Category Archives: Reading Groups

Amidst its present Russian turmoil, 2017 is also distinct as the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution and the 150th anniversary of the publication of Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1.

Join InterCcECT for 2 linked sessions on what is to be done.

Session 1 reads the novelist/critic China Mieville’s new narrative history of the Russian revolution, October (excerpts) alongside Lenin’s The State and Revolution (chapters 1 and 5).

Session 2 reads Capital (Chapters 25 and 26) alongside William Clare Roberts’s recent brilliant polemic
Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital.

Thursday 15 June, 4pm, HandleBar 2311 W North Ave

Wednesday 12 July, 4pm, Parts&Labor

Contact us (interccect at gmail) for the readings, like us on the facebooks for frequent links, and, as always, send proposals for group endeavors!

On our calendar:

26 May, Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction

28 May, Mieville himself at Seminary Coop

9 June, Poems, Prose, & Possibility

15 June, Summer of Cage

21 June, The Political Conscious

In this fresh hell, InterCcECT stands by our founding project, the pursuit of abstraction as both explanation for existing situations and inspiration for new situations, and we stand for the thinkers, makers, doers, survivors, gatherers who have lived other hells and will fight this one too.  We theorize and teach and struggle as we can with and for the oppressed and the objectified, and anyone who strives to build something more.

Join us Thursday 15 December for a reading group on thought in catastrophe and thought out of catastrophe, focusing on selections from Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia and Jose Esteban Munoz’s Cruising Utopia.  The Map Room, 4pm.

Write interccect at gmail for the readings.

When both scientism and the so-called “post-critical” movement are ascendent, what can possibly be the purchase of psychoanalysis?   Alenka Zupancic is going to tell us!  Join us Tuesday 14 June for a reading group on her very short book “Why Psychoanalysis: Three Interventions.”  We’ll meet in the garden at Handlebar at the luxuriantly summery hour of 3pm.  Drop a note to interccect at gmail for the readings.

InterCcECT compatriot`V21 Collective is hosting a series of reading groups this summer on debates in literary theory and criticism, including psychoanalysis and postcritique, world-systems theory and world literature, and distant reading.   Check out the syllabus below and see v21collective.org for more details; the first session is June 21.

SYMPTOM
Sigmund Freud, An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (excerpt)
Eve Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading”

WORLD
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
Immanuel Wallerstein, World Systems Analysis: An Introduction (excerpt)
Jason Moore, Capitalism and the Web of Life (excerpt)

SCALE
Immanuel Kant, “On the Mathematical Sublime”
Franco Moretti, “Graphs, Maps, Trees”
Mark McGurl, “The Posthuman Comedy”
Julie Orlemanski, “Scales of Reading”

Join us for another session on Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic, this Friday, 13 May, 3pm at The Bourgeois Pig (Red Line: Fullerton).  We’ll continue with Sections 19-36  –  let us know if you need the readings.  And contact us to propose additional summer events!

What formations of the people would amount to collective sovereignty, rather than the mere management of populations?  How can the party or the state be rethought in our era of obscene electoral politics and pervasive state violence?  What distinguishes academic anti-statism from market-fundamentalist disintegration of the state?

InterCcECT hosts a special reading group session featuring selections from Jodi Dean’s Crowds & Party and Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics, facilitated by Daniel Zamora (of Foucault & Neoliberalism notoriety).

Join us Tuesday 29 March, 4pm, UIC Institute for the Humanities (Stevenson Hall basement, 701 S Morgan St, Blue Line: UIC Halsted).

Materials available by request: interccect at gmail.

Foremost among the methods promoted in the new critical modesty is “description” – a form of attention to textual surface billed as an alternative to interpretation, with its putative depth tendencies.  What is the description of a literary text?  Where does critical description meet literary description?  In what is a literary text engaged, and what does it forswear, when it describes?

InterCcECT highlights the V21 Collective‘s pre- symposium reading group on Description & the Postcritical Turn.

Readings include passages of description from Dickens, Hardy, and Wilde, along with essays on description in literature and description as method by Lukacs, Latour, and Love.  The session is Monday 21 September, 3-5pm, DePaul Library Rosati Room (Room 300, 2350 N Kenmore, Redline: Fullerton).  Contact v21collective at gmail for the readings.

InterCcECT highlights the V21 Collective‘s pre- symposium reading group on Form & Formalism.  Selections from George Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, and Caroline Levine are on the table; session is Friday 21 August, 3-5pm, DePaul Library Rosati Room (Room 300, 2350 N Kenmore, Redline: Fullerton).  Contact v21collective at gmail for the readings.

Amidst growing protests against systemic and state-administered premature death, and beyond #hashtagactivism, calls for a new black radicalism are resounding.  In The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten advocate for “the undercommons” as a subject of such radicalism, “the prophetic organization that works for the red and black abolition…not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that couple have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.”      

Join InterCcECT for a reading group on The UnderCommons, chapters 0-6, on Thursday 9 July, 4pm (purchase the text or follow the link to a free version made available by the publisher).

VENUE CHANGE: La Haven Coffee, 1241 S Michigan.  (Roosevelt station)