Category Archives: Reading Groups

Successive viral waves, unrelenting loss, and the cumulative strain of semester 5 at Pandemic University have discombobulated InterCcECT too much in recent months, but it is now time to resuscitate! The authoritarian surge warrants more fighting, and also some more thinking. Join us for a discussion of Lauren Berlant’s *America, “Fat,” The Fetus* and all things bodily, genderly, nationcraftly – and mourningly. We’ll meet Monday 13 June, 4pm, outdoors at Pilot Project (Blue Line: Western). And fire up your summer reading lists, as we’ll be making plans for many future sessions.

Contact us for PDFs.

It seems the circumstances might allow us to reconvene in person! And what better way to honor haptic social idea-making than readings in wild thought, reason unbound, conceptuality on the move? University of Chicago press just put out a new translation of Claude Levi-Strauss’s La Pensée Sauvage, the magisterial study of intellection outside disciplines and beyond the west-east divide. We’ll read the first chapter, “The Science of the Concrete,” see if anybody remembers how to do a reading group, and air desires for collective summer endeavors with this or other works.

Join us for Wild Thought Thursday 27 May, 4pm. Since venues are operating with constraints about groups, we’ll meet at our Bucktown salon, outdoors among the wildflowers. Contact us for the reading and address.

We continue with Rose for next time. Chapter 4 “The Division of Labor and Illusion,” meeting Weds 30 Dec, 4pm CST.

Contact us for PDFs and meeting link. Wishing everyone well.

Continuing our march through Rose, chapter 3 this time. Weds 16 Dec, 4pm CST.

Contact us for PDFs and meeting link. Wishing everyone well.

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.

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.

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.)

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.