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In academia these days the pressures are great to rely heavily on derivative works.  Imperatives to publish are stronger than ever, the fates of individuals or even departments (depending on where you work) rest on outputs.  Concepts and philosophers fall in and out of fashion. The pressure to be “current” is strong—critical theorists of all stripes live and write under the tyranny of the new. In this context (whether you are working through Fanon or Spivak, Leibniz or Peirce, Heidegger or Spinoza, Butler or Marx), temptations to engage a range of derivatives but “sign” a paper with the “source” are perhaps more pressing than ever. Engagement with philosophical texts is not only fun, and thought provoking, it becomes a way to “sign” ones work, to exert authority in the field, to demonstrate gravitas. Scholars also struggle against the methodological legacy of their disciplines. Where philosophy has methodologically been intent on concept-creation, geography, on the other hand, or perhaps one strand of it, has historically been engaged in the naming and bounding of regions. In contemporary work this legacy often translates into a kind of herding together of concepts that are similar, that resonate with one another, but that are not identical objects. Critical theorists who work within the register of anthropology, sociology, or political science (to name a few others) will undoubtedly wrestle with other legacies.

But concepts matter.  They matter in their distinctions.  They make a difference, in the most literal sense that, in the act of philosophizing, in the invention, creation of a new concept, one is attempting to change sensibilities, provoke new perceptions and understandings, to make difference. This is why we must proceed with caution in attempts to make new or difficult concepts legible to a wider audience; we must be a careful not simply to appeal to a common sense understanding, lest we risk losing the very specificity of the concept in question. It is in this sense, I argue, that we cannot simply substitute a more commonly understood term for its less familiar concept. We cannot for example exchange “affect” for “emotion” (unless we want to launch a fully developed argument as to why they are equivalent) any more than we might substitute “price difference” for “surplus value.” To paraphrase Deleuze, when a philosopher employs a distinctive term or concept, it is in principle because he or she has a reason to (Deleuze, 1978).

Concepts matter in a second sense, in a full understanding of their materiality—in their creation. They emerge in an energetic field, a kind of ecology (Sharp, 2007) –the material conditions of their production and the time in which they are produced that enable them to acquire a specific power to exert influence (or sometimes, relegate them to the sidelines until a later date). This is why, for example, in his discussion of Citizen-Subject, Balibar insists (in his close reading of Descartes) that Descartes’ concept of “the subject” is that of subjectus: “the individual submitted to the ditio, to the sovereign authority of a prince, an authority expressed in his orders and itself legitimated by the Word of another Sovereign (the Lord God)” rather than “subjectum” the “subject-as-citizen” which is the more common attribution (Balibar, 1991: 36). To insist on this difference is not merely “a question of semantics” or perhaps it is rather to give to role of semantics its full material significance.  To mark the difference between subjectus and subjectum is to mark a whole host of historico-geographical struggles in the realm of ideas and in the practice of politics, for instance, the bourgeois appropriation of Descartes’ opus (no longer Descartes but a variant of Cartesianism) (see Negri, 1970).

To engage “derivative” texts, then, it is important to understand and to mark their relationship to the original text, either to make proper use of the concept or to understand the full significance of its alteration, modification, or explication in a derivative work. To engage in a kind of indiscriminate “mash-up” of varied interpretations because they “seem to make sense” or “simplify the concept for the reader” is to run several risks. At the very least it is to deny the important interpretive significance of the derivative text in its own right.

In the positive sense of derivative—as a derive, a drift of meaning—one cannot for instance cite Massumi as a “stand in” for Spinoza without erasing at the same time the significance and originality of Massumi’s inflected reading, what he is producing that is new in his reading of Spinoza, and the differentiated nature of the struggle that Spinoza engaged in (e.g. Massumi, 2002). If Massumi’s Spinoza is what grabs you, do that scholar the honor of allowing his interpretation to stand on its own. To do otherwise is to deny the site of struggle for both scholars (in the fullness of their offerings and in the recognition of the silences or limitations of their texts). It is a collapse of meaning that can bring the use of philosophy perilously close to a kind of theology, as if the meaning were unchanged and true, handed down from one scholar to another, with the originary text acting with a kind of unassailable authority and original “truth.”

In the negative sense of derivative, as a text lacking in originality, at times the more intuitively graspable meaning provided by the derivative work is precisely so because it appeals to an already available common sense—that is, it erases the very distinction that the original scholar intended in the introduction of a new concept. True thought, in the sense of working through something that might be difficult to grasp, is replaced by the act of recognition. Worse still, in reliance on derivative texts, one can end up with a kind of impossible mash-up. Many philosophers are susceptible to varied and antagonistic readings: Spinoza, for instance, has been appropriated with equal measure by Marxists, German romanticists, deep ecologists, liberals, and even right wing libertarians.

Critical theorists are an intelligent lot—my critique here is not of our collective capacity, but of what I see as the increasing temptation towards indiscriminate use of derivative texts. It is an acknowledgement of the increasing pressures and seductions that structure our work environment. But we are capable of more than this, to contribute to a scholarship that extends well beyond our own fields, to speak with precision back to philosophy in our own voice.

So what is to be done?  Not everyone has the luxury of time to delve deeply into original scholarships (much less in original languages in which they may be written, as often as not, not in English).  At the least, we might have the courage to name and appreciate the derivative text that we are drawing from—its originality, its significance; to be careful of the terminology we use; and to resist submitting to the insecurities that demand we “back cite” to the scholar that derivative text draws upon. Alternatively, we might think to work collectively on a particular philosopher—with different members of a collective exploring different interpretive works along with the original text, in a discussion of their context, their points of concurrence and disagreement.

My point here is not to insist on some kind of overly obsessive precision for its own sake. It is to appreciate the measure of a distance taken, between the original concept in its context and its derivation in subsequent times and places: a most historico-geographical reading. It is important then to understand each text in its relation to “the unevenness, the heterogeneity, the irreducible divergence of what is better described as a "conjuncture” (Montag, 1998: 10) in order to appreciate, apprehend, and work through the conflicts that traverse it.  It is in these very gaps and fissures that the work becomes alive, that we move from the citation practices of theology to philosophizing, to work in, through, and beyond the text, reading and writing “in a materialist way” (Montag, 1998; Macherey, 1998). In an emerging scholarship that espouses a “new materialism,” we should expect nothing less. 

References

Balibar E (1991) Citizen Subject. In: Cadava E, Connor P, and Nancy JL (eds) Who Comes After the Subject? New York and London: Routledge, pp. 33-57

Deleuze G (1978) Gilles Deleuze, Lecture transcripts on Spinoza’s concept of affect. Available at: http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=14&groupe=Spinoza&langue=2/  http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=11&groupe=Spinoza&langue=1 (accessed November 24, 2015)

Macherey P (1998) Soutenance. In:  Montag W (ed) Stolze T (trans) Pierre Macherey: In a Materialist Way. Selected Essays. London and New York: Verso, pp. 17-27

Massumi B (2002) Parables for the Virtual. Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham and London: Duke University Press

Montag W (1998) Introduction. In: Montag W (ed) Stolze T (trans) Pierre Macherey: In a Materialist Way. Selected Essays. London and New York: Verso, pp. 3-14

Negri A (1970) Political Descartes Mandarini M and Toscano (trans) London and New York: Verso

Sharp H (2007) The force of ideas Political Theory 35(6):732-755