical and perhaps cultural moment, then has it passed? Certainly not. It is a historical moment and a mode of thought. Introduction 7 Recalling Badiou’s argument above, we do not speak of ancient Greek philosophy and German Enlightenment thought as passed or passé. That would be absurd and suggests an acute degree of historical and discursive ignorance. Historians and philosophers are never concerned with what has passed or putatively finished. The best ones narrow their eyes at such talk of endings. Instead, they inquire into how and why ideas, images, and discourses survive through repetition and difference. What they attend to is how they are transmitted. It is how the virtual totality of the symbolic undergoes real changes as it is actualized in specific, historical moments that we must address. So critical theory is neither a historical symptom nor a fad. It is a mode of thought. One of the most creative, vital, and decisive about art and its histories. It helps us grasp the ontology, ethics, and values of art. It is aesthetic thought at work within history. Thus, theory is not the study of the past as much as it is a mode of thinking committed to the “power of the future,” as Deleuze reminds us time and again. This “power of the future” expresses how a mode of thinking ensures that any discourse cannot close itself off from an outside: an open, unscripted, aleatory future. To reduce and to restrict a discourse—what can be said and what is visible from a particular framework—is an assertion of power. A power aimed at reducing a multiplicity of viewpoints, voices, and vital possibilities to a single authority. If we understand critical theory as an event, then we will come to grasp how and why its “power of the future” is actualized only to the degree that it touches an outside of discourse thereby challenging hegemonic power by opening it to newness and unforeseen possibilities. For instance, the questions and method that Immanuel Kant puts into play in the eighteenth century are not merely Enlightenment artifacts but questions now addressed to twenty-first-century readers. These questions resonate anew as each subsequent generation reads them. Kant asks us these basic questions: “What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope for?”8 Each question enacts an area of philosophy itself: epistemology (knowledge), ethics, and aesthetics. It has always fascinated me that the study of art and its affects is inseparable from hope, certainly a “power of the future.” Hence, we must reject any position that argues that critical theory is a historical artifact or is somehow finished. The work that remains is to construct new relations between critical theory and art history. There is no end of theory, meaning both an aim (a goal) and a conclusion (a closing or death). As the art historian Georges Didi-Huberman puts it, “Art historians who glibly dismiss ‘theory’ are actually dismissing, or rather expressing their dread of, the strange fact that questions can outlive answers.”9 All talk of “ends” should be replaced by conceiving thought as a movement that surveys a terrain both known and unknown. If art history has always been a theoretical enterprise—and it has been—then there is no end of theory, no end of art history. In fact, there are no “ends” at all. While it is true that our initial reception of theory made it a decisive weapon of critique, a means to deconstruct the discipline of art history, no one would 8 Introduction argue that the discipline has been fully critiqued and is now “correct.” So what are we to make of theory in the aftermath of that critique? It is shortsighted to continually reduce theory to a form of critique without acknowledging that critique is meaningless unless it can affirm an art historical future to come. This is the primary lesson of Deleuze’s work: “Critique, impotencies, ends, modesties … none of that is as valuable as a single real affirmation.”10 Beyond critique, theory affirms what happens when we encounter a work of art.11 I could put it this way: initially, theory taught us how to read and interpret artworks and their relation to the world, but now, it must affirm the complexity of what occurs when one encounters a work of art within the world. An encounter entails more than meaning; it is open and relational, aesthetic and epistemic, ontological and ethical, temporal and historical at once. So let us remain with theory, let us survey the immanent terrain between art history and philosophy, in order to discover new innovative lines of thought capable of affirming and motivating the study of art, its histories, and its politics. Bearing in mind that each theoretical return changes the entirety of the discourse itself. This means that the discourse of art history is reiterated differently, time and again. Each return generates difference. It is the return that opens us to events: events change everything. For this reason, among others, critical theory remains something that we are still researching. As Marquard Smith has written, “to research, which by definition is ‘to look for with care’, is an act not only of interpreting the world but changing it.” And, perhaps more pressing for our concerns today, he demands that we recognize how and why “each historical moment has its own épistéme of re-search.”12 He hyphenates re-search to emphasize this complicated structure of repetition and difference. So