Integrating Paradox

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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Fascism Lately

In Late Fascism, old InterCcECTer Alberto Toscano offers a new intervention in what has come to be known as “the fascism debate.” How do we robustly conceptualize and historicize the authoritarian tendencies of the present and their activation of racism and sexism? 

Join InterCcECT for a reading session, focusing on chapters 1-3. 

Monday, 12 Feb, 4pm, at The Bourgeois Pig (red line: Fullerton)

RSVP for PDF. 

Mark your calendars now for two very special upcoming InterCcECT events this winter! 

11 March with special guest Elizabeth Anker, author of On Paradox!

8-12 April with special guest Gregor Moder! (exact date TBD very soon)

and if it floats your boat:

5 Feb Seminary Coop new book salon for Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism

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Bad Education

Break goals at once over-ambitious and under-achieving? Nation-wide war on education got you down? Lee Edelman will not cheer you up!

But join InterCcECT anyway, for a reading session on the formidable queer theorist’s recent release, Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing. We’ll read the intro and chapter two.

Monday 18 December

4pm at The Map Room

(Blue Line: Western)

RSVP for PDFs. Fire up your Theory New Year’s Resolutions! Traditionally we host an MLK day session; mark your calendars and send along reading recs.

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Neurosis, Kafka style: a miniseminar with Aaron Schuster

InterCcECT is delighted to again welcome visiting scholar Aaron Schuster for a miniseminar, this time on “The Neurotic Choice of Neurosis: Kafka, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy”. Join us Tuesday 7 November, 4pm at UIC English (University Hall, 601 S Morgan St, 18th floor, room 1850). We’ll read Kafka’s story “Investigations of a Dog” alongside “The Drive to Philosophize,” an excerpt from Schuster’s book-in-progress.

RSVP for the readings, and as always, contact us to propose events.

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Spherical Apartheid: a miniseminar with Christian Sorace

The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s Sphere Trilogy considers Bubbles, Globes, and Foam as organic models for biopolitics. Special guest Christian Sorace, Lecturer in Global China at the University of Cambridge, joins InterCcECT to present a critical exploration of this project, juxtaposing it to spherical cultural practices in Mongolia to show its limits and political obscenity while also probing the possibility of outlining communism within a biopolitical framework.

We’ll read a pre-circulated chapter and an excerpt from The Secret History of the Mongols and meet Christian for discussion at UIC, University Hall (601 S Morgan) room 1850 (18th Floor) Thursday 21 September, 4pm.

RSVP for the readings, and as always, contact us to propose events.

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the computational versus the digital

With LLMs perpetrating a massive new enclosure, and creative labor struggling militantly, the times are ripe to debate intelligence, creativity, pattern recognition, and counting. If quantification is the fundamental episteme of our times, does it follow that all forms of digital reason are alike? How do computational mediascapes draw upon the infrastructural logics of long ago centuries? What is the difference between adding up and speculation? The recent Critical Inquiry essay “On Addressability, Or What Even Is Computation?” offers some important distinctions and historicizations that ramify for cultural theory.

Stave off fall just a little longer! Join us Tues 29 Aug, 4pm, at The Map Room (Blue Line: Western).

Contact us for pdfs and to propose back-to-school events; mark your calendars for a visit from special guest Christian Sorace, “Spherical Apartheid” 21 Sept!

Would-be visitors please get in touch; InterCcECT hosts lectures, mini seminars, works-in-progress, and dinner/overnights.

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drive all night

Following on our recent readings about repression and compulsion, let’s dive into drive. To resurrect our old summer tradition, special guest Professor Chris Breu will anchor. We’ll read Lacan’s “On Freud’s Trieb”, Laplanche’s “Drive and Instinct”, and De Lauretis’s “Basic Instincts”. Familiarity with Freud’s “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” may be desirable.

Join us Tuesday 1 August, 4pm, Sheffields Beer and Wine Garden (outdoors; CTA Belmont on Red, Brown, Purple lines).

Contact us for pdfs or to propose additional summer plans.

Mark your calendars for a visit from special guest Christian Sorace, 21 Sept! Would-be visitors please get in touch; InterCcECT hosts lectures, mini seminars, works-in-progress, and dinner/overnights.

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geoengineering galaxy brain

Is critical theory equipped to evaluate the promise of geoenginnering? What is real cause for hope about the near future and what is real fantasy? InterCcECT continues hot ecomarx summer with Andreas Malm’s recent two part series The Future Is the Termination Shock: On the Antinomies and Psychopathologies of Geoengineering.

Join us Tuesday 20 June, 4pm, Half Sour.

Contact us for pdfs or to propose summer plans.

Mark your calendars for a visit from special guest Christian Sorace, 21 Sept! Would-be visitors please get in touch; InterCcECT hosts lectures, mini seminars, works-in-progress, and dinner/overnights.

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compulsory compulsive compulsion

As a complement to our last session, we’ll roll towards summer with selections from Soren Mau’s Mute Compulsion. What is in us more than us? What are the modes of repetition in social reproduction, and are those evidence of a capitalist trieb?

Join us Monday 15 May, 4pm, at The Red Lion (Red Line: Fullerton).

Contact us for PDFs. Aim for all of Part I, but focus on Intro and Chapters 1 and 2.

We’ll also be moving towards more summer plans, so bring your reading lists and field trip itineraries!

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green marx red marx

After a too long interval powered by too good things, InterCcECT reconvenes! Chicago winter has hardly transpired – one of many burning signs that we’re already living the unevenly distributed collapse of the ecosphere. What does the Marxan corpus uniquely offer to the explosion of ecotheory in para- or non-marxist idioms in recent years? Find out with Kohei Saito’s Marx in the Anthropocene! We’ll read the intro and chapter one (and optionally the rest of part one) for Thursday 30 March, 4pm, Map Room.

Contact us for PDFs.

Propose events, topics, field trips, and happenings!  Like us on social media for frequent links and commentary.

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