"Revisiting Asia as a Method in the 21st Century” by Alex Taek-Gwang Lee

Kritika Kultura, in collaboration with the Literary and Cultural Studies Program and PLUME, invites you to a lecture titled “Revisiting Asia as a Method in the 21st Century,” to be delivered by Alex Taek-Gwang Lee of Kyung Hee University, South Korea. The lecture will take place on 11 July 2025, 3:00–5:00 PM, at the NGF Conference Room, De la Costa Hall, Ateneo de Manila University.

This event offers an opportunity to engage with Alex Taek-Gwang Lee’s latest publication, which explores themes of global capitalism, modernity, decoloniality, and transnational criticism.

Admission is free and open to the public. Please bring a valid ID for campus access. To register, visit https://go.ateneo.edu/KKLectureSeries.

ABSTRACT

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the global disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic, some Western radicals and leftists have declared the death of capitalism—or at least its retreat. Among these claims is the notion that China has transcended capitalism altogether. But what if these declarations misunderstand the very conditions that sustain global capitalism today? In Made in Nowhere, philosopher and cultural theorist Alex Taek-Gwang Lee dismantles the fantasy that capitalism has expired and challenges the illusion that China represents an alternative to it. Drawing on Karl Marx’s original insights into capitalism—its global division of labor, the commodification of life, and the emergence of a new working class—Lee reveals how the Chinese state has, in fact, played the role of capitalism’s unlikely savior since 2008. This lecture invites readers to reconsider the myths surrounding the supposed end of capitalism and the ideological projection of China as its negation. Lee engages critically with contemporary theoretical frameworks, from “supermodernity” and the concept of the multitude to the spectacle of Netflix and Squid Game, to expose how global capitalism continues to reconfigure itself—often under the guise of its own demise. Join us for a provocative discussion that traces how capitalism today is not made in somewhere—but made in nowhere.

BIONOTE

Alex Taek-Gwang Lee is a professor of philosophy and cultural studies and director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies and the Global Centre for Technology in Humanities at Kyung Hee University, South Korea. He has held academic positions as a guest researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences and as a visiting professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics, and Ethics at the University of Brighton (UK) and the Graduate School of the University of Santo Tomas (Philippines). He also served as an academic advisor for the Gwangju Biennale in 2017 and as a program manager for the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2021. His scholarly work includes co-editing the third volume of The Idea of Communism (2016) and Deleuze, Guattari, and the Schizoanalysis of Postmedia (2023), as well as authoring Communism After Deleuze (2025) and Made in Nowhere: Essays on the Asiatic Modes of Existence (2025).

ABOUT KRITIKA KULTURA

Kritika Kultura is acknowledged by a host of Asian and Asian American Studies libraries and scholarly networks and indexed in the MLA International Bibliography, Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Clarivate), Scopus, EBSCO, the Directory of Open Access Journals, and the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (ICCTP). Read KK issues and learn about submission guidelines and events on https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk or email the editors at kk@ateneo.edu.