Cusset presents the American intellectual style as one that wants to *get things done*, one that wants to use ideas as *tools* for other purposes.
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This reminds me of Pragmatism the Philosophy, which (I agree with Cusset has a focus on action, most notoriously with the Pragmatist position that "truth is what works."
> the third phenomenon is the US pragmatic take on theory as something someone does, or manipulates, or acts with, as an object in the hands of a subject [...]
> Theory was an almost authorless series of concepts and arguments [...]
> In the US, as an instrument to help reach a certain goal, theory became, respectively, a method of reading (deconstruction), a praise of difference (micropolitics) [etc.] [...] Not that such active and deliberate takes are wrong per se, but they all are derived from a very institutional (university) and somehow cultural (North American) necessity to do things with words, to tend towards consequences, and to select the most relevant word formations one could find to that end [...]