Our inheritance was left to us without a testament—or is it the other way around?

Mosaic, an award-winning interdisciplinary critical journal, is hosting professor Rebecca Comay as a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer on October 27-28.

Professor Comay will pursue a kind of thought experiment in her lecture: turning on its head the notion that there is a deficit of “testamentary protocol” for a revolutionary modernity. She will consider how the “treasure” of testimony is passed on to future generations through a “thicket of imperatives, injunctions, promises, exhortations, incitements, excitations” with which the dead speak to us. Using the second thesis from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” as a guide, this talk will explore some of the manifestations of testamentary excess.

What: Public lecture: “Our inheritance was left to us without a testament—or is it the other way around?”
Who: Distinguished Visiting Lecturer Rebecca Comay
When: Thursday, Oct. 27, 2016, at 7:30 p.m.
Where: Robert B. Schultz Lecture Theatre, St. John’s College, Fort Garry campus
Note: An open seminar will be held on Oct. 28 from 2:30-4:30 p.m. in the Institute for the Humanities Boardroom, Rm 409 Tier. Students and faculty are welcome to attend and to bring questions for discussion.

Rebecca Comay // Photo: European Graduate School

About Rebecca Comay

Professor Comay is a world-leading scholar of comparative literature, philosophy, literary theory, and criticism. A professor of philosophy and comparative literature at the University of Toronto and professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, professor Comay is the author of Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (2011), editor of Lost in the Archives (2002), and the co-editor (with John McCumber) of Endings: Questions of Memory in Hegel and Heidegger (1999).

About Mosaic

Founded in 1967, the year of Canada’s centennial, Mosaic is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to publishing the very best critical work in literature and theory. The journal brings insights from a wide variety of disciplines to bear on literary texts, cultural climates, topical issues, divergent art forms and modes of creative activity. Mosaic combines rigorous scholarship with cutting-edge exploration of theory and literary criticism. It publishes contributions from scholars around the world and it distributes to 25 countries. In North America, Mosaic is read by subscribers in almost every state and province. It can be found in 226 of the world’s major university and college libraries.