The Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism

This year’s Theory Centre conference — Raising a Mirror to the University: Theory and the Canadian Institution — will be hosted on April 23 - April 24, 2026.

This year’s conference will also importantly coincide with the 40th anniversary of the Theory Centre here at Western.

The schedule will be available shortly.

😩 Low energy. 🌘 Short days. 😭 Big feelings.
If you're not okay, you're not alone. 💜

➡️ Talk to someone, any time, for FREE. We’re here 24/7. Start now at imwell.helpwhereyouare.com or ☎️ call 1-833-398-9040 anytime.

Join us for tomorrow's Theory Session presented by Dr. Antonio Calcagno, Tuesday, March 24th at 3 pm in StvH 3165.
The title of the talk is "The Immanence of Sources of Possible Change: Michel Henry and Karl Marx."
Abstract:
How can a radical phenomenology of immanence and auto-affection like that of Michel Henry respond to the exigencies and challenges of the current polycrisis, and some would say catastrophes, of the environment, growing nationalism and authoritarianism, war, genocide, migration, and economic upheaval? Undoubtedly, our planet finds itself at a perilous time in its history and it would seem that a response requires concrete, collective, and externalised action in the world to address what we can in the short time that we have. I argue in this paper that a reading of Henry’s philosophy that frames his work largely within his conceptualisation of autoaffection, immanence, and life runs the risk of absolutising the foregoing key fundamental structures of Henry’s philosophy, ultimately ignoring the fact that, for Henry, life itself not only continues to impress itself on us but it also expresses itself in and through us and the real world, and it is this dialectical relationship of expression and impression that allows Henry to engage the world as well as feel and suffer it, too. To this end, I argue that by rereading Henry’s extensive work on Karl Marx that we find possible sources that enable us to respond to the present-day challenges of the world. History and the economy are transcendental modes of life that colour the very autoaffection of life that impresses itself on the self, thereby allowing it to express various responses to the world in which it finds itself, both individually and collectively. In Henry, we uncover sources of praxis, of work, that can move us toward Marx’s demand that we change history and the world.

The smiling faces of those having completed the February comps. Congratulations!

You are invited to a public lecture by PhD candidate Emily Dickson, on March 6, 1 pm in UC 1105 and on Zoom. Please email Leanne Trask for the Zoom link.

Re-forming Formalism: A New Approach argues for a renewed significance of formalism, as method and theory, for the study of the visual arts. Bringing together art historical and aesthetic theoretical insights both past and present, this lecture aims to establish the basis for such an approach, developing a view towards what formalism can and should be, grounded in an account of what forms are and how forms act. Through a combination of historical inquiry and contemporary theorizing, Re-forming Formalism attempts to address the serious charges formalism has faced historically—particularly by prominent critical theorists in the second half of the twentieth century, including by Terry Eagleton and Jacques Derrida—while at the same time seeking to move past these.

Beyond the questions posed to art history, this lecture considers more generally: what is the meaning, and what are the stakes, of framing analyses formally? What affordances do formalist analyses provide us—that is, what possibilities are made available by formalists on the basis of and in coordination with what limits—and how do we use these affordances to serve as bases of a formalist ethics? This lecture builds upon the larger dissertation research, where investigations of Immanuel Kant, Aloïs Riegl, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Simmel, György Lukács, Henri Foçillon, and Karl Marx, among others, are mobilized in order to argue that the forms of art are not closed off from the world but remain, in certain key respects, open to the forms of life. Formalism, on this account, does not merely articulate these interstices; it also draws us closer to—it puts us “in a bind with,” writes Judith Butler—the greater life of forms of which we are a part. Arguing that it is no longer justifiable to uphold without question those assumptions that have led to its ongoing rejection and neglect, this lecture positions formalism as a valuable analytic and theoretical tool, and as a meaningful ethical and evaluative framework, in and for the present.

This lecture addresses urgent questions about truth and power in our post-truth era. It examines gaps in both Arendt's and Foucault's accounts, then characterizes politics as a struggle for justice and freedom based on a struggle for power. It argues that all three concepts—justice, freedom, and power—are normative concepts, such that politics itself is a social domain of truth. The lecture concludes that post-truth politics fundamentally opposes the empowered correlation between justice and freedom that is political truth. It is despicable because it is politically false.

In this presentation, Associate Professor Melissa Adler will describe the ways that her interdisciplinary orientation to information studies, social theory, and gender and sexuality studies inform her historical methods. She will talk about how she put theorists including Derrida, Wynter, and Benjamin to use in her research on Thomas Jefferson’s library, archival, and museum practices to understand the paradoxes associated with access to information. She will also show how she formulated a theory of surveillance and datafication based on Jefferson’s land surveys, ledgers, encryption techniques, and information architectures by expanding upon theories of documentation, racial capitalism, empire, and labour.

January 27, 2026
4 - 5:30 PM EST
StvH 3165

Congratulations Alexandra S. Lepine. It was a long (and sometimes winding) road but you did it! You can download Alex's dissertation "Reluctant Writers, Sanguine Comrades: The Cultural Production of
the Communist Party of Canada, 1920-1935" here:

uwo.scholaris.ca

TODAY at 11:00AM doctoral candidate Thomas Wormald gives a Public Lecture on "Inside, Outside, and Otherwise than Catherine Malabou's Thought: An Epigenesis of Plasticity."

This public lecture will provide a precis of the ‘internal epigenesis’ of plasticity—an account of plasticity as it develops within Malabou’s own work—and an ‘external epigenesis’ that seeks to provide a historical backdrop of sources and materials that influenced Hegel’s appeal to the idea of ‘plasticity’ in his own work which Malabou has identified as such a monumental transformation in the history of modern thought and its opening of possibilities for a rethinking of, but not exclusive to, philosophy, subjectivity, nature, ethics, politics, gender, aesthetics, and Being itself. It is, as we argue in our research, a revolution in the ontological economy of Western thought.