”The New Fascist Body” was drawn from Dagmar Herzog’s book-length essay of the same name (Wirklichkeit Books, 2025).

Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she writes and teaches on the histories of gender and sexuality, fascism and genocide, disability activism and care work, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. She is author of seven books, including Sex after Fascism (Princeton, 2005), Sexuality in Europe (Cambridge, 2011), Cold War Freud (Cambridge, 2017), and The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2024).

”Fredric Jameson: Toward a Creative Reading” was drawn from material in Phillip Wegner’s forthcoming book Late Theory: Jameson, or, The Persistence of Reading (University of Minnesota Press, 2026).

Phillip Wegner received his PhD from the Literature Program at Duke in 1993. He is the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar in the English Department at the University of Florida. Wegner has published on contemporary literature and film, utopian studies, science fiction, and Marxism. His most recent books include Invoking Hope: Theory and Utopia in Dark Times (2020), Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative (2014), and Life between Two Deaths, 1989-2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties (2009).

Presentations

• Kristin Ross, “Uprising of the Earth: The New Ecological Face of the Commune Form”
• Harry Harootunian, “Archaism and Actuality: Japan in the Global Fascist Imaginary“

Presentations

• Gregor Moder, “Marx in Yugoslavia: Alienation or Ideology”
• Bara Kolenc, “The Spectacle of Instanternity: How Computer Screens Usurped the Function of a Mirror”

Presentations

• Michael Hardt, “Constitutional Crisis”
• Michael Denning, “Impeaching der große Trumpf: Populism, Forms of Exploitation, and ‘diese Religion of every day’s life’”
• Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernity as a Philosophical Problem”
• Harry Harootunian, Concluding Comments

This presentation will develop Eric Cazdyn’s ongoing exploration of the blindspot. The blindspot can be conceptualized in many ways (from the unrepresentable to the impossible), but is usually understood as something missing, as something to be exposed or concealed. Cazdyn argues that the dominant ideology of the blindspot today (from culture to politics to academia) is the deadliest weapon used by those in power (justifying everything from war to environmental destruction to psychological suffering). To develop this critique, Cazdyn has built what he calls a “Blindspot Machine”–a rotating rig consisting of four cameras, that, instead of exposing blindspots produces a new theory of the blindspot itself…one that can be mobilized as a unifying principle of radical film, politics, and intellectual work. In this iteration of the Blindspot Machine project, Cazdyn will screen his newest film (The Blindspot Variations IV, shot in Italy), accompanied by a live lecture that connects the problem of the blindspot to cinema, surveillance, forensic desire, the refugee crisis, theories of temporality (including the Buddhist category of Ma, or negative time-space) as well as to the relation between theory and practice itself.

Eric Cazdyn is a professor at the University of Toronto, where he teaches in the Centre for Comparative Literature and the Department of East Asian Studies. He has written the following books: The Already Dead (Duke 2012); After Globalization (with Imre Szeman, Wiley-Blackwell 2011); The Flash of Capital (Duke 2002); and is editor of Trespasses (Duke 2010). In his most recent book, Nothing (with Marcus Boon and Timothy Morton, University of Chicago Press 2015), Cazdyn re-thinks the concept of praxis within Buddhism, Marxism and Psychoanalysis. Cazdyn is also a filmmaker and over the past five years has been engaged in a multi-faceted project called “The Blindspot Variations,” that experiments with the live-essay-film.

Perhaps the best way to identify an epoch is to search for the “contradictions” (antagonisms) that traverse it. This conference will focus on three of them that define our historical moment: the inconsistencies and tensions of sexual politics (transgender movement, MeToo, etc.); the philosophical tension between scientific naturalism and a dimension supposed to escape it; and the controversies about the forthcoming (ecological, economic, social) apocalypse – is the threat real or just a projection of our inability to deal with the new situation?

Presentations

• Alenka Zupančič, “Sex is Disappointing”
• Slavoj Žižek, “Ernst Lubitsch I: From Indirectness to Ratatatata”
• Alenka Zupančič, “Apocalypse is Disappointing”
• Mladen Dolar, “The Slaughterhouse of Language”
• Slavoj Žižek, “Ernst Lubitsch II: Cynicism, Humor, and Engagement”
• Mladen Dolar, “Endgame of Aesthetics, from Hegel to Beckett”

In the context of Fredric Jameson’s seminar Althusser or Lukacs?, we held a one-day conference on Saturday December 3rd, 2016. We had three visitors who shared their views on the works of Althusser: Caren Irr, Professor of English from Brandeis University; Warren Montag, Brown Family Professor of Literature from Occidental College; and Jason Read, Associate Professor of Philosophy from University of Southern Maine.

Presentations

• Fredric Jameson, “Spectroscopies of Ideology: Althusser & Bachelard”
• Caren Irr, “Ideology, Image, Information: Using the Althusserian Apparatus”
• Warren Montag, “Althusser and the Concepts of Materiality and Materialism”
• Jason Read, “Conscienta Sive Ideologia: The Spontaneity of Ideology in and after Althusser”

Hegel’s Science of Logic is one of the strangest and most difficult texts in the history of philosophical or theoretical writing, and as little read and studied as it is central to his entire work (and not only his: both Marx and Lenin studied it intensively). The Institute for Critical Theory invited three scholars who had something new to say about Hegel to present their views in a one-day exchange.

Presentations

• Fredric Jameson, “Hegel and Marxist Literary Criticism”
• Mladen Dolar, “Being and MacGuffin”
• Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda, “The Dash—The Other Side of Absolute Knowledge”