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!
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.
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).
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!
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.
Where does the marxist interpretative imperative of cognitive mapping meet the ecocritical palpation of energy? In the latest issue of Representations, Harry Pitt Scott’s article “Figures of Separation: Cognitive Mapping and Oil’s Declining Slope” promises some useful synthesis. Join us at 4pm Thursday 25 July outdoors at Sheffield’s. Contact us for PDF and to propose additional summer events!
We’ve read the admin memos, we’ve heard from the LLM classroom enthusiasts, we’ve received the scabgpt threats; let’s sit down for some reading on the social history of artificial intelligence. Join InterCcECT Weds 5 June to discuss Matteo Pasquinelli’s The Eye of the Master . We recommend reading the whole book, but at least the intro, first chapter, and conclusion. RSVP for PDFs, and rendezvous 4pm at the Lincoln Park Public Library Meeting Room (Red, Brown, Purple Lines: Fullerton).
Social theorist Melinda Cooper frames 20th and 21st century economic activity as the responsibilization of individuals for the costs of social reproduction, and the plundering of public coffers for private gain – two different but complementary mechanisms for contemporary accumulation. We’ll explore the latter mechanism in a reading session on Cooper’s latest book Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance (Princeton UP 2024). Focus on the Introduction and Chapter Five. Join us Monday May 6, 4pm at the Lincoln Park Public Library Meeting Room (Red, Brown, Purple Lines: Fullerton). RSVP for PDFs.
Summer is upon us! Propose events, field trips, Hegel close-read ambitions and more to interccect at gmail.
InterCcECT is pleased – chuffed, fulfilled, unalienated even – to welcome two very special guests for a spring session “The Trouble with Alienation”. Visiting scholars Gregor Moder and Bara Kolenc, a new generation of Ljubljana school philosophers of psychoanalysis, Hegel, aesthetics, comedy, and then some (!) will each present a short talk and discussion will follow. Join us Monday 8 April at 4pm at UIC (601 S Morgan St, 20th Floor, Room 2028; Blue Line: UIC Halsted).
Mark your calendars now for the subsequent spring reading session Monday 6 May on the new Melinda Cooper! As always, email interccect@gmail to propose readings, works-in-progress groups, field trips, alienation activities galore.
In the grammars of theory, paradox is paramount, while integration, stability, or resolution tend to fall below the radar – or be roundly excoriated. A new book from the emblematic theory publisher Duke UP evaluates this habit of thought across traditions in law and the humanities and offers constructive alternatives. Professor Elizabeth Anker (English and Law) joins InterCcECT as a special guest to discuss On Paradox: The Claims of Theory. We’ll read the Introduction “On Paradox” and, ideally, Chapter 6: “What Holds Things Together: Toward an Integrative Criticism” (on Claudia Rankine’s Citizen). RSVP for PDF.
Monday 11 March, 4pm
UIC University Hall, room 2028 (20th Floor; 601 S Morgan St; Blue Line: UIC Halsted)
Mark your calendars for our next special guest visit, Monday 8 April with Gregor Moder and Bara Kolenc.
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