This special anniversary issue of differences considers how critical theory has changed in the twenty years since the journal’s inception. differences first appeared in 1989 in the midst of heated debates about the relative merits of post-structural theories of difference and the politics of racial and sexual diversity. In the ensuing years, the journal has established itself as a critical forum where the problematic of differences is explored in texts ranging from the literary and the visual to the political and social. In this issue, contributors bring their own critical convictions, personal passions, and sometimes unexpected investments to bear on questions of what counts as theory today and what kinds of work theory still does. Distinguished contributors from a variety of disciplines and political positions look at the contemporary theoretical landscape. One contributor argues that the modern university needs to move away from its emphasis on output and to acknowledge instead the pleasures of teaching, learning, and thinking. Another suggests that the confluence of physiology and phantasy in psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s work offers a new way to think about critical theories of embodiment. Yet another contributor racializes “whiteness,†asking whether a male-authored work that contains no black characters of consequence is nevertheless fair game for a black feminist reading.

Emily Apter, "Women's Time" in Theory; Simon Critchley, What Is the Institutional Form for Thinking?; Ann duCille, The Short Happy Life of Black Feminist Theory; Avital Ronell , Have I Been Destroyed? Answering to Authority and the Politics of the Father; Joan Copjec, The Fable of the Stork and Other False Sexual Theories; Miglena Nikolchina, Between Irony and Revolution: Sexual Difference and the Case of Aufhebung; Elizabeth Grosz, The Practice of Feminist Theory; Ranjana Khanna, Unbelonging: In Motion; Elizabeth Castelli, What's the Difference? Religion and the Question of Theory; Susan Gubar, The Graduate Student I Was, the Graduate Courses I Teach, and What Theory's Got to Do with It; Lee Edelman, I'm Not There: The Absence of Theory; Jacques Khalip, Still Here: The Remains of Difference; Gayle Salamon, Here Are the Dogs: Poverty in Theory; Elizabeth Cowie, Thinking Differently; Elizabeth A. Wilson, Underbelly; Elizabeth Weed, Reading for Pleasure