Precarious Figures, Rigorous Styles

Andrew Cole's The Birth of Theory points to Plotinus's dialectics of identity and difference as the foundation of Hegelianism and the source of modern critical theory. Of crucial importance is not only theory as a form of medievalism but also theory as a dialectics of figure and concept: theory is "thinking other." This article examines Cole's thesis alongside Eve Sedgwick's diagnosis of the hermeneutics of suspicion and paranoid reading; both critics seek to undo New Historicism's hold on literary studies within the historical rise of neoliberalism. Crucially, Cole's deployment of feeling in dialectics - of thinking as also "feeling other" - is rooted in Sedgwickian and Deleuzian affect theories. Cole's forceful critique of post-Deleuzianism, especially its rejection of dialectics, may be addressed through Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's study of precarity in the Anthropocene, the age of post-sustainability. Precarity, as an unpredictable encounter, is precisely the figural leap required in dialectical interpretation. Theory, informed by precarity, is the dialectical imagination as attentive doing that leads to dialectical surprises and utopian world-making.