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.
Why Psychoanalysis?
Filed under Reading Groups
Symptom, Scale, World: 3 sessions on theory and criticism
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”
Filed under Reading Groups
Encyclicals: Hegel continues
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!
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Encyclopedia Brown: a summer of Hegel kicks off 6 May
InterCcECT will host a series of reading groups this summer, and the first focuses on the beginning of Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic (Prefaces and Sections 1-18). Join us Friday, 6 May, 2:30pm at the south loop’s Little Branch Cafe, 1251 S Prairie Ave (Roosevelt “L”). Drop a note to interccect at gmail if you need the readings (we are using the Hackett Classics Edition/ Translation). As always, contact us to propose events, and follow us on Facebook for frequent links.
also on our books:
4 May, Fred Moten
11-13 May, Modernities: Old Problems, New Approaches
23 May What is Critical Theory?
Filed under Uncategorized
Hegel’s Kilogram
What maps can relay the convergences and divergences, the topoi and the antagonisms, of philosophy and science? How might the very terrain of modernity take different shape if these maps were recast?
InterCcECT is delighted to present “Hegel’s Kilogram,” a lecture by Nathan Brown, Director of the Centre for Expanded Poetics at Concordia University. Join us Thursday 14 April, 4:30pm, at the gallery of our generous partners Sector 2337, 2337 N Milwaukee Ave (Blue Line: California).
Abstract:
Hegel’s Kilogram: On the Measure of Metrical Units
Hegel’s theory of measure, articulated in the Science of Logic, was developed shortly after the foundation of the metric system in the late 18th century. The establishment of physical standards for the meter and the kilogram, fabricated and archived at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sèvres in 1799, illustrates Hegel’s understanding of measure as “the concrete truth of being” in a curiously salient way, demanding consideration of the relation between scientific accuracy, metaphysical speculation, and material particularity. The metric system instantiated universal standards of measure in singular physical objects, themselves created through meticulous measurement practices, thus dramatizing the problem of grounding in relation to both particular metrical units and the practice of science in general.
What is at stake, conceptually and empirically, when these inaugural units are themselves redefined? Since the 1960s, key standards of the International System of Units (SI) have been redefined on the basis of numerical constants, such as the speed of light (c) and the elementary charge (e), rather than physical objects. This paper considers ongoing efforts to redefine the kilogram unit on the basis of the Planck constant, focusing in particular on Watt Balance experiments carried out at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. These experiments offer a fascinating contemporary case study of the problem of measure. Considering both their empirical operations and their conceptual implications, I argue that the redefinition of metrical units is a key site for thinking not only the imbrication of epistemology and ontology, but also for understanding the history of modernity at the crux of science and philosophy.
Before and After, mark your calendars:
April 1 GENERAL STRIKE
April 4 Henry James, Media Archaeologist
April 15 German Philosophical Aesthetics
April 18 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition
Filed under Lectures
peoples and parties: the state of anti-statism
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.
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like the weather: an Eve Sedgwick mini-seminar
Eve Sedgwick’s profoundly supple thought surprisingly instigates both queer theory as we know it and that riposte to queer reading now called “post-critique.” Her arc was dynamic, capacious, unpredictable, and we have only barely begun trace it.
InterCcECT is delighted to host a mini-seminar on Sedgwick’s work, led by Professor Zach Samalin. Readings span the poles of her career and include “Epistemology of the Closet: Axiomatic”; “The Weather in Proust”; and “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes.” Materials available by request: interccect at gmail.
Join us Wednesday, 27 January, 5pm, at the Newberry Library (basement seminar room). Red Line: Chicago.
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Check back soon for the announcement of our February session with Daniel Zamora.
Also on our calendar:
12 Jan Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life
22 Jan Pete Coviello, The Wild Not Less Than the Good: Thoreau, Sex, Biopower
25 Jan Adam Kotsko @ UIC School of Architecture
28-29 Jan Beauty & Form
Filed under Miniseminars
decolonizing images
Through what processes of mediation, under what circumstances, down which paths of struggle, can colonialist iconography be appropriated for anti-colonial nationalism? What are the wages of the image for the work of sovereignty? Is photography trans-contextual?
