Fashioning Critical Theory

A discussion of Jacques Derrida's deconstructive practice, which seeks to identify "the supplement" to any origin story or set of claims in a text. What are the characteristics of this readerly practice? What motivates Derrida to make these kind of readerly, critical interventions? And where does deconstructive practice bring us as thinkers, critics, and readers - and perhaps even writers? It is to an anti-authoritarian place, a place oriented toward a future of multiplicity and refusal of origin stories, purity politics, and imperial principles of ethics and morality.

What is Fashioning Critical Theory?

Podcasted conversation on critical and literary theory, drawing on a range of theorists from Europe, the United States, Caribbean, and Latin America. Our title is drawn from Audre Lorde's essay "Poetry Is Not a Luxury," where she writes that poetry fashions a language where words do not yet exist. How does theory make words and world new, attuned, and embedded within inventive and inventing lived-experience, tradition, and cultural production?