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Sianne Ngai’s “Inhabiting Error: From ‘Last Christmas’ to ‘Senior’s Last Hour’” (November 17th)
Sianne Ngai’s “Inhabiting Error: From ‘Last Christmas’ to ‘Senior’s Last Hour’” (November 17th), © Sianne Ngai
The Department of German at NYU and Deutsches Haus at NYU present “Inhabiting Error: From 'Last Christmas' to 'Senior’s Last Hour'” an NYU German Graduate Student Invited Lecture Series, with a lecture by Sianne Ngai.
The Department of German at NYU and Deutsches Haus at NYU present “Inhabiting Error: From 'Last Christmas' to 'Senior’s Last Hour'” an NYU German Graduate Student Invited Lecture Series, with a lecture by Sianne Ngai, organized by organized by Manuela Ruckdeschel, Raymond Blankenhorn, and Lukas Oberem.
This talk uses a pop song by Wham! and a reading of Marx's Das Kapital 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 Marx and Hegel saw it) and not just an unfortunate tendency of how subjects understand it (as Kant saw it), error must be phenomenologically inhabited in order to be fully understood.
About the participant:
Sianne Ngai is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Her writing has been translated into multiple languages, most recently into German as Das Niedliche und der Gimmick: Zwei ästhetische Kategorien, trans. Christina Dongowski (Leipzig: Merve Verlag, 2022).
Sianne Ngai's “Inhabiting Error: From 'Last Christmas' to 'Senior’s Last Hour'” is funded by the DAAD from funds of the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).
Date and Time: Friday, November 17th 2023, from 5:30 PM-7:00 PM
Location: Deutsches Haus at NYU, 42 Washington Mews, New York, NY
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