Why Theory is the coming-of-age story of Ryan before he became the leading voice of feminist hegelianism in the 2030s. It shows his early toils with reading Hegel with Lacan under the mentorship of Todd.
The story is noted for among other things containing the so-far best readings of the Interpretation of Dreams, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, there is no Meta-language, universality and fake news.
The main thread of the story follows Ryan, a shy, bright and somewhat insecure young scholar, as he attains a PhD, becomes a professor and uncovers new searing hot takes on seriality, Hegel’s Absolute and Lacan’s Quilting Point.
Ryan’s mentor, Todd (portrayed by renowned media theorist Todd McGowan) is the father figure whose fallos rooted in his established profile and firm grasp of the sources (the texts, the language of the source texts, all films, the person of Slavoj Žižek) allows him to facetiously toy with his impotence/castration (by emphasising personal failings, senior moments of forgetting) only to make his fallow stronger.
As Todd plays name of the father, master quilter, duped and duper, it also becomes clear that the podcast is not merely Hegel with Lacan but Todd with Ryan, at least at first.
Along the way, Ryan and Todd must collaborate to shine a light through the gloomy alleys of Hegelian, Freudian and Lacanian concepts and use them to vanquish rivals off their schools adhering to Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Harman and Heidegger by constructing (at first incredibly misleading and straw man-like) readings that grow in honesty and complexity.
The series is infused with drama and context from multiple flashbacks to the Christian, conservative childhood of Todd, Ryan’s origin story and the cameos played by several notable theoreticians and one (indirectly) by Žižek himself.
Their initial bad takes on rivals show their honesty, as most theoreticians would shuss it until they could formulate a highly-convoluted reading of the critiqued party’s key terms that show them to be contradictory, but Ryan and Todd show the real consequences of being limited in time: They might very well have had to agree with a thorough point-by-reading of their rivals that addressed all their criticisms, but by the time such a reading (or theoretical force-feeding) would be done, the world would have passed.
Hence, they show that doing theory is not only about determining which philosophical text logically aligns with which facts, but even more about which theory immediately seizes upon the most relevant facts of the world and banishes irrelevancy to the background. Interventionist theory must be fast and crafty, and Hegel with Lacan is what works for Ryan and Todd.
Together they are determined to be duped and not to be duped by the non-duped and doubly duped dupes.
Ryan’s insecurity / burdening awareness of castration is illustrated in his desire to please the master, laugh at his jokes, supply supposedly funny sarcastic remarks from the viewpoint of leftist politics, most evident in the moment when he is caught defending the position that American leftist should rally around the term ‘Die Linke’. But it is also his main strength as he ceaselessly toils to a) overcome castration while b) not falling prey to the notion that it can be overcome while c) not falling prey to the notion that a)+b) allows overcoming somehow. This complex but earnest theoretical investment has him on overdrive making connections that no established professor can make. The podcast thus turns gradually into Ryan with Todd rather than Todd with Ryan.
