This book addresses some general issues in contemporary
thought through the medium of dialogic exchanges with other
critics. This situated notion of critical theory tends to reverse the
more conventional format in works that approximate the status of
a treatise on method or a theoretical system. Conceptual problems
are here approached through-or at least introduced by-specific
arguments with significant contemporary theorists. And what is
often relegated to footnotes is here embodied and interrogated in
the principal text. These procedures attest to my attempt to leave
certain traces of production evident in my own writing. The larger
incentive in this approach is to enact within my own "textual" practice an open dialectical interaction both between concrete interlocutors and between thematic unification and those challenges to it
that may prove to be provocative in carrying critical reflection
further. My conviction is that the critique of totalization
that has been so prominent in recent thought should not devolve
into an indiscriminate reliance on techniques of fragmentation,
decentering, and associative "play." It should be conjoined with a
critical and self-critical attempt to elicit the actual and desirable
articulations among aspects of culture and society-articulations
open to forces that contest and displace but do not simply eliminate
them. One such articulation joins three important intellectual tendencies: Marxism, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism. The elaboration of connections among this trio of critical theories has been a
primary preoccupation of intellectual life in the modern context. I
try to put forth some reasons why this has been the case-and in a
transformed fashion should continue to be. I also indicate ways in
which this preoccupation may be inflected in directions more pertinent for a critical and self-critical historiography.