Inhabiting Error: From “Last Christmas” to “Senior’s Last Hour”: A Lecture by Sianne Ngai

Name: Inhabiting Error: From “Last Christmas” to “Senior’s Last Hour”: A Lecture by Sianne Ngai
Start: 2026-06-01T18:00:00+02:00
Location: ul. Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28, 00-927 Warsaw, Poland

Schedule

Mon, 01 Jun, 2026 at 06:00 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

ul. Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28, 00-927 Warsaw, Poland | Warsaw, MZ

Please join us for a lecture by Professor Sianne Ngai (University of Chicago):
Inhabiting Error: From “Last Christmas” to “Senior’s Last Hour”
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 George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Ugly Feelings (2005), Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012), and Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (2020), all from Harvard University Press. She is currently working on a new book on the affective and aesthetic dimensions of dialectical thinking.

Institute of Polish Culture
University of Warsaw
Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28
Room 5