The unmasterability of theory is a major cause of resistance to it. No matter how well versed you may think yourself, you can never be sure whether you have to read Jean Baudrillard. Mikhail Bakhtin. Walter Benjamin. Helene Cixous. C. L R. James. Melanie Klein. or Julia Kristeva. or whether you can safely forget them. (It will. of course, depend on who you are and who you want to be. A good deal of the hostility to theory no doubt comes from the fact that to admit the importance of theory is to make an open-ended commitment, to leave yourself in a position where there are always important things you don't know. But this is the condition of life itself