For the session of January 2011 we are traveling to the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, where a reading group member receives and introduces us to the current exhibition The Politics of Collecting – The Collecting of Politics. After viewing the exhibition and a simple dinner, we are reading a chapter from the book of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: Touching, Feeling – Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003). Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009) is well known for her writing on queer theory, performativity and also affect.

We are reading the chapter Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins, which is about the work of psychologist Silvan Tomkins, developer of Affect Theory in the 1960s, and more specifically about the affect of shame. In addition we are reading an interview with Lauren Berlant, from Cabinet magazine (fall 2008) on shame. Berlant is Professor of English at the University of Chicago and writes on a.o. public spheres as affect worlds.