Category Archives: Lectures

What infrastructures can sustain the momentum of an event of political massing?  What are compelling idioms, amidst ideologies and theories of anarchic post-politics, for affirming formations as integral to political struggle? In her book Crowds and Party, Jodi Dean argues that the party must be reclaimed as a site and modality of politics; InterCcECT previously hosted a lively mini-seminar on the book and is thrilled to now host Professor Dean herself for a talk and debate.

Join us Thursday 20 October, 5pm, in the lovely environs of our frequent collaborator Gallery 400.

400 S Peoria St, 60607 (Blue Line: UIC Halsted)

made possible by generous support from The UIC Institute for the Humanities, The Great Cities Institute, Institute for Policy & Civic Engagement, Gallery 400, Departments of English, Art History, Gender&Womens Studies, Political Science, and Anthropology.

What maps can relay the convergences and divergences, the topoi and the antagonisms, of philosophy and science?  How might the very terrain of modernity take different shape if these maps were recast?

InterCcECT is delighted to present “Hegel’s Kilogram,” a lecture by Nathan Brown, Director of the Centre for Expanded Poetics at Concordia University.   Join us Thursday 14 April, 4:30pm, at the gallery of our generous partners Sector 2337, 2337 N Milwaukee Ave (Blue Line: California).

Before and After, mark your calendars:

April 1 GENERAL STRIKE

April 4  Henry James, Media Archaeologist

April 15 German Philosophical Aesthetics

April 18 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

Through what processes of mediation, under what circumstances, down which paths of struggle, can colonialist iconography be appropriated for anti-colonial nationalism? What are the wages of the image for the work of sovereignty? Is photography trans-contextual?

 
InterCcECT is delighted to present Casablanca Retro: Colonial Photography, History and Memory in Postcolonial Morocco, a talk by Patricia Goldsworthy Bishop. Join us Thursday, 5 November, 7pm, at the arts & events space of our partners Sector 2237,2337 N Milwaukee Ave (Blue Line: California).

Talk Abstract:

Throughout the colonial era photographers such as Marcelin Flandrin, an Algerian pied-noir who settled in Morocco at the establishment of the protectorate, collaborated with the government and tourism boards to construct a European vision of North African society and history. Known as the photographer of Casablanca because of his heavy involvement with the Protectorate government, after independence Flandrin’s work was criticized for reproducing Orientalist stereotypes and supporting the colonizing mission. Since the 1980s, however, Moroccan cultural, educational, and financial institutions have reinterpreted Flandrin’s images in order to resituate the protectorate as a part of Moroccan, rather than French, history. This talk traces Flandrin’s transformation from an archetypal French colonial photographer to a part of Moroccan heritage through an analysis of Flandrin’s 1928 and 1956 publications on photographs of the city of Casablanca (Casablanca from 1889 to the Present) and their subsequent reprinting by Moroccan scholars in 1988 (Casablanca Retro). Through the reinterpretation of these images and the appropriation of Flandrin by Moroccans, we can see the process of writing, resisting, and revising history and the instrumental role played by imagery in this process in colonial and post-colonial Morocco.

Our theory itinerary for the coming weeks:

20 Oct, Liquidity/Value: Reconceiving Marx for an Era of Financialization
22 Oct, The Sovereign’s Personal Element
23-24 Oct, Thinking Universalities
29 Oct, Experts and their Images
29-31 Oct, Revolutions in the Concept of Form
18 Nov, Civil War and Imperialism: Unimagining Community in the British Empire

To propose or announce events, contact us at intercecct @ gmail, or find us on Facebook.

What must a map of the world depict?  What aesthetic forms can “map” late capitalism, critically disclosing its dynamics and its totalizations?  What is the difference, aesthetically and politically, between a representation of capital and a representation of class antagonism?

InterCcECT is delighted to partner with Gallery 400 for a special lecture by visiting scholars Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, authors of Cartographies of the Absolute.  Revisiting and revising the themes in their book, Toscano & Kinkle will discuss arts of capitalism and arts of the state.

