Lecture by Sianne Ngai: 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.