Theory’s essential promise is departure from whatever is merely given

Evidence

Naming and historicizing these habits, this book does depart. What comes after burning it all down, after indeterminacy and vibrant matter in the embers? Can’t ideas animate us? Should not theory risk synthesis? Endorsing mediacy against immediacy is a proscribed move—but the wager of this chapter and of this book has been that theory and aesthetic production must be impelled by their own essential and definitive promise of departure: theory moves away from mere context, speculatively moving beyond reflexive cognition, propulsively moving against the merely extant; art and literature generate more than what is already given, speculatively proposing other worlds, other words, propulsively suspending ordinary ratiocination. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 325

Categorization

• QUESTION: The jabs at poststructuralist keywords (‘indeterminacy and vibrant matter’) mark her quarrel with her putatively anti-theory predecessors — worth interrogating who exactly she is dismissing.