Critical Theory Chicago

Marxism and Literature: Back to the Basics

Marxism and Literature Harold Washington Library 6th Floor North Study Room Reading Schedule: Text available here. Monday November 18, 2019 6-8 pm Reading: “Ideology” (page 55) Monday November 25, 2019 25 6-8 pm Reading: “Base and Superstructure” (page 75) and “Hegemony” (page 108) Monday December 2, 2019 6-8 pm Reading: “Traditions, Institutions and Formations”,…

Capitalism and Feminism: Federici’s Caliban and the Witch

Capitalism and Feminism Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation Every other Monday 6-8 pm At the Harold Washington Library On April 1st, we will be in the 6th floor SOUTH study room For all meetings after the 1st, we will be in the 6th floor NORTH study room Caliban…

Deleuze and Guattari: What is Philosophy?

D & G: What is Philosophy? Every other Monday from 6-8 pm At the Harold Washington Library We meet in the 6th Floor North Study Room “Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between philosophy, science, and the arts, seeing as means of confronting chaos, and challenge the common view that philosophy is an extension of logic. The…

Accessible Badiou: Ethics

Reading Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil Every other Monday January 14th through March 11th 6-8 pm Harold Washington Library 6th Floor North Study Room From Peter Hallward’s translator’s introduction to this essay: “Indeed for a general audience, and first published in a popular series of student-friendly engagements with major philosophical topics…

Of Grammatology Part II

Join our discussion of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology. We will continue our discussion by finishing part II. Critical Theory Chicago meets Mondays at the Harold Washington Library 6-8pm in the 6th floor north study room. Note: The library is closed Feb. 18th. We will be at Half Sour at Polk and Clark “The opposition of…

Intellectuality, Democracy, and Machines: Paolo Virno and Karl Marx Readings

Paolo Virno and Karl Marx Monday January 13, 2020 6-8 pm Harold Washington Library 6th Floor North Study Room For this session we will read Marx’s “Fragment on Machines” from the “Grundrisse” and Paolo Virno’s “General Intellect” related to the fragment, intellectuality, contemporary capitalism, and democracy. Join us. “As part of the Historical Materialism research…

Badiou’s Big Book of Being and Event

Being and Event by Alain Badiou Select Mondays 6-8 pm (reading schedule is below) Harold Washington Library 6th Floor North Study Room We’ll make our way through Being and Event three weeks at a time. “Since the book’s first publication in 1988, Alain Badiou’s Being and Event has established itself of one of the most…

More Walter Benjamin! Theses on the Philosophy of History

Theses on the Philosophy of History Monday January 6, 2020 6-8 pm Harold Washington Library 6th Floor North Study Room We’ll open the new year for CTC with Benjamin’s short essay “On the Concept of History”, aka “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) The text is available in many places, including online here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm…

Derrida: Specters of Marx

This year is 30 years since the fall of the Berlin wall. Published in 1993, 4 years after the fall of the wall, Spectres de Marx wrestles with the fate of Marxism at this point in history. “The purpose of these two volumes, Specters of Marx and Whither Marxism? is to begin to address questions…

Critical Theory Chicago Hosts Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Publisher’s Blurb: “In their international bestseller Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri presented a grand unified vision of a world in which the old forms of imperialism are no longer effective. But what of Empire in an age of “American empire”? Has fear become our permanent condition and democracy an impossible dream? Such pessimism is…

What was the sublime? Miniseminar with Ian Balfour

Originally posted on InterCcECT:
Is the sublime so five minutes ago? So two centuries ago? This mini-seminar explores the extraordinarily discontinuous history of the category of the sublime and loaded examples of it proffered by theorists and critics, as well as how the sublime lines up, easily or not, with its aesthetic “others.” The point…