let us “look for with care” and re-search art theory with a fidelity to the specificity of our own historical moment, our own épistéme. To do so will require us to construct new lines of flight, new becomings, new forms of content and expression. Re-search conceived in these terms affirms two aspects of critical theory. First, it would force us to confront “the capacity of every discipline to produce its own illusions and to hide behind its own peculiar smokescreen.”13 Notably those that have arisen in the aftermath of the theoretical turn such as a return to naïve formalism, vapid diaristic art, or lifeless iterations of conceptual art strategies. Second, re-searching critical theory means not merely explicating now canonical theoretical texts. It is not a faithful return to some point of origin; rather, it is a return that discovers new problems, that learns how to create theoretical concepts of our own. Re-search is an intensive apprenticeship in how to think critically and creatively about art, history, politics, and temporality. Every scholar knows that to re-search requires opening oneself to unforeseen encounters. Listen closely to Deleuze here: When you work, you are necessarily in absolute solitude … But it is an extremely populous solitude. Populated not with dreams, phantasms or plans, but with encounters … You encounter people (and sometimes Introduction 9 without knowing them or ever having seen them) but also movements, ideas, events, entities … To encounter is to find, to capture, to steal, but there is no method for finding other than a long preparation.14 Simply put, to re-search theory means learning how to live up to the challenge of an encounter like this. It is learning how to lose oneself in an immanent becoming. Becoming a theorist of art means to become what the ancient Greeks called a theoros, a special envoy who lights out for new terrain and experiences, one who devises new ways to transmit events.15 Becoming a theorist means to think and to discern the immanence that “complicates the most diverse things and persons in the self-same tapestry, at the same time that each thing, each person, explicates the whole.”16 Theory was only ever an open work, comprised of individuated practices with multiple durations—that is, modes of thought with multiple returns, betrayals, and aleatory encounters.17 It only works when it establishes resonances among the various disciplines that it traverses and reworks. Isn’t this precisely what we are still witnessing as our knowledge of theory increases alongside our ability to rethink the philosophy and methodology of art history? New angles, new points of emphasis, new ways forward, new returns. Here are but a few new actualizations of critical theory: affect theory, the intense interest in Foucault’s late concept of “aesthetic life,” Edward Said’s work on “late style,” Walter Benjamin’s ideas on semblance and readability rather than endless chattering about aura, or Jacques Derrida’s thoughts on the ethical promise of photography. These are still part of our ongoing debate about discourse and method, but they are also ways to step outside of the “prison-house of language” and a narrow conception of lived experience framed by human intentionality (phenomenology).18 To step outside of language and to be beside ourselves when we encounter an artwork requires us to radically rethink “what is given in experience.” Doing so will force us to create art historical concepts—aesthetic and epistemic, sensible and intelligible concepts—with and alongside life as such. Such work is being done on several fronts, both within and beyond art history. Isabelle Stengers, the philosopher of science, maps us “a route completely different from that offered by critical theory, social constructivism, or deconstruction” by skillfully constructing a singular conception of interpretation.19 Stengers defines “interpretation” as a movement beyond ourselves. It “directs our attention not to the human mind, but, so to speak, back to the world” because “it is the world itself that is ‘open to interpretation’, not because of the weakness of our limited mind but because of the world’s own activities.”20 To interpret in this manner, art historians would have to experiment with temporal rather than spatial notions of subject and object. It would force us to face the full panoply of experiential, aesthetic, and temporal forces that shape and render vital the forms we interpret. Perhaps, we will have to substitute creativity for critical thinking, especially if that would allow us to construct an art history of events? All of this is groundwork for art historical theory to come. 10 Introduction Lastly, to work and create art history anew, critical theory cannot be understood as tradition. It is not a dull, oppressive weight to be genuflected before, learned, and passed down for the sake of itself. On the contrary, it is creative-critical thought: imaginative, interpretative, subversive, constructive, vital. Let us call re-searching critical theory an archival practice of the highest order. An archival practice whose only test is to transmit events. It is a practice defined along these lines: [Theory] does not have the weight of tradition … [rather] it reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification … it is from within these rules that we speak, since it is that which gives to what we say … its modes