This week – don’t miss this lecture !!!!
The Irrationality of Labour: Robert Kurz and the Meaning of the Critique of Work Today
Alastair Hemmens | Cardiff University
Tuesday 22ndOctober 2019
6.30pm – 8.00pm | Grand Parade, M2 Boardroom
ALL WELCOME
Abstract:
A plethora of works have been published over the course of the past decades or so since the 2008 financial crisis that purport to offer a ‘critical’ stance towards work. These texts include Peter Fleming’s The Mythology of work, Frayne’s The Refusal of Work, and Srnicek and Williams’ Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work. The appearance of these more critical approaches to labour speaks to a sense that all is not right with the world of work. Nevertheless, this paper will speak to the limitations of these ‘critiques of work’, which, like previous examples in intellectual and political history, in reality generally limit themselves to a critique of this or that empirical phenomena associated with labour, rather than advance a critique of work as such. Drawing on the critical theory of the late Wertkritiktheorist Robert Kurz, this paper will explore what a genuinely radical critique of work should consist in today, that is, a categorical critique of work as an historically specific, destructive and irrational abstract social form that has progressively and brutally imposed itself on human activity over the course of the past five centuries.
Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics
Public Lecture Series HAS THE FUTURE BEEN CANCELLED?
Forthcoming speakers in this lecture series:
19.11.19 Michael Heinrich, ‘The Actuality of Marx’s Communism’
3.12.19 Esther Leslie, ‘Fog, Foam and Froth: On Fascism Today and its Atmospheres’
14.1.20 Aaron Bastani, title T.B.C.
4.2.20 Patricia McManus, ‘Adorno: Back to Commitment’
18.2.20 Benjamin Noys, title T.B.C.
3.3.20 Ray Brassier, ‘The Human’
17.3.20 Sara Farris, ‘The Problem with Left Nationalism’
