Inhabiting Error: From “Last Christmas” to “Senior’s Last Hour”

Room L140.

media release: This in-person Humanities Without Boundaries lecture 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 Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Ugly Feelings (2005) and Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012), winner of the MLA James Russell Lowell Prize. Her most recent book is Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (2020), which was shortlisted for the Christian Gauss Book Prize, co-winner of the ASAP Book Prize, and a Literary Hub Book of the Year. Ngai is currently working on a book about the affective dimensions of dialectical thinking.