InterCcECT

Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labour, and its central concept of “real abstraction,” implicitly recognized something that has become undeniable today: that environmental crisis is a crisis of thought. As atmospheric carbon increases our basic brain functioning decreases. But in another sense it may have always been a crisis of thought. What if the value form, with its quite literally world-destroying demand for accumulation, has produced for us our mode of abstract thinking? This might include, as Jason Moore as recently suggested, generating the abstract ideas of “Nature” and “Society.”

Join us Monday 29 July, 4pm, to ponder these and other abstractions, with selected readings from Sohn-Rethel, Moore, and Alberto Toscano (and optional David Cunningham).  Red Lion Pub (2446 N Lincoln; Red, Brown, Purple Lines: Fullerton). Contact us for pdfs.

As always, contact us to propose events!

On our calendar:

V21 Collective summer reading groups: THE STATE 22 July
“Political Sentences” InterCcECT miniseminar with special guest Jan Mieszkowski 7 August

Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” is a one-stop guide to everything most promising and most problematic in his thought — from the linguistic construction of meaning to the relationship of human and animal, from the most abstract reflections on the disclosure of Being to a troubling fascination with national identity — all compressed into a simple pair of peasant shoes! Earth and world, world and work, form and shoe – can these relations remain the same after mechanical reproducibility, after the world market, after extinction?

Join us Thursday 27 June, 4pm, at The Map Room.
Readings available upon request to intercept at gmail.

As always, we welcome event proposals and summer accommodates many sessions. Follow us on Facebook for frequent links and commentary.

On our calendar:
June 19: V21 Collective reading group “Equality”
June 21: Marxist Literary Group
July 22: V21 Collective reading group “The State”
July 29: InterCcECT reading session “Real Abstraction”
Aug 7: InterCcECT miniseminar “Political Sentences” with special guest Jan Mieszkowski
Aug 26: V21 Collective reading group “The Planet”

Is the sublime so five minutes ago? So two centuries ago? This mini-seminar explores the extraordinarily discontinuous history of the category of the sublime and loaded examples of it proffered by theorists and critics, as well as how the sublime lines up, easily or not, with its aesthetic “others.” The point of departure will be Hegel’s short account of the sublime, considered in conjunction with passages from Adorno, Benjamin, Rancière, Negri, Newman, and Ngai.

Join InterCcECT for “Their Aesthetic Category: What was the Sublime?” led by ultra special guest Ian Balfour. Contact us for the readings.

Monday 18 March
4pm
UIC Institute for the Humanities
Stevenson Hall (lower level)
701 S Morgan St

Blue Line: UIC/Halsted