Nowhere is the tendency to convert theory into a fashion accessory more pronounced than in France. (Though of course the tendency to accessorize opinion is extremely widespread.)

Of course I recognize that from a certain optic, opinion and identity are always and already indistinguishable – and that our relation to cognition is not less problematic than our relationship with our wardrobe. The French, with their cultural predisposition to centralize everything, from government to epistemology, are particularly astute theorists of both the ineluctability and the impossibility of such multi-level signifiers, not to mention the contradictions in our social imaginary of ‘signification’. The ‘fait social total’ of Marcel Mauss is at once a phantasm as impossible as Lacan’s ‘juissance de l’autre’, and an inescapable existential product of any signifier’s ‘Geworfenheit’. This is the sort of contradictory dynamic tension that French thinkers use to achieve a flow state. The conceptual equivalent of the destructive interference used in noise-cancelling headphones. I have no theoretical beef with either prong of the logical forked stick, but I do have some reservations, more pragmatic than puritanical, about the use of theory as costume (and vice versa).