Untimely Politics.

By Samuel A. Chambers. New York: New York University Press, 2003. 224p. $45.00.

The first thing one notices about this book is that its author's name appears in brackets. Is this perhaps a disingenuous act of modesty or disavowal? Samuel Chambers never alludes to these puzzling parentheses in the text, but they are surely an invitation to its untimely reading. This, Chambers explains, is a reading that refuses to unmask the writer and instead follows the web spun by a text through its protean historical allusions and discursive relationships. It is indicative of the untimeliness he commends more generally as an exemplary approach to politics.

This is political theory in the Continental tradition. Its main influences are Heidegger, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida. It is a strength of the book—albeit a somewhat paradoxical one—that it succeeds in interpreting significant aspects of their philosophies in an accessible and rigorous manner. Chambers is helped here by a clear agenda that ties the different stages of his argument together as components of the untimely approach he commends. Untimeliness (good) versus timeliness (bad) operates as a polemical dichotomy throughout the book, and Chambers explains how it yields opposing accounts of language, history, philosophy, agency, political theory, and politics. Having proffered a persuasive interpretation of untimeliness on each of these levels, he brings his approach to bear on a case study of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

What, then, is this distinction between timely and untimely interventions? Very broadly, one might summarize it as the difference between mainstream Anglophone approaches, with their presuppositions of methodological individualism, linear history, language as a tool, and politics as a set of problems to be solved, and Continental senses of the structural and discursive networks that situate agents, speech acts, and events within a shifting field of forces and a complex temporality. The effect of this latter approach is to render any interpretation of politics far more ambiguous and complicated than more conventional approaches acknowledge. Chambers is especially scathing here about those recent political theorists who have advocated a pragmatic turn, since he finds their problem-solving ambitions too narrow. In their concern about the timeliness of their interventions (as neither premature nor too late), they betray, he argues, an Aristotelian understanding of language (as an instrument or possession of agents: the as-if-objective [AIO] model, as he calls it) and of time (as a sequence of nows, a temporal continuum). As such, they fail to recognize the complex historicity and linguistic structures that must also be engaged with if political interventions are to be effective.

The richer and more radical approach that untimeliness implies is cashed out in an analysis of DOMA, an act passed by the 104th Congress with the aim of defining terms like marriage and spouse in a solely, and legally enforceable, heterosexist way. Chambers's main conclusion is that the act's critics remain far too circumspect when they dwell on a liberal language of rights, on the prejudices of politicians, or even on a generally homophobic malaise in society at large. In the first case, they resort to explanations based on narrowly legislative issues or individual psychology, and in the second, they are unable to explain what is politically damaging in this specific act, if all legislation emerges within a homophobic context. An untimely reading locates the act more broadly within a field of “discursive heterosexism” wherein sexual meanings are contested and reinforced. It thereby invokes an untimely agency, which “can continue the struggle against DOMA outside of legislative and judicial arenas” (p. 9). For the act's targets are not individuals or the erosion of timeless traditions, Chambers argues, but contested subject positions.

The author's application of his approach is cleverly executed here. He also manages to hit all the target areas of timely presuppositions that he had carefully challenged in the preceding chapters. There are nonetheless a number of questions that might be posed. First, the analysis of DOMA is presented as an “exemplary case” of an untimely reading (p. 155), and it is certainly well chosen as an illustration. But how far is this also a typical or representative case? The analysis is persuasive because Chambers has selected just the sort of example that will respond to his sort of reading, that is, one that concerns subjectivity, identity, and sexual practices. This is a cultural politics with an especial interest in discursive power. But if the relevant structures were, for example, more economic ones (if the act had concerned, say, poverty and structures of capital and class were at stake), would the primary focus remain discursive, and would this still look so efficacious?

Second, in order to convey his sense of untimeliness, Chambers draws on a Derridean metaphoric of ghosts and specters. This invokes the absent presences: the meanings that make untimely reappearances by haunting the present with traces of the past and anticipations of the future; the impossibility of distinguishing between the real and the unreal. The language is evocative, but I am not convinced that its metaphysical nuances necessarily serve Chambers well. There is a rich language of the invisible, the virtual, traces, lines of force, structures, relationships, that might have been more appropriate for his concern with the social and power relations that situate every utterance, act, or event. Is it not unnecessarily mystifying to refer to the gays and lesbians in DOMA's discursive dramatics as ghosts?

This relates, finally, to my suspicion that besides or beneath the spooky Derridean language, Chambers's proposals are possibly less original than he implies. Is the politics he commends more than an acknowledgment of Foucault's agonistic field of power and resistance? And might the analysis of DOMA not have been conveyed equally well within the framework of the agency-versus-structure debate? The author discusses agency in a number of places (his untimely version is again Foucauldian). He also presents his interpretation of DOMA as a “political act of structural and discursive heterosexism” (p. 8). This transcription is not intended to detract from the richness of his analysis, nor to deny that his poststructuralist emphasis on genealogy, historicity, temporality, and discourse can supplement the sometimes arid terms of the agency/structure debate. But it might have been useful to relate his untimely theory specifically to this more familiar debate within the social sciences. If nothing else, this could have served as an invitation to readers who might not normally turn to Continental theory for methodological inspiration, to learn from Chambers's splendid and, yes, timely, volume.