The Inoperative University ... Teaching the Unteachable
Cultural Studies Salon Seminar with Dr. David L. Clark
Event Details
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Thursday, October 15, 2026
7:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Traill College
Building: Scott House
Room: 105
Can the university stand for peace? Rather than seeking an answer to that pressing question, I pursue the openness or hospitality to a contingent future for which it calls. For what is a university whose myriad practices and self-understandings can be said originate in a bare pledge, an endlessly improvised promise to others and for the sake of their flourishing? Such a petition is nothing if not risky, and that is my point. What if the ends of the university lie in forever improvised beginnings, in contingent and uninsurable claims, that resist the imperative that the university be an operable community, at once effective and productive? And if I posit that the university makes and unmakes itself at every moment it is partly because I experience the excess of attestation every day in my classrooms, where, I argue, I pledge myself to teaching the unteachable. The truth is that I do not know how to teach. But far from an impediment to education, this not-knowing is what makes teaching and learning possible in the first place.
Dr. David L. Clark is Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, where he is also an Associate Member of the Department of Health, Aging, and Society. Last year he was Dr. Terrence Hoffman Humanities Professor-in-Residence, a position in the Faculty of Engineering. He has held Visiting Professorships at several universities, including the George Whalley Visiting Professor in Romanticism at Queen’s University, and the Ruth N. Halls-Bascom Visiting Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Forty years ago, he was the Barbara Rooke Fellow in Romantic Literature at Trent University. In 2028 he will be Visiting Professor at Western’s Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism, where he will offer a graduate course on Derrida’s hospitality seminars. He has published work on a broad range of topics: from Critical Animal Studies to the late writings of Immanuel Kant, and from Jacques Derrida to William Blake, and from the surgical separation of conjoined twins to the desecration of the Napoleonic war-dead. Recent publications include essays on, respectively, Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Kant’s Toward Perpetual Peace. His talk today is drawn from a triplet of essays on the vicissitudes of teaching and learning in the contemporary public university.
Contact Info
This talk will not be recorded.