To entitle a book on deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and rhetoric, Theory Does not Exist, may seem perverse. A glance at the table of contents would lead many a reader and perhaps many a humanities scholar to say this book is filled with nothing but “theory.” One need only look at the names mentioned or alluded to in the titles: Derrida, Foucault, Freud, Irigaray, Lacan, Sartre, and Žižek. They have become bywords for “theory,” whether as an academic specialty, an intellectual talisman, or an anathema hurled at cultural adversaries.

At the same time, however, there is another set of names in these titles: Sophocles, Socrates, Plato, the Sophists, and Cicero. These are not simply target texts. They are not the textual or literary objects to which various theories are applied to produce “readings” or “interpretations.” They are rather interlocutors and inspirations. They are where the “heritage” we sometimes call “theory” begins (insofar as it has a beginning). In a simpler, less self-aware (and hence more problematic, monologic, and oppressive) time, these ancient texts, all by Western men, designated what we called “Classics.”

Within the essays themselves, we find a variety of other names, Catullus, Juvenal, Julian of Norwich, Dogen, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Mallarmé, Camus, Kristeva, and more. And this is very much the point.