What would “sexual freedom beyond the rule of commodities” look like? By way of starting a conversation, this lecture-performance will take up the task of answering this question from the far end of a discursive nightmare. Across the board, a specter is roaming politics. Be it in debates on allegedly “socialist” economics, on gender equality, on #metoo, on queerness, on cultural appropriation (#danaschutz), on Black Lives Matter, or on gun control, some notion of “freedom” is utilized against a tacit fantasy of “leftist totalitarianism”—the figure of the pink totalitarian.

Join us at e-flux on Wednesday, May 16 at 7pm for the second evening of ArteEast’s spring screening series Films, Facts, and Fiction. The evening features Eric Baudelaire’s latest film Also Known As Jihadi (2017), followed by a video broadcast by the filmmaker recorded esepcially for the event, and live responses to the film by Alia Ayman (filmmaker and PhD student, NYU), Brian Kuan Wood (e-flux journal), and Sarah Rifky (ArteEast).

Penzin’s lecture will take llyenkov’s early speculative work on the “entropic death of the universe” as a starting point from which to salvage the powers of “thinking matter,” while Almborg’s film and conversation with Chehonadskih will engage with llyenkov’s later work on pedagogy, theories of (dis)ability, and the “thinking body”. While both lecture and film propose a materialist understanding of thinking outside the individual, one is located in matter and the universe, and the other in sensuous activity with objects and between people, leading to unique understandings of communism.

It is traditionally thought that the demise of the project of communism was due to the bureaucratization of the commons. Another supposed basis was the supremacy of ideology over grass-roots democracy, which had failed to maintain its agency subject to the rule of party apparatuses.

Join us at e-flux for the New York premiere of The Otolith Group's recent film The Third Part of the Third Measure (2017). The screening will be followed by a discussion with the group's Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, and responses by music scholar George Lewis, and artist and performer travis.