Zia Gluhbegivic,Unit for Criticism SCT Fellow, Summer 2007
On her experience at S.C.T.

Theory Camp in Ithaca Gorges: the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell provides an unforgettable experience of intensive intellectual exchange and dynamic networking in the picturesque setting of the Finger Lake region. I was fortunate to become part of Marjorie Levinson’s close-knit seminar on Spinoza, Romanticism and Cognitive Science. As beginner Spinozists, twenty graduate students and junior scholars, working in diverse fields ranging from literary studies through architecture to mathematics, interacted day and night, in seminar rooms and coffee shops, tackling the concepts of affect, conatus,emergent network, co-evolution, structural coupling, chaos and complexity. In the context of three other long seminars and four mini-seminars, all of them explicitly political and urging practical activism, our seminar appeared isolated in theoretical sophistication. However, our discussions had a twofold political goal: by examining the conceptual niceties of form, structure, closure and genre, we endeavored to theorize a new formalism that would dialectically combine close reading and materialist historicism and rethink Romanticism in the context of the Enlightenment; we also applied Spinoza-informed immanent critique of ideology to articulate the mechanisms of formation and interaction of collective entities. We had the continuous challenge of engaging other participants and speakers at mini-seminars, public lectures, cocktails and informal study sessions, putting our work into conversation with discourses of trauma and witnessing, transnationalism, affective lives of colonial archives, indigeneity and globalization, evangelical capitalism, religious tolerance and equality, Talmudic dialogism and Gramsci’s educational theory. While making lifelong friends with fellow doctoral students from all over the world, we also had the rare opportunity to have individual meetings with such intellectual luminaries as Daniel Boyarin, Martha Nussbaum, Gayatri Spivak, William Connolly, Jonathan Culler and Stanley Fish, as well as our seminar leaders, and the presiding spirit of the Theory Camp, Dominick LaCapra.