Category Archives: Reading Groups

So we press on: join InterCcECT for the next round of Adorno (reading part one: relationship to ontology), Thursday 5 June, 4pm, Lincoln Park Public Library large meeting room.

RSVP to interccect at gmail for PDF or with other hot summer concepts.

The times call for Negative Dialectics. Join InterCcECT as we embark on an intensified summer project of Adorno. We’ll aim to meet every two weeks, for as long as we can stand it. Summer schedule remains open for your proposals for alternate/ additional events too.

First session: read the Introduction (pages 1-60, or as deep as you get).

Thursday 22 May, 4pm, Sheffield’s Beer Garden (outside).

RSVP to interccect at gmail for PDF or with other hot summer concepts.

How do the financial instruments deployed in Hollywood shape its aesthetic output? A new book tracking the financialization of culture industries offers a comprehensive theory of the derivative form structuring contemporary music, television, and film. Join InterCcECT for a discussion of Derivative Media, with special guest, Professor Andrew deWaard. We’ll read the Introduction and Chapter 2. University of California Press has an open-access initiative ; rsvp to interccect at gmail for pdfs.

Monday 7 April 2025

4pm

Lincoln Park Public Library (large meeting room), 1150 W Fullerton. (The library has a parking lot.) Red, Brown, Purple Lines: Fullerton

Mark your calendars now for our May event, a celebration of long time InterCcECTer Adam Kotsko’s new book, Late Star Trek! Thursday 8 May, 4pm, Seminary Coop and festivities after.

As spring dawns, let us know what’s on your summer theory agenda; InterCcECT always welcomes event proposals.

Secular stagnation looks different around the globe, yet across those differences it commonly orients the rise of a global right. Join InterCcECT for a reading session on Endgame: Economic Nationalism and Global Decline, focusing on the introduction and first chapter. Author Jamie Merchant will be our special guest! 19 Feb, 5pm, back room of The Long Room .

RSVP to interccect at gmail for pdf, and mark your calendars now for our social spring of great guests: 20 March with Erin Graff Zivin, and 7 April with Andrew DeWaard!

How can he not have been immortal? The death of Fredric Jameson this fall leaves us a tremendous life’s work, and the charge to uphold it. In the new year, InterCcECT convenes to begin to find language for what has been given, and what has been lost. The conversation will be rooted in the foundational short text, the original talk and q&a titled “Cognitive Mapping,” printed in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. An optional on-ramp some might like is the posthumous (and long) article “Agon: The Iliad.” With special host Jonathan Flatley, we welcome all Chicago Jamesonians, friends of Fred, and first-timers.

Join us Thursday, 16 January, 5pm, at UIC University Hall, 601 S Morgan St, 20th floor, room 2028 (Blue Line: UIC Halsted). RSVP for pdfs.

ALSO! InterCcECT is delighted to announce the launch of StLSECT, a satellite in Saint Louis! Tell your southern comrades, and email stlsect@mailbox.org to sign up for event announcements. Columbus is also in the works. Other locations looking to start their own satellite can reach out for our handbook!

As always, contact us to propose events. Mark your calendars now for a session with special guest Erin Graff Zivin 20 March, and stay tuned for Feb plans.

Happy back to school! Join InterCcECT for an introduction to the philosophy of Hans Blumenberg and his genealogies of ontology and political theology, “Imitation of Nature: Toward A Prehistory of The Creative Being” (https://www.jstor.org/stable/20686110 or Contact us for PDF).

Tuesday 15 October, 4pm, Wicker Park Bucktown Public Library Meeting Room (Blue Line: Damen).

Mark your calendars now for What’s That Smell? , a conversation with special guests Professors Simon Hajdini and William Mazzarella, Tuesday 12 November, 4pm, UIC University Hall Room 2028.

Where does the marxist interpretative imperative of cognitive mapping meet the ecocritical palpation of energy? In the latest issue of Representations, Harry Pitt Scott’s article “Figures of Separation: Cognitive Mapping and Oil’s Declining Slope” promises some useful synthesis. Join us at 4pm Thursday 25 July outdoors at Sheffield’s. Contact us for PDF and to propose additional summer events!

We’ve read the admin memos, we’ve heard from the LLM classroom enthusiasts, we’ve received the scabgpt threats; let’s sit down for some reading on the social history of artificial intelligence. Join InterCcECT Weds 5 June to discuss Matteo Pasquinelli’s The Eye of the Master . We recommend reading the whole book, but at least the intro, first chapter, and conclusion. RSVP for PDFs, and rendezvous 4pm at the Lincoln Park Public Library Meeting Room (Red, Brown, Purple Lines: Fullerton).

Social theorist Melinda Cooper frames 20th and 21st century economic activity as the responsibilization of individuals for the costs of social reproduction, and the plundering of public coffers for private gain – two different but complementary mechanisms for contemporary accumulation. We’ll explore the latter mechanism in a reading session on Cooper’s latest book Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance (Princeton UP 2024). Focus on the Introduction and Chapter Five. Join us Monday May 6, 4pm at the Lincoln Park Public Library Meeting Room (Red, Brown, Purple Lines: Fullerton). RSVP for PDFs.

Summer is upon us! Propose events, field trips, Hegel close-read ambitions and more to interccect at gmail.

In Late Fascism, old InterCcECTer Alberto Toscano offers a new intervention in what has come to be known as “the fascism debate.” How do we robustly conceptualize and historicize the authoritarian tendencies of the present and their activation of racism and sexism? 

Join InterCcECT for a reading session, focusing on chapters 1-3. 

Monday, 12 Feb, 4pm, at The Bourgeois Pig (red line: Fullerton)

RSVP for PDF. 

Mark your calendars now for two very special upcoming InterCcECT events this winter! 

11 March with special guest Elizabeth Anker, author of On Paradox!

8-12 April with special guest Gregor Moder! (exact date TBD very soon)

and if it floats your boat:

5 Feb Seminary Coop new book salon for Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism