Magic Mountain Talks

Michael Hardt on Empire, Multitude, Antonio Negri, and the subversive seventies, in conversation with Rachel Kushner
2027-02-25 18:00 - 20:00 (America/Denver) | Trident Booksellers & Cafe, 940 Pearl St., Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
Michael Hardt teaches political theory in the Literature Program at Duke University. His works combine philosophical investigations with analyses of our current political situation. Studying the current forms of social domination, including the mechanisms of capitalist control, which form the bases of the contemporary global power structures, is a central focus. Key, too, is engagement with contemporary social movements that refuse domination and present the potential for new, democratic modes of social organization. His first book was Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (1993). Over the course of several decades, his collaborations with Antonio Negri resulted in six books: Labor of Dionysus (1994), Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), Commonwealth (2009), Declaration (2012), and Assembly (2017). His latest book, The Subversive Seventies (2023), analyzes liberation movements of the 1970s in a wide range of countries throughout the world, highlighting their relevance for political struggles today.

Rachel Kushner is the author of the novels CREATION LAKE, THE MARS ROOM, THE FLAMETHROWERS, and TELEX FROM CUBA, a book of short stories, THE STRANGE CASE OF RACHEL K, and THE HARD CROWD: ESSAYS 2000-2020. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books have been translated into twenty-seven languages. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker and the Paris Review, and her nonfiction in Harpers and the New York Times Magazine.

Arne Höcker on paranoia and the totalitarian drift of modernity, in conversation with Lilla Balint and Benjamin Kunkel
2027-03-18 18:00 - 20:00
Arne Höcker is Associate Professor of German Studies at CU Boulder. His publications include The Case of Literature: Forensic Narratives from Goethe to Kafka (Cornell UP 2020), and Paranoia and the Totalitarian Drift of Modernity (Cornell UP 2026).

Lilla Balint is Assistant Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century German literature, culture, and thought in its transnational European contexts. Her work has appeared in venues such as Critical Quarterly, German Quarterly, Gegenwartsliteratur: A German Studies Year Book, and Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature, among others. She is coeditor of Text + Kritik 244—Judith Schalansky (2024). Her monograph The Contemporary: History and Temporality after 1989 is forthcoming with De Gruyter.

Benjamin Kunkel is the bestselling author of Indecision and Utopia or Bust, and a co-founder of n+1. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books.

This event is made possible by CU Boulder’s 2026 Kayden Book Award.