of appearance … [It], then, involves a privileged region: at once close to us and different from our present existence, it is the border of time that surrounds our presence, which overhangs it … it is that which, outside ourselves, delimits us.21 In this light theory is a mode for thinking and creating alongside an artwork. It puts us in the middle of things—in medias res—rather than in a position of transcendent authority. Theory sides with the funk of life, the viscera and the sinew because only there amid bodies (the very materiality of art) is an event of such intensity possible, one that would render art history truly engaged, contemplative, metaphysical even, as it encounters images, objects, situations, and thought. Theory for Art History aims to present multiple ways that we might come to understand art history. What follows will require some effort on the part of the reader, not so much in reading the chapters as in following up on what is presented here. My goal in writing this book is to provide an opening to critical theory, one that dispels some of the aura of complexity and helps to explain what is often termed “jargon.” If the book you are reading does not motivate you to read critically and creatively the work by these theorist themselves, then it has failed in its very raison d’être. As readers move beyond the introductions to the primary texts, it is my hope that they will develop a more complex, thorough, and intensive understanding of the necessity of critical theory for the study of art history. With that said, this book has been written with three audiences in mind. First, it is for undergraduate students in courses on the theory and methodology of art history. Second, this book is for graduate students seeking an introduction to critical theory that will prepare them to engage the primary sources and enter into larger, ongoing discussions. Finally, Theory for Art History is intended for teachers and scholars who teach contemporary theoretical perspectives and who are themselves interested in how these perspectives inflect art historical practice. The present volume will serve as an excellent supplement to any course on critical theory or art historical methodology. Introduction 11 This text focuses on bodies of thought that arose primarily in postwar Europe, but what we have come to term critical theory developed in conversation with the philosophic and aesthetic thought that preceded it. The importance of Plato, Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and G. W. H. Hegel for art history is indisputable. Their absence from this volume in no way suggests their unimportance, which is asserted nevertheless through the many references to their work that follows. The parameters of this text are such that the thinkers termed predecessors are nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century figures without whose work critical theory as such would not exist. Each of the four theoretical predecessors included in this volume—Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ferdinand Saussure—serves as a hinge to the earlier thinkers not included in the volume. In addition, these four thinkers initiate the major discourses that drove late-twentieth-century critical theory (e.g., Marxism, psychoanalysis, and semiotics). Indeed, their problematics, concepts, and discourses continue to set the agenda for critical theory today. Whether one embraces them or not, one must have a basic understanding of their contributions in order to enter the conversation between critical theory and art history. This book is designed to be a useful resource. Most readers will not read it from cover to cover but will go to it for insight into a particular theorist and/or theory. The four predecessors introduced in the opening section are presented in alphabetical order by last name, as are the chapters in the main section. Every chapter on an individual thinker has three main parts: a list of Key Concepts, the main body of the text, and a “Further Reading” section. At the beginning of each chapter is a short list of Key Concepts that I have identified as particularly important for art historians to understand. These concepts are essential to each theorist’s entire body of thought. Taken together they comprise a glossary of theoretical terms. These concepts are listed in the order of their appearance in the main text. Key Concepts are highlighted where they are most thoroughly explained. Hence, a reader interested in one particular concept can quickly scan the chapter for the discussion of it. The main body of each chapter begins with a brief biographical sketch. In the discussion that follows the names of other thinkers included in the volume are cross-referenced (indicated by the bold font). Each chapter also offers a discussion of some possible implications for art history that a particular theorist’s work offers. Of course, it is impossible to indicate all of the possible implications for art history, but foregrounding some of the ways a certain thinker’s work has already been used is given in order to posit how it may be used otherwise in the future. Each entry concludes with a “Further Reading” section which includes two subsections. First, a “By” subsection lists those primary texts essential for a more complete understanding of a theorist. Second, an “About” subsection lists secondary sources about the theorist as