November 11, 2020 · 10:25 PM

Dialectics Contra Bricks

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.

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May 22, 2020 · 2:19 PM

war, death, working through

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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.

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April 28, 2020 · 3:34 PM

necropolitics, death cults, time immemorial

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.

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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.)

 

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January 23, 2020 · 2:53 PM

“women” as a political category

 

skin-abstract-acrylic-painting-cara-bevan.jpgAre 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.

Have theory new years resolutions? Propose events, topics, field trips, and happenings!  Like us on social media for frequent links and commentary.
On our calendar:

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November 20, 2019 · 4:08 PM

Do We Still Need Kojève?

Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel are the crossroads through which German philosophy passes into French theory. What happens to our current theoretical projects—especially those that want to claim Hegel for the emancipatory Left—when we acknowledge Kojève’s mediation? Or does Kojève’s humanist dialectic take us away from the Hegel we desire most?

Readings include the introduction to Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Bataille’s “Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice” and “Letter to X, Lecturer on Hegel,” and Žižek’s “Lacan: at What Point is He Hegelian?”. Contact us for pdfs.
Join us for a festive winter break reading session facilitated by Dr. Zachary Tavlin , Thursday Dec 19th, 4pm at The Map Room.
Have theory new years resolutions? Propose events, topics, field trips, and happenings!  Like us on social media for frequent links and commentary.
On our calendar:

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September 25, 2019 · 1:46 PM

Walking After Midnight [Cowboy]: the Trauma of Desire and the Stakes of Interpretation

The newly translated Seminar VI of Lacan, “Desire and Its Interpretation” exposes interpretation as at once intimately co-implicated in, and incommensurable with, desire.  Groundbreaking work by Kevin Floyd in The Reification of Desire situates this knot within the capitalist dynamics of reification and totalization, with an assist from Midnight Cowboy and queer aesthetics.   Join InterCcECT for a miniseminar on this conjuncture.

 

Special guest Earl Jackson leads us Wednesday 30 October, 5pm, UIC, 2028 University Hall, 601 S Morgan St (Blue Line: UIC Halsted).

Readings: “The Dialectic of Desire” (Seminar VI pages 357-406) and “On Capital, Sexuality, and the Situations of Knowledge” (Reification pages 1-38), with extra focus on Floyd’s reading of Midnight Cowboy (154-194).

Contact us for pdfs.

Earl Jackson is Chair Professor in Asia University, Taiwan, and Associate Professor Emeritus, University California Santa Cruz, as well as the Co-director of the Transasian Screen Cultures Institute in Seoul. He is the author of Strategies of Deviance: Studies in Gay Male Representation; the co-editor (with Victor Fan) of Nang#7, The Scent of Boys; and numerous essays on queer theory, and Japanese and Korean cinemas. He is currently completing a monograph, Critical Conditions: Theory and Practice in Japanese Cinema.  Jackson has worked in the Korean independent film industry as line producer, film editor, screen writer, and actor.

 

As always, like us on facebook for frequent links and commentary, and get in touch to propose events!

On our calendar:

15 Oct 20th Anniversary release date Fight Club

1 Nov “After Fiction” University of Chicago

15 Nov Tanya Agathocleous “Civility, the Civilizing Mission, and the Colonial Public Sphere”

18 Nov Monuments of Omission 

 

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July 17, 2019 · 7:21 PM

political sentences

Any completed utterance runs the risk of being ideological.   

–Roland Barthes

What are sentences? Why do we place so many conflicting demands on them? To what extent does our claim to be viable social or political beings rest on our ability to articulate “correct” sentences? This miniseminar will explore these questions, focusing on what is at stake ideologically in the ambition to reshape the sentence form or even to dispense with it entirely.  Readings include brief selections from Adorno’s Minima Moralia, Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text, Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, and Stein’s Patriarchal Poetry.

Join InterCcECT for a mini seminar with special guest Jan Mieszkowski, author of Crises of the Sentence, Weds 7 August, 5pm-7pm, at Ambassador Public House (Blue Line: UIC/Halsted), back room.

Contact us for pdfs.

As always, like us on facebook for frequent links and commentary, and get in touch to propose events!

On our calendar:

18 July, Go Down Moses

29 July InterCcECT Too Real Abstraction

8 August, NASSR

26 August, V21 Collective  “The Planet” 

 

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July 2, 2019 · 1:54 PM

too real abstraction

Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labour, and its central concept of “real abstraction,” implicitly recognized something that has become undeniable today: that environmental crisis is a crisis of thought. As atmospheric carbon increases our basic brain functioning decreases. But in another sense it may have always been a crisis of thought. What if the value form, with its quite literally world-destroying demand for accumulation, has produced for us our mode of abstract thinking? This might include, as Jason Moore as recently suggested, generating the abstract ideas of “Nature” and “Society.”

Join us Monday 29 July, 4pm, to ponder these and other abstractions, with selected readings from Sohn-Rethel, Moore, and Alberto Toscano (and optional David Cunningham).  Red Lion Pub (2446 N Lincoln; Red, Brown, Purple Lines: Fullerton). Contact us for pdfs.

As always, contact us to propose events!

On our calendar:

V21 Collective summer reading groups: THE STATE 22 July
“Political Sentences” InterCcECT miniseminar with special guest Jan Mieszkowski 7 August

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June 4, 2019 · 3:52 PM

the origin of art at the end of the world

van gogh, shoesHeidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” is a one-stop guide to everything most promising and most problematic in his thought — from the linguistic construction of meaning to the relationship of human and animal, from the most abstract reflections on the disclosure of Being to a troubling fascination with national identity — all compressed into a simple pair of peasant shoes! Earth and world, world and work, form and shoe – can these relations remain the same after mechanical reproducibility, after the world market, after extinction?

Join us Thursday 27 June, 4pm, at The Map Room.
Readings available upon request to intercept at gmail.

As always, we welcome event proposals and summer accommodates many sessions. Follow us on Facebook for frequent links and commentary.

On our calendar:
June 19: V21 Collective reading group “Equality”
June 21: Marxist Literary Group
July 22: V21 Collective reading group “The State”
July 29: InterCcECT reading session “Real Abstraction”
Aug 7: InterCcECT miniseminar “Political Sentences” with special guest Jan Mieszkowski
Aug 26: V21 Collective reading group “The Planet”

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May 3, 2019 · 12:21 PM

the new narcissism

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The ancient myth of Narcissus found elaboration in psychoanalytic theories of the late 19th and mid 20th centuries. How must the theories stretch to illuminate ego orthodoxies of the i-media age?

Join us for a miniseminar with special guest and InterCcECT resident summer Lacanian Professor Chris Breu, Thursday 30 May, 5pm, Red Lion Pub. 2446 N Lincoln (Red, Brown, Purple Lines: Fullerton)

Readings include Sigmund Freud, On Narcissism, and selections from Jacques Lacan, the seminar book 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique. Contact us for pdfs.

Summer! Our collectively driven events amp up the pace in warmer months, so send us proposals and we’ll get rolling!

On our calendar:

The Marxist Literary Group Institute for Culture and Society 21-26 June
V21 Collective summer reading groups June, July, August
“Political Sentences” InterCcECT miniseminar with special guest Jan Mieszkowski 7 August

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