Gregory Marks

Nietzsche and Blanchot are philosophers using literary devices sure. Nietzsche also wrote a lot of poetry poetry and Blanchot some very fine novels which primed their writing for it. The word "theory" signals an allegiance to academic formalism and the "critical theory" industry

Perhaps Laruelle's "philofiction" is a more interesting way of conceptualising these experiments in thought (though I doubt it). I especially dislike this attempt to add experimental artists and philosophers to this very narrow canon. The Stendhal notion is risible.

Beckett makes a huge number of references to Kant and Geulincx, Joyce to Bruno and Cusanus—does that me they are now de facto "theory fiction", part of this cynical post-CCRU publishing category aimed at those with an anglophone education in continental philosophy?

I tend to agree that the category of theory-fiction places fiction in the service of the academic theory-mill. Yet I also wonder what is salvageable of its original (or imagined) intent: to sever what matters in theory from its high style into the world of pulp modernism.

The earliest conceptions of theory-fiction move in the opposite direction to their present iterations: not theory in fictive packaging, but fiction informing theory. Kafka, Burroughs, and Ballard precede and shape the thought of Deleuze and Baudrillard.

Yes, CCRU & imitators have inadvertently returned precedence to the theoretical/academic element. But this is all the more reason to look elsewhere in the intersection of theory and fiction, for works that demolish that distinction and the idols of theory with it.