Category Archives: Reading Groups

What are the formal constructions of realism in art and literature? What, if anything, distinguishes the realism of nineteenth-century capitalism from the realism of twenty-first-century capitalism? What binds Breaking Bad to Balzac? InterCcECT, with special guest Annie McClanahan, turns to Georg Lukacs for renewed debate on realism in these times. Read “Realism in the Balance” and “Reportage or Portrayal” and join us Monday 13 August, 4pm, at the InterCcECT salon in Bucktown; contact us for details and PDFs.

Our continuing conversation on the realism-complex of psychosis convenes Thursday 2 August, 3pm for Lacan’s Seminar 3, Chapters 7-8.

We highly recommend the History of Capitalism Reading Group’s next session, Wednesday 1 August, 1pm, on Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century. Check our calendar for details on these and other events.

Have a summer reading bucket list? A fall mini-seminar wish list? InterCcECT welcomes your announcements and initiatives.

In studying the structure of psychosis, Lacan also refines the psychoanalytic account of neurosis, elaborating two different disturbances in the subject’s relation to reality (which imply in turn different registers of reality). Make your own study of these dynamics by participating in our ongoing close-reading group on Seminar 3: The Psychoses. The next session considers chapter 4, is scheduled for 28 June at 5pm, and will take place at an InterCcECTual home in Logan Square. Contact us for PDF and address; make your summer reading list a new reality by proposing an InterCcECT group.

InterCcECT invites you to the second session of our new regular reading group on Lacan’s Seminars, Thursday 31 May. We’ll be continuing with Seminar 3: The Psychoses, focusing on Chapter 2, with the additional text of Freud’s commentary on Daniel Paul Schreber, “Psychoanalytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of Paranoia,” and with the recommendation to add Schreber’s “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness” to taste.

For a different negation of the social order than that represented by the psychotic, we’ll soon be reading Adam Kotsko’s Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late-Capitalist Television and holding a book discussion with the author at 57th Street Books. Slavoj Zizek recently praised Kotsko’s argument in this lecture.

Join us for Lacan, Freud, and Schreber at 5pm at our salon in Bucktown. Write us for more details, or to propose other summer fun. InterCcECT takes its shape from you!

The study of psychotics led Jacques Lacan to engage with Freud; the psychotic’s distinctive relation to the symbolic order was a crucial element of Lacan’s elaboration of the psychoanalytic approach to the unconscious and to clincial structures. InterCcECT invites you to a newly convened regular Lacan reading group, commencing with Seminar III: The Psychoses. The first session will entail a close, text-based exploration of a short selection, Chapters 1 and 2, along with planning for future readings and session logistics.

Thursday 17 May at 6pm at the InterCcECT Salon in Bucktown. Write us for details and a PDF (specify English or French or both).

“For the real truth of the matter – the glaring, sober truth that resides in delirium – is that there is no such thing as relatively independent spheres or circuits: production is immediately consumption and a recording process, without any sort of mediation, and the recording process and consumption directly determine production, though they do so within the production process itself. Hence everything is production: production of productions, of actions and of passions; productions of recording processes, of distributions and of co-ordinates that serve as points of reference; productions of consumptions, of sensual pleasures, of anxieties, and of pain.”

In preparation for our very special production by Alberto Toscano on 1 March, “Desiring Abstraction: The Place of Capital in Post ’68 French Thought,” join InterCcECT for a reading group session on selections from Anti-Oedipus and a response by Badiou. 5pm, Thursday 23 February. Request PDFs and details.

As always, contact us to propose projects; sign up for updates via RSS or check back here regularly for announcements including our own special events in April, May, and June with Kiarina Kordela, Viv Soni, and Tom Eyers.

Highlights from our calendar:
24 February, Bonnie Honig, “Antigone versus Oedipus: Feminist Theory and the Turn to Antigone” at DePaul
28 February, Bruce Robbins, “The Beneficiary: Cosmopolitanism and Inequality” at UIC
2 March, Sianne Ngai at UIC
2-3 March, Cavell’s Aesthetic Criticism at U of C
6 March, Lawrence Grossberg, “Is There a Place for Intellectuals in the New Radicalism?” at Columbia College

As school starts anew, InterCcECT looks forward to new conversations and new elements in our circle. In two short weeks, on 24 Jan, join us for the previously scheduled reading group on Quentin Meillassoux’s Divine Inexistence. Contact us for PDF and details.

Shortly thereafter, meet us at UIC for Aesthetics and German Philosophy, a conference sponsored by the American Friends of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, featuring Robert Pippin, David Wellberry, Karl Ameriks, and Elizabeth Millan. 10 Feb, 9:45am-5pm at UIC Student Center East, 570 S Halsted, Room 302.

Check the calendar for other upcoming events, and let us know: what are your theory goals for the new year?