Category Archives: Reading Groups

In The Order of Things, Foucault meticulously, if idiosyncratically, catalogues epistemic shifts from resemblance to representation to History, regimes of knowledge corresponding to ages of the world.  At the time of writing, nearly 50 years ago, he located his work in the still-unfolding modern episteme.  Are we now modern? Join us for the conclusion of our reading sessions, Monday 22 June, 3pm (note earlier time), at The Bourgeois Pig.

What are your summer theory projects?  Contact us to propose events!

Our session on Foucault’s The Order of Things proved rousing; we’re going to continue with chapters 4 and 5 (“Speaking”; “Classifying”).  Join us again next Monday, 8 June, at 4pm, at Moody’s Pub (in the garden, weather permitting).  As always, InterCcECT welcomes proposals for summer projects; find us on Facebook or send us an email.

After his critique of the clinic, and as a prolegomena to his theory of power, Michel Foucault outlined a distinct regime of knowledge that pivoted upon a new concept of “representation” – a Kantian sense of the limits of mental representations and the promise of formal representations.  Modern knowledge, for the archaeological Foucault of Les Mots et Les Choses (translated as The Order of Things), is distinguished not only by its representational ethos, but by its agency in generating and congealing worldly relations: once words are thinkable as representation rather than as coincident with things, “discourse” is thinkable as a force of ordering things.

InterCcECT kicks off summer with a multi-session reading group on this crucial moment in Foucault’s thought.  Join us Monday June 1st at 4pm, in the garden at Moody’s Pub (red line: Thorndale).  We’ll be starting with the first three chapters from Part 1 of The Order of Things (Las Meninas, The Prose of the World, & Representing).  Contact us for the readings.

What are your summer ambitions?  As always, we welcome proposals and initiatives for events ranging from reading groups to field trips, works-in-progress sessions to pub afternoons.

In our sights:

Elizabeth Grosz, Nietzsche and Amor Fati May 6

Lee Edelman, with Lauren Berlant and Michelle Wright, May 7 & 8

Elizabeth Grosz, Deleuze and the Plane of Immanence May 8

Jon McKenzie, Remaking the Liberal Arts, May 12

What remains of the theory of the state, after the laments of sovereignty and the ecstasy of vitalism? We’re taking our dialectic to the streets, to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and its culminating vision of world historical formations.

Join us Wednesday 20 August, 12 noon, at our favorite civic institution of late, the Wicker-Park/Bucktown Public Library meeting room. Contact us for the readings, and to propose future events, alternate locations, and different states of things.

Catherine Malabou has rapidly elasticized possible futures for Continental Philosophy by reorienting our understanding of Hegelian thought around the notion of plasticity, “a capacity to receive form and a capacity to produce form.”

In her recent short work Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, Malabou considers writing as a scene of plasticity and model of political and ethical action. Join InterCcECT for a reading group on these crepuscular illuminations of Derrida, Hegel, Heidegger, Freud, Levi-Strauss, and Levinas.

Thursday 17 October
3-5pm
Department of English conference room
UIC, 2028 University Hall
601 S Morgan St, 60607 (Blue Line: UIC Halsted)

Text available to Chicagoans upon request.

Mark your calendars now for our upcoming miniseminar with Joshua Kates, “Radical Empiricism Revisited,” at which we’ll explore the Kantian inflections of empiricism in Deleuze, Latour, and Luhmann as they oppose Derrida and early Foucault. Friday 22 November, 3-5pm, location TBA; paper to be pre-circulated.

What’s happening in theory this fall? Send us your event proposals and announcements, check out our calendar for recommended events, and connect with us on Facebook for frequent links and commentary.

The aesthetic resistance to theory. Aesthetic indistinction. The aesthetic that theorizes itself. The sensitivities and perceptions that exceed theoretical vision. (Not) knowing it when you see it. Autonomy.

Does the new aesthetic turn adequately grapple with whether there can even be such a thing as aesthetic theory? InterCcECT is excited to host a reading group on Renegade Aesthetics led by special guest Benjamin Morgan. We’ll be tackling selections from very recent works by Steven Connor (“Doing Without Art”), Sianne Ngai (Our Aesthetic Categories), and Jacques Ranciere (Aisthesis). Contact us for PDFs.

Thanks to the generous partnership of The Scholl Center, we will meet Friday 9 August, 2pm, at The Newberry Library, room B92.

What are you theorizing? InterCcECT happily announces your events and eagerly receives your proposals. And don’t forget to connect with us on Facebook.

Jameson’s recent Representing Capital encounters Marx’s first volume through foregrounding the reading modes necessary to appreciate Marx’s writing modes, which are themselves not peripheral to the subject matter but essential.

Jameson writes “the central formal problem of Capital Volume I is the problem of representation: namely how to construct a totality out of individual elements, historical processes, and perspectives of all kinds; and indeed how to do justice to a totality which is not only non-empirical as a system of relationships, but which is also in full movement, in expansion, in a movement of totalization which is essential to its very existence and at the heart of its peculiar economic nature.”

Join InterCcECT for a reading of Jameson’s reading.
Friday, 28 June, 2pm
Bucktown / Wicker Park Public Library (Community Room, 2nd Floor).
1701 N Milwaukee, accessible via Blue Line Damen or Milwaukee, North, Damen, Western, and Armitage buses.

As always, to propose events write us us or connect on Facebook.

InterCcECT reminds you to attend our upcoming sessions on Lukacs and Lacan:

Monday 13 August, refine your sense of realism in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries by discussing “Realism in the Balance” and “Reportage or Portrayal” with special guest Annie McClanahan of UW Milwaukee’s Center for 21st Century Studies. 4pm, InterCcECT Salon in Bucktown; email us for PDFs and details.

Thursday 16 August, refine your sense of reality by discussing Seminar 3: The Psychoses, chapters 9 &10, 5pm at the Salon.

Close thy summer, open thy Kant: Critique of Pure Reason reading group begins Wednesday 29 August, 6pm, Bourgeois Pig cafe.

Also note: David Graeber’s Debt reading group, Wednesday 5 September, 1:30pm, UIC University Hall 1050.

Got good reads on your summer bucket list? We always welcome event proposals.