Direct Flights and Stop-Overs

I. Transatlantic Exchanges

As we have seen, ¹ French theory is literally on the move—it is still being exported, transported, and transmuted. We’ve heard various versions of how, and why, French theory is inevitably misunderstood, just as American theory gets jumbled and scrambled up during its own trip across the Atlantic. Much of what “passes” and does not “pass” as French cultural theory (some “travels” well while other parts do not) can be described by a number of spatializing metaphors that turn toward what at first glance might seem a purely spatial phenomenon —”howx passes from f to a” or “how y passes from a to f.” But it is actually a temporal-spatial movement that can be seen and understood in terms of “transit.” In other words, what I’m interested in exploring here comprises a certain “chronotopics” of passage, a chronotopics that looks not only at the contexts of production and consumption of French thinking in America (understood as the larger “Americas”), or American thinking in France, but also, at the time and spaces of the passages used to go from one context to another—the transport or transit that must necessarily occur in time and in space in order for x to get to a from f or for y to get to f from a. I wish first to read this chronotopics of passage in part with the aid of Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk, an excellent model for turning space into sight and sight into space, before turning both space and sight into visible time.