I have read and do read literary theory, though it’s not my field of expertise, and at a conscious level at least Foucault was not an inspiration for TC&TC. But it’s true of course that literary theory overlaps with, informs and is informed by, other theoretical traditions, so it’s hardly as if they are hermetically sealed off from each other. Theory can be a source of ideas in a critical as well as a celebratory way – TC&TC is part-structured, for those who care, by a critical gnawing on Agamben, Un Lun Dun contains a teasing of Althusser, and so on. In Embassytown, various philosophical writings on language (particularly those of IA Richards, Paul Ricoeur and Tran Duc Thao) and sort-of-theology (Benjamin) were important.
In literary theory terms, the writers who loom largest in my head are probably Jameson, Eagleton and Macheray. (There are plenty of others, of course, but they may be the troika core.) In broader terms, those to whose theoretical work I’m particularly drawn, though obviously not always without friendly disagreement, would include Marx and the classical Marxist tradition, Fanon, Pashukanis, Federici, Koskenniemi, Cesaire, Sedgewick, Tafuri, Sara Ahmed, and plenty of others. The biological philosophies of Lewontin and Rose have been inspiring and illuminating. Of newer writers I’m excited about the work of Robert Knox, Reecia Orzeck. I could go on – Jordana Rosenberg, Alberto Toscano, Mark Bould, et many al.
In philosophy I enjoy reading Reza Negarestani, but I have to stress that I don’t tend to evaluate it as philosophy so much as as strange philosophical fiction. I’ve been on the peripheries, largely because of shared aesthetic fascinations, with some writers associated with the ‘Speculative Realist’ movement in philosophy, of which the work I find most compelling is Ray Brassier’s, though I also find it extraordinarily difficult, even more so than I do most ontology. Much of the work currently produced in that current, particularly where it attempts to apply some of the tools and approaches to the analysis of stuff I know a little more about, like literature and law, I find deeply unconvincing. But not uninteresting, and, again, the pleasure of riffing off scholarship in fiction is that one can do so without claiming to agree – or even understand - necessarily.
In literary theory terms, the writers who loom largest in my head are probably Jameson, Eagleton and Macheray. (There are plenty of others, of course, but they may be the troika core.) In broader terms, those to whose theoretical work I’m particularly drawn, though obviously not always without friendly disagreement, would include Marx and the classical Marxist tradition, Fanon, Pashukanis, Federici, Koskenniemi, Cesaire, Sedgewick, Tafuri, Sara Ahmed, and plenty of others. The biological philosophies of Lewontin and Rose have been inspiring and illuminating. Of newer writers I’m excited about the work of Robert Knox, Reecia Orzeck. I could go on – Jordana Rosenberg, Alberto Toscano, Mark Bould, et many al.
In philosophy I enjoy reading Reza Negarestani, but I have to stress that I don’t tend to evaluate it as philosophy so much as as strange philosophical fiction. I’ve been on the peripheries, largely because of shared aesthetic fascinations, with some writers associated with the ‘Speculative Realist’ movement in philosophy, of which the work I find most compelling is Ray Brassier’s, though I also find it extraordinarily difficult, even more so than I do most ontology. Much of the work currently produced in that current, particularly where it attempts to apply some of the tools and approaches to the analysis of stuff I know a little more about, like literature and law, I find deeply unconvincing. But not uninteresting, and, again, the pleasure of riffing off scholarship in fiction is that one can do so without claiming to agree – or even understand - necessarily.