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.
Hegel in the severe style
Continuing our march through Rose, chapter 3 this time. Weds 16 Dec, 4pm CST.
Contact us for PDFs and meeting link. Wishing everyone well.
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everything coming up roses
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
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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war, death, working through
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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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.
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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“women” as a political category
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.
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:
3 Feb The Order of Forms
24 Feb Lori Marso, Dear Dick: A Feminist Politics of the Epistolary
3 April Martin Hagglund
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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:
23 Nov DuBois workshop
3 Feb The Order of Forms
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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
Filed under Miniseminars
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”
Filed under Miniseminars
