Skip to content

Categories

Sianne Ngai

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

Tuesday, April 21, 2026, 5:00–6:30pm

Social Science Research Building Tea Room
1126 E. 59th St., 2nd Floor
map

Register here

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.

This event is free and open to the public, and registration is recommended. Please email us at ccct@uchicago.edu if you require any accommodations to enable your full participation.

Sianne Ngai is an Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Chicago, and a fellow of 3CT. Her work is most broadly concerned with the analysis of aesthetic forms and judgments specific to capitalism. Ngai is the author of Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Harvard University Press, 2012), and Ugly Feelings (Harvard University Press, 2005). Ngai’s work has been translated into multiple languages, and she has received fellowships from the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin and the American Council of Learned Societies. She co-edited, with Lauren Berlant, a special issue of Critical Inquiry on Comedy (2017). Ngai has also taught at the Cornell School for Criticism and Theory and Sci-Arch, The Southern California Institute for Architecture.