How can theology enrich the historicization of race and racialization? Find out at a special session with Professor Adam Kotsko! We’ll read the chapter “Modernity’s Original Sin: Toward a Theological Genealogy of Race” from his new collection What is Theology? Christian Thought and Contemporary Life, out now from Fordham University Press. Contact us for PDFs.
Join us Tuesday 28 September, 4pm, at Sheffield’s Beer and Wine Garden (outdoors; CTA Belmont on Red, Brown, Purple lines).
Filed under Miniseminars
This June marks a special anniversary for the Inter Chicago Circle for Experimental Critical Theory: ten years of conversations and conviviality, readings, lectures, field trips, workshops, and experiments. One decade of cross-city wild thought, of crowds and parties, of cinema, television, hysteria, and so many dialectics. Our deepest gratitude to the many many theorists of many many persuasions who’ve linked the circle together!
In celebration, including in cyclical return to the politics of literature, join us for an extra festive experiment in speculative fiction: for next time we’re reading Dr. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry of the Future, a big novel of big ideas and big states.
Decadent Decadeversary Salon
29 June
4pm
RSVP for more deets; we’ll continue outdoor venue-ing.
Filed under Reading Groups, Welcome
It seems the circumstances might allow us to reconvene in person! And what better way to honor haptic social idea-making than readings in wild thought, reason unbound, conceptuality on the move? University of Chicago press just put out a new translation of Claude Levi-Strauss’s La Pensée Sauvage, the magisterial study of intellection outside disciplines and beyond the west-east divide. We’ll read the first chapter, “The Science of the Concrete,” see if anybody remembers how to do a reading group, and air desires for collective summer endeavors with this or other works.
Join us for Wild Thought Thursday 27 May, 4pm. Since venues are operating with constraints about groups, we’ll meet at our Bucktown salon, outdoors among the wildflowers. Contact us for the reading and address.
Filed under Reading Groups
We continue with Rose for next time. Chapter 4 “The Division of Labor and Illusion,” meeting Weds 30 Dec, 4pm CST.
Contact us for PDFs and meeting link. Wishing everyone well.
Filed under Reading Groups
Continuing our march through Rose, chapter 3 this time. Weds 16 Dec, 4pm CST.
Contact us for PDFs and meeting link. Wishing everyone well.
Filed under Reading Groups
Though Anthony Giddens is dubious, we’ll continue with Gillian Rose’s Hegel Contra Sociology (chapter 2) Thursday 10 December, 4pm CST.
Contact us for PDFs and meeting link. Wishing everyone well.
Filed under Reading Groups
Though interlocking and worsening crises continue to prevent normal InterCcECT events, the time has come to fail better. Tracking the present emergency conscripts us to sociology, but we need speculation “now more than ever.” Join us Weds 2 December, 4pm CST, to discuss a text that stages this contradiction, Gillian Rose’s Hegel Contra Sociology. Focus on the first chapter, with the option to continue the book in subsequent weeks as a kind of structure for mitigating the deficits on z00m. Contact us for PDFs and meeting link. Wishing everyone well.
Filed under Reading Groups
Virtualization is piteous, as is oligarchic nihilism. But InterCcECT did ok with a first virtual session and will try again. We’re reading Sigmund Freud’s “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” along with “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through.” Join us Monday June 1, 4pm. Contact us for pdfs and virtual deets.
Filed under Reading Groups
For 9 years, InterCcECT has been a deliberately off-line circle, taking strength in ad-hoc conversations in para-institutional spaces around Chicago. Yet day 46 of isolation here, with a new order for at least 33 more, spools us off in to the ether. Thus an experiment – perhaps ill-fated, perhaps inspiriting – in virtualizing our collective.
Achille Mbembe’s recent Necropolitics is surely a book for pandemic time. Join us Thursday 14 May, 4pm, no customary El stop needed. Contact us for deets. (We’ll focus on intro-chapter 4.)
Filed under Reading Groups
Are all political identities fictions? And if not, shouldn’t they be? What is constructed and what is material in the subjectivities, experiences, bodies invoked by “feminist” moments, and how does feminist theory itself produce the opposition of “constructed” and “material”? The Marxist Feminist Sylvia Federici offers bracing correctives to many contemporary debates around biopolitics, performativity, and sexual identity with the weight of decades of feminist praxis; her new book Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism centers reproductive labor and boldly reaches for a collective body.
Join InterCcECT for a reading session on selections from Skin: Thursday February 20th, 4pm at Half Sour, 755 S. Clark (Red Line: Harrison; Blue Line: LaSalle). Contact us for pdfs.
Filed under Reading Groups
