The Summer Institute

My first years at the Institute were a sort of anticipated utopia; we were different and we knew the world better.
                                                                                                                                    Leo Lowenthal








The Summer Institute is a working community of younger scholars, who share an intellectual and personal history at Duke University, Swarthmore College, and other institutions, and a commitment to Marxist and materialist theory.  In addition to their annual summer discussions, they have collaborated on panel sessions at national and international conferences and on essay collections.
They also very much like to hike and cook.


June 2001, Keene Valley, New York
Kant, “Idea for a Universal History,” “What is Enlightenment?”
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History
Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century
Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra

June 2002,  Acadia, Maine
Spinoza, The Ethics
Bové and Dufour, The World is Not for Sale

June 2003,  Crescent Beach, Florida
Chow, The Protestant Ethnic
Beaud, A History of Capitalism, 1500-2000
Negri, “Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo”

April, 2004, Durham, North Carolina
“A Sort of Anticipated Utopia: The Ethics and Politics of Collectivity” 
Badiou, Ethics
Heller, “The Frankfurt School”

June, 2005, Keene Valley. New York
David Harvey, The New Imperialism

June, 2006, Keene Valley, New York
Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War
Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's 'On the Concept of History'

The Participants:
Liz Blasco
Susan Hegeman
Caren Irr
Carolyn Lesjak
Chris Pavsek
Michael Rothberg
Rob Seguin
Phil Wegner
Yasemin  Yildiz

Die Nachgeborenen:
Sophie
Owen
Nadia
Mia
Claire
Madeleine
Lonso




                                                                                                                                       

The principle advantagr we derive from things outside us--apart from the experience and knowledge we acquire from observing them and changing them from one form into another--lies in the preservation of our body.  That is why those things are most useful which can feed and maintain it, so that all its parts can perform their function properly.  For the more the body is capable of affecting, and being affected by, external bodies in a great many ways, the more the mind is capable of thinking.
But there seem to be very few things of this kind in Nature.  So to nourish the body in the way required, it is necessary to use many different kinds of food.  Indeed, the body is composed of a great many parts of different natures, which require continuous and varied food so that the whole body may be equally capable of doing everything which can follow from its nature, and consequently, so that the mind may also be equally capable of conceiving many things.
Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics

When we contemplate this display of passions, and consider the historical consequences of their violence and of the irrationality which is associated with them (and even more so with good intentions and worthy aims); when we see the evil, the wickedness, and the downfall of the most flourishing empires the human spirit has created; and when we are moved to profound pity for the untold miseries of individual human beings--we can only end with a feeling of sadness at the transcience of everything. . . . But even as we look upon history as an altar on which the happiness of nations, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals are slaughtered, our thoughts inevitably impel us to ask: to whom, or to what ultimate end have these monstrous sacrfices been made?
                                                     G.W.F. Hegel, "The Philosophical History of the World"




   Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory

   To Those Born After

























Contact us:   Phillip E. Wegner, University of Florida
                   


Last updated 7/20/06