So we press on: join InterCcECT for the next round of Adorno (reading part one: relationship to ontology), Thursday 5 June, 4pm, Lincoln Park Public Library large meeting room.
RSVP to interccect at gmail for PDF or with other hot summer concepts.
Hot Adorno Summer
The times call for Negative Dialectics. Join InterCcECT as we embark on an intensified summer project of Adorno. We’ll aim to meet every two weeks, for as long as we can stand it. Summer schedule remains open for your proposals for alternate/ additional events too.
First session: read the Introduction (pages 1-60, or as deep as you get).
Thursday 22 May, 4pm, Sheffield’s Beer Garden (outside).
RSVP to interccect at gmail for PDF or with other hot summer concepts.
Filed under Reading Groups
beam us up, scotty
In search of other worlds, in quest of cultural heritage, and in complement to last month’s discussion of asset managerial aesthetics, InterCcECT convenes to celebrate the publication of LATE STAR TREK, the latest book from stalwart Adam Kotsko. Seminary Coop hosts a conversation between Kotsko and Gerry Canavan, editor of the series Mass Markets: Storyworlds Across Media, Thursday 8 May, 4pm. Directly afterwards we’ll adjourn to Jimmy’s (aka Woodlawn Tap) for libations.
As semesters wind down and quarters begin to feel the spring breeze, fire up your summer theory desires. InterCcECT always takes proposals for events, and we welcome guests on book tours / with miniseminar ideas. Coming to town? Schedule your fall event now. And mark your calendars for our first summer ambition, an initial session on Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics on 22 May! Behave, and we’ll have multiple summer sessions devoted to carefully reading it.
Filed under Field Trip
asset managerial aesthetics
How do the financial instruments deployed in Hollywood shape its aesthetic output? A new book tracking the financialization of culture industries offers a comprehensive theory of the derivative form structuring contemporary music, television, and film. Join InterCcECT for a discussion of Derivative Media, with special guest, Professor Andrew deWaard. We’ll read the Introduction and Chapter 2. University of California Press has an open-access initiative ; rsvp to interccect at gmail for pdfs.
Monday 7 April 2025
4pm
Lincoln Park Public Library (large meeting room), 1150 W Fullerton. (The library has a parking lot.) Red, Brown, Purple Lines: Fullerton
Mark your calendars now for our May event, a celebration of long time InterCcECTer Adam Kotsko’s new book, Late Star Trek! Thursday 8 May, 4pm, Seminary Coop and festivities after.
As spring dawns, let us know what’s on your summer theory agenda; InterCcECT always welcomes event proposals.
Filed under Reading Groups
improvising
“It is indeed necessary to improvise, it is necessary to improvise well,” Jacques Derrida told a crowd of unsuspecting Ornette Coleman devotees who’d come to hear Coleman perform with German pianist Joachim Kühn at the Parc de la Villette on July 1, 1997. Coleman’s fans did not react well to the experiment: in fact, the heckling eventually caused Derrida to leave the stage before he’d finished reading (improvising, pretending to read) his text, despite Coleman’s encouragement. Yet while Derrida’s performance might have gone awry (he describes it as a disaster unlike anything that had happened to him in his years of standing before large audiences), the event (or non-event) enables us to delve further into what Erin Graff Zivin insists is a necessary encounter between deconstruction and improvisation.
Join us for a miniseminar on this encounter, led by Professor Graff Zivin, Thursday 20 March, 4pm. We’ll read Derrida’s interview of Coleman as well as his piece “Play – The First Name.” RSVP to interccect at gmail for pdfs.
UIC University Hall, room 1850 (18th floor, 601 S Morgan, Blue Line: UIC Halsted).
mark your calendars now for our upcoming events:
7 April with special guest Andrew DeWaard on his new book Derivative Media
8 May InterCcECT stalwart Adam Kotsko discusses his new book Late Star Trek
Filed under Miniseminars
theory of the new regime
Secular stagnation looks different around the globe, yet across those differences it commonly orients the rise of a global right. Join InterCcECT for a reading session on Endgame: Economic Nationalism and Global Decline, focusing on the introduction and first chapter. Author Jamie Merchant will be our special guest! 19 Feb, 5pm, back room of The Long Room .
RSVP to interccect at gmail for pdf, and mark your calendars now for our social spring of great guests: 20 March with Erin Graff Zivin, and 7 April with Andrew DeWaard!
Filed under Reading Groups
mapping without a compass
How can he not have been immortal? The death of Fredric Jameson this fall leaves us a tremendous life’s work, and the charge to uphold it. In the new year, InterCcECT convenes to begin to find language for what has been given, and what has been lost. The conversation will be rooted in the foundational short text, the original talk and q&a titled “Cognitive Mapping,” printed in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. An optional on-ramp some might like is the posthumous (and long) article “Agon: The Iliad.” With special host Jonathan Flatley, we welcome all Chicago Jamesonians, friends of Fred, and first-timers.
Join us Thursday, 16 January, 5pm, at UIC University Hall, 601 S Morgan St, 20th floor, room 2028 (Blue Line: UIC Halsted). RSVP for pdfs.
ALSO! InterCcECT is delighted to announce the launch of StLSECT, a satellite in Saint Louis! Tell your southern comrades, and email stlsect@mailbox.org to sign up for event announcements. Columbus is also in the works. Other locations looking to start their own satellite can reach out for our handbook!
As always, contact us to propose events. Mark your calendars now for a session with special guest Erin Graff Zivin 20 March, and stay tuned for Feb plans.
Filed under Reading Groups
tis the season: in defense of sex
In a partly salutary shift, gender has largely replaced sex as a category in contemporary culture and theory. Popular sex negativity and insurgent fascist politics alike pose sex as a problem – but not the way psychoanalysis meant. A new book by longtime Friend of InterCcECT Chris Breu challenges this shift, constructing a theory of sex as nonbinary embodiment and as prosocial desire. Professor Breu dialogues about In Defense of Sex with Professor Rebekah Sheldon at Seminary Coop on Saturday 7 December at 3pm.
Join InterCcECT there and afterwards for a book party and holiday festivity, prosociality amid the darkness (RSVP for party deets).
Filed under Dialogue
Sense & Sensation
Smell is the sense the least available to medium, mediation, and remediation, and the most susceptible to association with the natural, the animal, the disgusting. For these and other reasons, the theory and art of smell generate great friction in philosophy, political-economy, and psychoanalysis. An exciting new book palpates these frictions and percusses insights about truth, language, and sexuality. In a very special InterCcECT dialogue, Dr. Simon Hajdini discusses What’s That Smell with Dr. William Mazzarella, Join us at 4pm Tuesday 12 November, UIC University Hall Room 2028 (601 S Morgan St, 20th floor; Blue Line: UIC Halsted).
Advance reading not required but suggested; contact us for PDF.
Mark your calendars now for our 7 December event, In Defense of Sex, a book talk at Seminary Coop followed by InterCcECT festivities that evening!
Filed under Dialogue
being creative
Happy back to school! Join InterCcECT for an introduction to the philosophy of Hans Blumenberg and his genealogies of ontology and political theology, “Imitation of Nature: Toward A Prehistory of The Creative Being” (https://www.jstor.org/stable/20686110 or Contact us for PDF).
Tuesday 15 October, 4pm, Wicker Park Bucktown Public Library Meeting Room (Blue Line: Damen).
Mark your calendars now for What’s That Smell? , a conversation with special guests Professors Simon Hajdini and William Mazzarella, Tuesday 12 November, 4pm, UIC University Hall Room 2028.
Filed under Reading Groups
InterCcECT 