well as art historical texts that include a significant discussion of a theorist or apply a theorist’s ideas in a singular manner. These bibliographies, of course, are not exhaustive. They are 12 Introduction points of entry to help the reader further encounter each thinker. Any omissions of quality work about any of these thinkers is my fault alone. I have relied primarily on the texts that have helped me most. Undoubtedly, there are many others that can assist readers in comprehending this challenging work. In the main body of each chapter, when a particular text by a theorist is mentioned the date given in parenthesis indicates the year that the work was originally published. Lastly, this book owes a debt to Theory for Religious Studies by William E. Deal and Timothy K. Beal. Their text was the exemplar of the theory4 series conceived and published by Routledge. I have used their book as a model for my own, retaining the format and structure of the chapters, even as I have written new chapters on theorists not addressed by Deal and Beal. Their work deserves to be acknowledged and appreciated. I know I certainly do. Endnotes 1 Alain Badiou, The Adventure of French Philosophy, translated by Bruno Bosteels, London and New York: Verso, 2012, lii. 2 Badiou, The Adventure of French Philosophy, lii, lvi. 3 Note Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977. 4 Donald Preziosi, “That Obscure Object of Desire: The Art of Art History” in Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science, New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1989, 21–53 and The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009. 5 This is a key point of Georges Didi-Huberman’s remarkable Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, translated by John Goodman, University Park: The Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 2005. 6 Jas Elsner, “From Empirical Evidence to the Big Picture: Some Reflections on Riegl’s Concept of Kunstwollen,” Critical Inquiry 32:4 (Summer 2006): 753. 7 Preziosi, The Art of Art History, 7, 11. 8 Marquard Smith, “Theses on the Philosophy of History: The Work of Research in the Age of Digital Searchability and Distributability,” Journal of Visual Culture 12:3 (December 2013): 375–403. On these questions from Kant see note 41 on p. 400. 9 Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images, 33. 10 Badiou, “Gilles Deleuze” in Pocket Pantheon: Figures in Postwar Philosophy, translated by David Macey, London and New York: Verso, 2009, 116. 11 See especially Simon O’Sullivan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation, London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 12 Smith, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 376, 377. See also What Is Research in the Visual Arts: Obsession, Archive, Encounter? edited by Marquard Smith and Michael Ann Holly, New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2008. See also Theory After ‘Theory’, edited by Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge, London and New York: Routledge, 2011; and Theory Aside, edited by Jason Potts and Daniel Stout, Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2014. 13 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994, 6. Introduction 13 14 Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London and New York: Continuum, 2006, 5. I have been working on these issues elsewhere; see Emerling, “Transmissibility: A Mode of Artistic Research” in The Dark Precursor: Deleuze and Artistic Research, edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2017, 437–445. 15 Theory (theōria) in Western cultural discourse from Plato to Hannah Arendt designates not a discourse of mastery but rather a praxis, an interruption, an exception to the rule, a caesura that allows for a rethinking. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle insists that theōria is the “highest human praxis.” (See Book 10 of Nicomachean Ethics, translated by Sarah Broadie and Christopher Rowe, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002, 241–258.) Thus, and Martin Heidegger strove to make this clear, there is no distinction between theory and practice: theory is (re-)thinking; it is an activity that constructs an interruption of any reified, unexamined conception of an entity’s very being. Rethinking is the praxis that allows art history and philosophy to assert their relation and their distinct “lines of flight.” 16 Deleuze, “Zones of Immanence” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Anne Hodges and Mike Taormina, New York: Semiotext(e), 2007, 268. 17 On the concept of an “open work,” see Umberto Eco, The Open Work, translated by Anna Cancogni, Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989. 18 The phrase “the prison-house of language” comes from Frederic Jameson’s The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972. 19 Bruno Latour, “What Is Given in Experience: A Review of Isabelle Stengers’s Penser avec Whitehead,” Boundary 2 32:1 (Spring 2005): 226. An abridged version of Latour’s review appears as the preface to the English translation of Stengers’s Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, translated by Michael Chase, Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2011. 20 Latour, “What Is Given in Experience,” 226. 21 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A. M. Sheridan-Smith, New York: Pantheon, 1972, 130.