On Paradox: The Claims of Theory Available to Purchase

In one of the most widely memefied moments of modern British comedy, an SS officer played by David Mitchell notices the skull on his uniform cap and asks his comrade in alarm, “Are we the baddies?” Elizabeth Anker's On Paradox stages the fallout of a similar moment across its three hundred pages. Trained and deeply immersed in the procedures of what came to be known in the academic humanities as Theory, Anker realized some years ago that those procedures, or at least some recursions of them, far from leading to the sunny uplands of social justice, were actually obstructing concrete progress. Most of her book is a diagnosis of how Theory betrayed the Left: its chapters cover the general theory of modernity (1), the theory of human rights (2 and 3), the development of exclusion as a political category (4), and classroom practice (5). The sixth and final chapter...