InterCcECT is delighted to present Casablanca Retro: Colonial Photography, History and Memory in Postcolonial Morocco, a talk by Patricia Goldsworthy Bishop. Join us Thursday, 5 November, 7pm, at the arts & events space of our partners Sector 2237,2337 N Milwaukee Ave (Blue Line: California).
Talk Abstract:
Throughout the colonial era photographers such as Marcelin Flandrin, an Algerian pied-noir who settled in Morocco at the establishment of the protectorate, collaborated with the government and tourism boards to construct a European vision of North African society and history. Known as the photographer of Casablanca because of his heavy involvement with the Protectorate government, after independence Flandrin’s work was criticized for reproducing Orientalist stereotypes and supporting the colonizing mission. Since the 1980s, however, Moroccan cultural, educational, and financial institutions have reinterpreted Flandrin’s images in order to resituate the protectorate as a part of Moroccan, rather than French, history. This talk traces Flandrin’s transformation from an archetypal French colonial photographer to a part of Moroccan heritage through an analysis of Flandrin’s 1928 and 1956 publications on photographs of the city of Casablanca (Casablanca from 1889 to the Present) and their subsequent reprinting by Moroccan scholars in 1988 (Casablanca Retro). Through the reinterpretation of these images and the appropriation of Flandrin by Moroccans, we can see the process of writing, resisting, and revising history and the instrumental role played by imagery in this process in colonial and post-colonial Morocco.
Our theory itinerary for the coming weeks:
20 Oct, Liquidity/Value: Reconceiving Marx for an Era of Financialization
22 Oct, The Sovereign’s Personal Element
23-24 Oct, Thinking Universalities
29 Oct, Experts and their Images
29-31 Oct, Revolutions in the Concept of Form
18 Nov, Civil War and Imperialism: Unimagining Community in the British Empire
To propose or announce events, contact us at intercecct @ gmail, or find us on Facebook.
Filed under Lectures
V21 Collective Inaugural Symposium: Presentism, Form, and the Future of History
PRESENTISM, FORM, AND THE FUTURE OF HISTORY
a series of collaborative, experimental roundtables featuring affiliates of the V21 collective
October 9th and 10th, 2015
University of Chicago | Saieh Hall 021 (5757 S University Ave)
Friday, October 9
9:00am: Opening Remarks: Benjamin Morgan
9:15-11am: Bleak House Today
On how the form of Dickens’s novel resonates through time
Alex Woloch (roundtable anchor)
Elaine Auyoung
Elisha Cohn
David Coombs
Jonathan Farina
Emily Steinlight
Megan Ward
11:15-12:45: Theorizing the Present
On the continuing significance of Nietzsche’s critique of nineteenth-century historicisms, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life”
Pearl Brilmyer (discussion facilitator)
Danielle Coriale
Eleanor Courtemanche
Devin Griffiths
Matthew Sussman
Danny Wright
2pm-4pm: The Way We Write Now
On questions of method and interpretation in the current work of V21 affiliates
Caroline Levine (roundtable anchor)
Carolyn Betensky
Ellis Hanson
Anna Kornbluh
David Kurnick
Jesse Rosenthal
Jesse Oak Taylor
4:30-6:30 Empire and Unfielding
On the disciplinary relationship between Victorian Studies and studies of empire, grounded in Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr’s Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Common
Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr (roundtable anchors)
Tanya Agathocleous
Nathan Hensley
Jos Lavery
Sebastian Lecourt
Nasser Mufti
Mary Mullen
7:00-10:00
Affiliates Dinner
Evening Salon, Maeve Adams and Molly Clark Hillard, facilitators
Saturday, October 10
9:30-11: Plenary, “Atrocity in the Novel, Atrocity in History” Bruce Robbins
Introduction, Rachel O’Connell
Response, Zach Samalin
11:30-12:30: Symposium wrap-up, moderated by Elaine Hadley
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This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Registration is now closed.
Made possible by the generous support of the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Department of English Language and Literature, the Nicholson Center for British Studies, and the Center for International Studies. Additional support provided by the Institute for the Humanities, University of Illinois at Chicago, the Department of English, UIC, and the Inter Chicago Circle for Experimental Critical Theory.
Filed under Lectures, Miniseminars
Describing Description: varieties of post-critical reading
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.
Filed under Reading Groups
