LGS Blog
Theory and the Disappearing Future
Posted: Sunday 22 Jan 2012
Tom Cohen (Professor in Literary, Cultural and Media Studies, SUNY at Albany) will give a lecture on Tuesday 21st February, 6-8pm, at the Swedenborg Hall, Bloomsbury Way, London, on ‘Theory and the Disappearing Future 1: Oil and the End of Philosophy’. There will also be a seminar the following day, Wednesday 22nd February, 4pm, in EM330, Penrhyn Road Campus, Kingston University, on the book, Theory the Disappearing Future, co-authored with J. Hillis Miller and Claire Colebrook, which is published by Routledge. This volume includes both a transcript and facsimile print of a previously unpublished text by de Man of his handwritten notes for a lecture on Walter Benjamin.
Challenging and relevant, the volume presents de Man’s work as a critical resource for dealing with the most important questions of the twenty-first century and argues for the place of theory within it. The humanities are flooded with crises of globalism, capitalism and terrorism, contemporary narratives of financial collapse, viral annihilation, species extinction, environmental disaster and terrorist destruction. Cohen, Colebrook and Miller draw out the implications of these crises and their narratives and, reflecting on this work by de Man, explore the limits of political thinking, of historical retrieval and the ethics of archives and cultural memory.
This event is free and all are welcome.
