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The critique of “grand narrative” by writers like Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault and Lacan has itself come severely under fire since the 1980s (Lyotard, 1984). Mari Ruti’s new book Distillations: Theory, Ethics, Affect is an intervention in one of the recent versions of this debate, particularly as it concerns the aftermath of Lacanian psychoanalysis. As the author of almost a dozen books in this area, Ruti is well suited to the task, and indeed Distillations functions as something of a restatement of some of her previous work. Ruti’s approach throughout the book is to present two opposing views and then to navigate between them to a third position. Given the confines of this review, I’ve chosen to focus on Ruti’s discussion of ethics and of love.
The general orientation of the theorists discussed by Ruti might be characterized as that of a certain postmodern romanticism, by which I mean involving an opposition to the current hegemonic order that takes as a virtue the embrace of a theoretical position not fully intelligible to that order – “épater la bourgeoisie” indeed. Ruti quotes Brown’s (2005) claim that “[a]s a meaning-making enterprise, theory depicts a world that does not quite exist, that is not quite the world we inhabit. But this is theory’s incomparable value, not its failure” (p. 80). I speak of a “current hegemonic order” because it is indeed vague what exactly the theorists Ruti is considering are opposing. It can be said, however, that they all oppose heteronormativity of every stripe and color, racism and sexism of all kinds, as well as capitalism and neo-liberalism.
Ruti’s cast of characters is well known to theorists in critical theory, a field that Ruti describes as consisting of “a medley of Lacanian psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, affect theory, queer theory, and deconstructive feminism” (p. 1). As this may be unfamiliar territory for some, let me introduce the characters briefly before setting out some of the main controversies Ruti is intere