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.
Category Archives: 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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byways of transindividuation and intersection
In this riven present, unilluminating debates about identity politics make an odd commons uniting the blogosphere, journalism, and academic theory. Cast some light on questions of subjectivity, structuration, and collective identities for our times with new theses from African-American Studies and Continental Philosophy: Jennifer Nash’s Black Feminism Reimagined and Jason Read’s The Politics of Transindividuality. Contact us for excerpts.
Join InterCcECT for a reading session Monday 21 January, 5pm-7pm. Red Lion Pub 2446 N Lincoln (Red, Brown, Purple Lines: Fullerton).
As ever, send us proposals for events, and like us on f*cebook for links and discussion.
On our calendar:
Open University with Adam Kotsko
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feminism in other dimensions
August calls us to revisit and redirect our discussion of feminist lives with some quite different texts, Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman and Helen Hester’s Xenofeminism (excerpts).
Join us Wednesday 8 August, 4:30pm at The Map Room (blue line: Western). Contact us for PDFs.
As always, InterCcECT welcomes your proposals for events including mini seminars, field trips, and lectures. Follow us on Facebook for frequent links.
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mystery repeating: what to know about Deleuze
First as tragedy, second as dystopian hellscape.
What are the compulsions and the freedoms, the benefits and the constraints, the eruptions and rhythms of theorizing repetition?
Join InterCcECT Tuesday 17 July at 4:30pm at Map Room (Blue Line: Western) for a reading session on Difference and Repetition. We’ll focus on the introduction and first chapter, and there’s a proposal on the table to continue with the whole thing weekly. Contact us for PDFs.
As always, like us on Facebook for frequent links, and send us your proposals for working groups, guest lectures, field trips,and more.
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the art of the concept
How does art think? What kind of conceptuality inheres in the aesthetic? What artistic revolutions and political-economic transformations help account for the contemporary preponderance of “conceptual art” and “autofiction”? Between immanently critical works and postcritical trends, is interpretation obsolete?
InterCcECT kicks off summer with a reading group session on Peter Osborne’s Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art. We’ll focus on the introduction and chapters 1-2; contact us for the readings. Join us Thursday June 7th, 4pm, at the Red Lion Pub 2446 N Lincoln (Red, Brown, Purple Lines: Fullerton).
As always, InterCcECT welcomes your proposals for events including mini seminars, field trips, and lectures. Summer ramps up frequency, so propose away! Follow us on Facebook for frequent links.
On our Chicago calendar:
The Debt of the Living
Adam Phillips and Leo Bersani
Work, Blackness, Sex
Political Futures
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