August calls us to revisit and redirect our discussion of feminist lives with some quite different texts, Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman and Helen Hester’s Xenofeminism (excerpts).
Join us Wednesday 8 August, 4:30pm at The Map Room (blue line: Western). Contact us for PDFs.
As always, InterCcECT welcomes your proposals for events including mini seminars, field trips, and lectures. Follow us on Facebook for frequent links.
Filed under Reading Groups
First as tragedy, second as dystopian hellscape.
What are the compulsions and the freedoms, the benefits and the constraints, the eruptions and rhythms of theorizing repetition?
Join InterCcECT Tuesday 17 July at 4:30pm at Map Room (Blue Line: Western) for a reading session on Difference and Repetition. We’ll focus on the introduction and first chapter, and there’s a proposal on the table to continue with the whole thing weekly. Contact us for PDFs.
As always, like us on Facebook for frequent links, and send us your proposals for working groups, guest lectures, field trips,and more.
Filed under Reading Groups
How does art think? What kind of conceptuality inheres in the aesthetic? What artistic revolutions and political-economic transformations help account for the contemporary preponderance of “conceptual art” and “autofiction”? Between immanently critical works and postcritical trends, is interpretation obsolete?
InterCcECT kicks off summer with a reading group session on Peter Osborne’s Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art. We’ll focus on the introduction and chapters 1-2; contact us for the readings. Join us Thursday June 7th, 4pm, at the Red Lion Pub 2446 N Lincoln (Red, Brown, Purple Lines: Fullerton).
As always, InterCcECT welcomes your proposals for events including mini seminars, field trips, and lectures. Summer ramps up frequency, so propose away! Follow us on Facebook for frequent links.
On our Chicago calendar:
The Debt of the Living
Adam Phillips and Leo Bersani
Work, Blackness, Sex
Political Futures
Filed under Reading Groups
Service economy, helping professions, care work, affective labor. For at least two hundred years, feminist and marxist theories of social reproduction have underscored the unwaged, unvalorized, unappreciated exertions that make the quotidian happen, that uphold the infrastructures of the present for the future, that give life. Now the contemporary finds that labor not only unofficial, but delegitimized, not only under-compensated but over-burdened to the point of disaster. Whence arises the image of the lazy greedy feminine public employee, welfare queen, unfireable teacher? How long can dystopia hold?
This International Women’s Day, InterCcECT invites you to commune with us over feminist words. We’ll read Tithi Battacharya’s Social Reproduction Theory primer, and selections from Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life, and discuss Thursday April 19th, 5pm-7pm, at Ambassador Public House (back room), 310 S Halsted (Blue Line: UIC Halsted). Contact us for PDFs.
As always, send us proposals for events, field trips, works-in-progress, techniques of survival.
On our calendar:
10 March The Withering of the State, with Corey Robin keynote
16 April Eduardo Cadava, Learning to See
18 April Maria Acosta and Fanny Soderback, Underrepresented Groups in Philosophy
photo: Amy De’Ath
Filed under Reading Groups
In an era of racist violence and economic refeudalization and their entwinement, what lessons can be drawn anew from reconstruction, the black radical tradition, and the early twentieth-century political novel?
Join InterCcECT for a reading group on Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, Monday 15 January, 2018, 4pm-6pm at O’Shaughnessy’s Public House (Brown Line: Montrose). We’ll focus on Part 3: “Black Radicalism and Marxist Theory.” Contact us for PDFs. Special guest Andrew Leong will facilitate discussion.
Please note: online conversations about Parts 1 and 2 of Black Marxism will be held on Wednesday, January 10, 5-7pm (CT), and Friday, January 12, 5-7pm (CT). For participants outside the Chicago area, an online conversation on Part 3 will be held on Monday, January 15, 5-7pm (CT). Please contact Andrew Leong at andrew.leong@northwestern.edu by January 8 if you would like to participate in any of these conversations, or require PDFs of the reading. Participants may also find it fruitful to read the online articles in the African American Intellectual History Society’s roundtable on Black Marxism (http://www.aaihs.org/announcement-aaihs-online-roundtable-on-cedric-robinsons-black-marxism/).
The January 12 and 15 online conversations will be facilitated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (http://ealc.berkeley.edu/people/hofmann-kuroda-lisa)
The January 10 conversation will be facilitated by Andrew Leong.
As always, like us on Facebook for frequent links, and get in touch to propose events.
What’s on your new year theory calendar?
A bit of ours:
12 January The Mana of Mass Society
16 January Chicago Works
Filed under Reading Groups
What unites the contemporary American multimedia artist Bruce Nauman with the nineteenth-century sculptor Auguste Rodin? Literary and aesthetic theorists Mieke Bal, Anita Chari, Ankhi Mukherjee, and Geof Oppenheimer argue in their work “The Hysterical Material” that these artists share a fascination with the body as an agent of speech, expression, and representation distinct from rational communication and intellection. How does the body talk? How does language speak us? How does discourse take the body as raw material? “The Hysterical Material” conjoins these questions posed by art to similar concerns in the phenomenon of hysteria charted by Sigmund Freud.
Join InterCcECT for a lunch hour field trip to the Smart Museum’s Nauman/Rodin exhibition (as always, free and open to the public) with conversation about the works and the catalogue, Friday 10 November, 12:30-1:30pm. Then keep the ideas going at that afternoon’s psychoanalytic theory workshop, What is Sex?
Also on our calendar:
Gwendolyn Brooks: A Centenary Celebration, 8 November
Critique in German Philosophy, 9-11 November
Avery Gordon book discussion: The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins, 30 November
Filed under Performances
Exactly sixty years ago, Jacques Lacan conducted his 5th seminar, Formations of the Unconscious, treating the phallus, castration, and jokes, and presenting the first version of the graph of desire.
One year ago, InterCcECT conducted a mini-seminar with Professor Chris Breu on the newly released Seminar 10: Anxiety. Join us this year for a reprise, with the newly released Seminar 5: Formations of the Unconscious. We will focus on the sections on “The Dialectic of Desire and Demand” – contact us for pdfs.
Monday, 14 August, 4pm, Volumes Bookcafe (Blue Line: Damen)
As always, write interccect at gmail dot com to propose events, and like us on Facebook for frequent links and commentary.
Filed under Miniseminars
