Category Archives: Miniseminars

Is too-late capitalism evolving a new mode of production? A new mode of accumulation? Or just a new political and ideological dispensation of the main forces and relations that have defined modernity? InterCcECT is thrilled to host very special guest Professor Matt Seybold, Director of the Center for Mark Twain Studies and host of The American Vandal , for a miniseminar reckoning with the surging neofeudalism hypothesis.

We’ll read excerpts from Jodi Dean’s Capital’s Grave; Yannis Varoufakis’s Technofeudalism, and Seybold’s incisive essays “Against Technofeudal Education” and “The Technofeudal Text.”

Join us Wednesday 3 December, 5:30pm at UIC (University Hall, 601 S Morgan, 20th floor, Room 2028). RSVP for PDFs.

While in Chicago Dr. Seybold will also participate in Theory at the Bargaining Table, a conversation with Professor Dominique Baker and the Committee on Political Education of UIC United Faculty, about how to strategize faculty power in technofeudal times. Thursday 4 December, 3pm, UIC Daley Library room 1-470.

on our Chicago calendar:

Strangers to Ourselves: An Introduction to Freud

Power and Personality in Contemporary Capitalism

Authoritarian Imaginaries

Language Machines

got theory winter goals, theory new year’s resolutions? contact us to propose events!

“It is indeed necessary to improvise, it is necessary to improvise well,” Jacques Derrida told a crowd of unsuspecting Ornette Coleman devotees who’d come to hear Coleman perform with German pianist Joachim Kühn at the Parc de la Villette on July 1, 1997. Coleman’s fans did not react well to the experiment: in fact, the heckling eventually caused Derrida to leave the stage before he’d finished reading (improvising, pretending to read) his text, despite Coleman’s encouragement. Yet while Derrida’s performance might have gone awry (he describes it as a disaster unlike anything that had happened to him in his years of standing before large audiences), the event (or non-event) enables us to delve further into what Erin Graff Zivin insists is a necessary encounter between deconstruction and improvisation.

Join us for a miniseminar on this encounter, led by Professor Graff Zivin, Thursday 20 March, 4pm. We’ll read Derrida’s interview of Coleman as well as his piece “Play – The First Name.”  RSVP to interccect at gmail for pdfs.

UIC University Hall, room 1850 (18th floor, 601 S Morgan, Blue Line: UIC Halsted).

mark your calendars now for our upcoming events:

7 April with special guest Andrew DeWaard on his new book Derivative Media

8 May InterCcECT stalwart Adam Kotsko discusses his new book Late Star Trek

In the grammars of theory, paradox is paramount, while integration, stability, or resolution tend to fall below the radar – or be roundly excoriated. A new book from the emblematic theory publisher Duke UP evaluates this habit of thought across traditions in law and the humanities and offers constructive alternatives. Professor Elizabeth Anker (English and Law) joins InterCcECT as a special guest to discuss On Paradox: The Claims of Theory. We’ll read the Introduction “On Paradox” and, ideally, Chapter 6: “What Holds Things Together: Toward an Integrative Criticism” (on Claudia Rankine’s Citizen). RSVP for PDF.

Monday 11 March, 4pm

UIC University Hall, room 2028 (20th Floor; 601 S Morgan St; Blue Line: UIC Halsted)

Mark your calendars for our next special guest visit, Monday 8 April with Gregor Moder and Bara Kolenc.

InterCcECT is delighted to again welcome visiting scholar Aaron Schuster for a miniseminar, this time on “The Neurotic Choice of Neurosis: Kafka, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy”. Join us Tuesday 7 November, 4pm at UIC English (University Hall, 601 S Morgan St, 18th floor, room 1850). We’ll read Kafka’s story “Investigations of a Dog” alongside “The Drive to Philosophize,” an excerpt from Schuster’s book-in-progress.

RSVP for the readings, and as always, contact us to propose events.

The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s Sphere Trilogy considers Bubbles, Globes, and Foam as organic models for biopolitics. Special guest Christian Sorace, Lecturer in Global China at the University of Cambridge, joins InterCcECT to present a critical exploration of this project, juxtaposing it to spherical cultural practices in Mongolia to show its limits and political obscenity while also probing the possibility of outlining communism within a biopolitical framework.

We’ll read a pre-circulated chapter and an excerpt from The Secret History of the Mongols and meet Christian for discussion at UIC, University Hall (601 S Morgan) room 1850 (18th Floor) Thursday 21 September, 4pm.

RSVP for the readings, and as always, contact us to propose events.

Theory works concentrically, theory works linearly, and most of all it works obliquely.

Join InterCcECT for a seminar with very special guest Professor Alexander Galloway, sharing work in progress on philosophy, art, and angling:

This paper considers the diagonal line as a technique within thought. Inherently formal and spatial, if not also graphical, the diagonal or oblique line has played any number of important roles: from the diagonal of the unit square (which nearly destroyed Pythagoreanism and, later, played an important role in Plato’s “Meno”), to the clinamen or oblique swerve in Lucretius, to the modern intervention of Georg Cantor’s “diagonal argument” (where in 1891 he demonstrated that the real numbers are uncountable), to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s postmodern “machine,” defined as a diagonal that cuts through an assemblage. What does it mean to think and act “on the bias”?

(rsvp to interccect@gmail.com to receive the paper the week before)

Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programmer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, he is author of several books on digital media and critical theory, including Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age (Verso, 2021).

Tues 27 September

4pm

UIC University Hall 1850

601 S Morgan St, 18th floor

(Blue Line: UIC Halsted)

For reasons of both pleasure and overwork, humanities nerds often long to upload archives directly to our brains — but does the fantasy go the other direction? When will tech host the first uploaded human mind? What are the frontiers of AI and their consequences for mental labor (of academic stripes and otherwise)? How does science fiction work out hypotheses about the human and the machine?

InterCcECT is delighted to host an in-person miniseminar with special guest Professor Gerry Canavan to probe these weird frontiers. We’ll read this short story (composed in the form of a wikipedia article), along with “Bioethics and Transhumanism,” a recent article by Allen Porter.

Join us Tuesday 9 November, 4pm, at UIC, University Hall Room 2028 (20th floor, 601 S Morgan St; Blue Line: UIC Halsted).

Contact us for PDFs.

As always, InterCcECT welcomes proposals for workshops, reading groups, field trips, and more.

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).

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