Una brújula para un mundo en movimiento (sobre los géneros y las genealogías de la teoría)

Abstract

The essay points to the crucial importance of theory in a world in which “ontological puzzlement” about our experience of modernity makes a new turn with the emergence of digital media, with their radical questioning of notions like materiality, referentiality, authorship and new registers of visuality. If cinema nowadays has a “virtual life” –as the author argued in the past– a theoretical stand is important not only for film theory –which has suffered from anti-theory stands in the last two decades–, but for the Humanities in general, and for the sake of a possible, overall understanding of the present. A genealogy of theory, as it is proposed in this essay, implies both a different notion of history and transversal gaze through theories of the image, aesthetics, literary theory and philosophy.