Sianne Ngai - "Scenes of Error" - Kaplan Critical Conversations in the Humanities

Scenes of Error — Sianne Ngai

(The location for this event to be announced.)

Through meditations on Hegel, "dramatism," and the images of visual artist Ebecho Muslimova, this talk explores the affective dimensions of dialectical thinking, especially as the latter involves the risky act of staging and lingering in scenes of error.

This talk is a Fall 2026 Keynote of the Kaplan Humanities Institute's annual series, Kaplan Conversations in the Critical Humanities. 

About Sianne Ngai

Sianne Ngai is George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature 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 University Press), a Christian Gauss Award finalist, co-winner of the ASAP Book Prize, and a Literary Hub Book of the Year, explores the “gimmick” as a speech act and form encoding a series of interconnected contradictions concerning labor, time, and value. Extending Ngai’s previous investigation of the rise of equivocal aesthetic judgments (such as the merely “interesting”), Theory of the Gimmick explores the uneasy mix of attraction and repulsion produced by the gimmick across a range of forms specific to capitalist culture. 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.

Cost: Free; public welcome

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