This talk uses a pop song by Wham! and a reading of Marx's Capital to explore the stakes of recreating and lingering in wrong ways of thinking. To linger in error is to run the risk of affectively deepening error, expanding the reach of its domain. This is especially the case in a world where truths are hidden by the social forms in which they are expressed, making error an unavoidable part of everyday perception. Yet when contradiction is a part of the world (as Hegel saw it) and not a tendency in reason (as Kant saw it), error must be phenomenologically inhabited in order to be fully understood.

Sianne Ngai is an Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Ngai’s first book, Ugly Feelings (2005, Harvard University Press), is considered a key work of affect theory for its focus on politically ambiguous, non-cathartic negative emotions—envy and irritation as opposed to anger and fear. Her second book, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012, Harvard University Press), which won the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize, argues for the contemporary centrality of three everyday aesthetic categories, which are approached with the same philosophical seriousness given to the beautiful and sublime. Ngai’s most recent book, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (2020, The Belknap Press of Harvard UP), explores the “gimmick” as a speech act and form encoding a series of interconnected contradictions concerning labor, time, and value. Ngai’s work is most broadly concerned with the analysis of aesthetic forms and judgments specific to capitalism. She is currently working on Ugly Thinking, a book about the affective dimensions of dialectical thought and the ways in which Marx, Hegel, and a number of writers and artists inhabit error.

New Tendencies in Critical Theory is a series hosted by program coordinators in Comparative Literature, Comparative Cultural Analysis, and RMA Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Supported by ASCA and NICA.

For questions, please contact Jeff Diamanti (J.diamanti@uva.nl) or Marija Cetinic (m.cetinic@uva.nl).