Theory is the endless problematizing of our beliefs and practices, the bottomless suspicion that our current beliefs and practices are unworthy servants of the future, unfaithful to the open-endedness of the future, the anxiety that the present tends to ensconce itself in its presence and to close off what is coming. If there were no theory, there would be no future, just the endless repetition of the same. Resistance to theory is reactionary. To resist theory is to resist the future in order to cling to the present. Theory pries the present open to the future, making possible the coming of the impossible, in the name not of doubt but of faith, not of contempt but of love. To understand the future of theory would require understanding the future of love.

John D. Caputo, “After Jacques Derrida Comes the Future”

Excerpt from transcript:

Both remembering and forgetting…it’s important to know that both things will happen. The morally vigilant thing to do is at the point at which you think you’re forgetting, to remind yourself, and at the point at which you are remembering to make yourself forget. That’s what I call the ambivalence of global memory, and it’s a very complex state of being. If we were completely traumatised and tied to the trauma we couldn’t get anywhere, but if we did not have some taste of the trauma as something that was alive, not something that was archival, then we would not be able to really ethically act in a way to avoid it.

This course introduces students to contemporary literary theory and cultural studies; it covers major developments in such fields as Marxism, psychoanalysis, existentialism and phenomenology, feminism, deconstruction, postmodernism, queer studies, African-American and post-colonial studies, linguistics, structuralism and semiotics, surrealism and situationism. We will explore the relationship of theory to contemporary literature and culture, through a series of close readings of key theoretical texts, as well as examples taken from film, literature, music and other cultural forms.

While most of the course material will likely be a review for me, I look forward to having a regular outlet for theoretical discussion. I just hope I have Professor Boon as my tutorial leader.