May we suggest Cartographies in the Los Angeles Review of Books?

Wednesday 2 September, 6:00pm
Gallery 400 Lecture Room
400 S Peoria St
Blue Line: UIC Halsted

InterCcECT rejoices to return from winter break to a new year of inquiry.  We get started this week rather quickly, with a newly scheduled practice job talk :

InterCcECTer Audrey Wasser presents”Problem and Genesis: On Beckett’s Proust,” in which she reads Samuel Beckett’s Molloy and his writings on Proust to pursue a series of interlocking questions: What is the genesis of a literary work? How do we understand the autonomy and integrity of a literary work with respect to its influences and causes? Is a notion of causation, in fact, completely inappropriate to literature?  Must a work’s autonomy be conceived by means of a negation of all of the conditions that gave rise to it? 

Join us at 4:00pm Friday 24 January, U of Chicago campus, Classics, Room 110 (1010 E 59th St).  

Fulfill your new year’s theory resolutions!  Write interccect at gmail dot com to propose collaborations, and check out our calendar for recommendations like:

Kant’s Conception of Number: A Summing Up

In Conversation with Great Minds: Photographer Sally Mann

Worlding Realisms

InterCcECT is delighted to present a talk by Andrew Cutrofello, “Two Contemporary Hegelianisms,” Tuesday 19 March, 4pm, Newberry Library Room B82.

Abstract:
Robert Brandom’s and Slavoj Žižek’s appropriations of Hegel seem radically different. Brandom’s Hegelianism takes the form of a semantic holism that is essentially normative and pragmatic. Žižek’s is a version of dialectical materialism that is avowedly perverse and revolutionary in intention. Curiously, however, there are significant parallels in the two philosophers’ conceptions of Hegelian spirit. These are evidenced in their respective readings of T.S. Eliot’s essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Nevertheless, Brandom’s and Žižek’s Hegels ultimately diverge with respect to the nature of reason and commitment. In my talk I will try to sketch these differences by bringing into play another of Eliot’s essays from The Sacred Wood, namely, “Hamlet and His Problems.” In this essay, Eliot develops his famous conception of the objective correlative, explaining why it goes missing in Shakespeare’s play. Brandom and Žižek, I suggest, have fundamentally different conceptions of Hegel’s “missing” objective correlative.

a few highlights from our calendar, which contains additional details:
8 March Issues in Phenomenology
13 March Gregory Flaxman “A More Radical Empiricism: The Philosophy of William (and Henry) James” at U of C
13 March Bill Martin, “Zen Maoism: An improbable Buddhist-Marxist synthesis”
15 March Paola Marrati on Deleuze

InterCcECT proudly presents Jodi Dean, “The Communist Horizon” Saturday 27 October, 4:30pm, generously hosted by Gallery 400. Based on her brand new book, the talk urges us to imagine new Octobers.

*theorizing October*

(highlights from our calendar, which contains additional details):

12 Oct Laurence Hemming, “Production: Formerly This Was Called God: Heidegger in dialogue with Marx”
13 Oct Frances Ferguson, “Economic and Sentimental Reasons”
15 Oct Anthony Paul Smith, “Liberating Lived Experience: François Laruelle and the Work of NonPhilosophy”
16 Oct Michael Hardt, “The Right to the Common”
16 Oct Ramin Takloo-Bighash, “History, Theory, and Practice of Prime Numbers”
17 Oct Adam Kotsko, “Agamben on Liturgy and Politics”
17-19 Oct UIC French, “Inequality and Exclusion:The Theory and Practice of Human Rights”
18 Oct Achille Mbembe, “Notes on Fetishism and Animism”
26-28 Oct DePaul Philosophy, “Hegel and Capitalism”
29 Oct Danielle Bergeron, “Psychosis As It Is Lived”

InterCcECT encompasses you! Contact us to propose or announce your October aspirations and “like” us on Facebook for frequent links.