Category Archives: Reading Groups

Service economy, helping professions, care work, affective labor.  For at least two hundred years, feminist and marxist theories of social reproduction have underscored the unwaged, unvalorized, unappreciated exertions that make the quotidian happen, that uphold the infrastructures of the present for the future, that give life. Now the contemporary finds that labor not only unofficial, but delegitimized, not only under-compensated but over-burdened to the point of disaster.  Whence arises the image of the lazy greedy feminine public employee, welfare queen, unfireable teacher?  How long can dystopia hold?

This International Women’s Day, InterCcECT invites you to commune with us over feminist words.  We’ll read Tithi Battacharya’s Social Reproduction Theory primer, and selections from Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life, and discuss Thursday April 19th, 5pm-7pm, at Ambassador Public House (back room), 310 S Halsted (Blue Line: UIC Halsted).  Contact us for PDFs.

As always,  send us proposals for events, field trips, works-in-progress, techniques of survival.

On our calendar:

10 March The Withering of the State, with Corey Robin keynote

16 April Eduardo Cadava, Learning to See

18 April Maria Acosta and Fanny Soderback, Underrepresented Groups in Philosophy 

photo: Amy De’Ath

In an era of racist violence and economic refeudalization and their entwinement, what lessons can be drawn anew from  reconstruction, the black radical tradition, and the early twentieth-century political novel?

Join InterCcECT for a reading group on Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, Monday 15 January, 2018, 4pm-6pm at O’Shaughnessy’s Public House (Brown Line: Montrose).   We’ll focus on Part 3: “Black Radicalism and Marxist Theory.” Contact us for PDFs.  Special guest Andrew Leong will facilitate discussion.

Please note:  online conversations about Parts 1 and 2 of Black Marxism will be held on Wednesday, January 10, 5-7pm (CT), and Friday, January 12, 5-7pm (CT). For participants outside the Chicago area, an online conversation on Part 3 will be held on Monday, January 15, 5-7pm (CT). Please contact Andrew Leong at andrew.leong@northwestern.edu by January 8 if you would like to participate in any of these conversations, or require PDFs of the reading. Participants may also find it fruitful to read the online articles in the African American Intellectual History Society’s roundtable on Black Marxism (http://www.aaihs.org/announcement-aaihs-online-roundtable-on-cedric-robinsons-black-marxism/).

The January 12 and 15 online conversations will be facilitated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (http://ealc.berkeley.edu/people/hofmann-kuroda-lisa)

The January 10 conversation will be facilitated by Andrew Leong.

As always, like us on Facebook for frequent links, and get in touch to propose events.

What’s on your new year theory calendar?

A bit of ours:

12 January The Mana of Mass Society

16 January Chicago Works

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.