The Cooper Union Interdisciplinary Seminar

the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar

Robert Hullot-Kentor

Severe Clear

This lecture took place on September 8th, 2011 at 7:30 pm in the The Rose Auditorium at the Cooper Union

Lecture introduction

Immediately after the economic collapse of 2008, and months prior to Obama’s election—when I was last invited to speak at Cooper Union—the topic of the discussion here, A New Type of Human Being and Who We Really Are, was the loss of the seminal insight from which the whole of radical modernism developed: the insight into the primitive in ourselves and in the world around us.

The overarching point of the discussion was this: The historical dynamic that once made the insight into the primitive possible has now consumed this very same insight, while the momentum of the dynamic itself has in no way been assuaged.

Now, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, in the midst of a sudden deepening of the economic crisis, which will partly or entirely overshadow the occasion, we hear raised from every corner primordial demands for the necessity of sacrifice and self-infliction as the only adequate response to the gravity of the situation. The intensification of the economic calamity itself has by any measure been intentional, while nationwide the only voices that carry self-evidence are those that call for austerity and that every budget be “cut.”

The moment thus urgently prompts the question of whether a seminal insight that has lapsed—the insight into the primitive, as the only perception that would adequately call this moment by name—can be recovered.

Severe Clear—the weather alert issued to pilots on September 11th, 2001—is an excursus to this question, as an examination of the sacral edifice that is now being constructed in lower Manhattan.

About Robert Hullot-Kentor

Robert Hullot-Kentor is the chair of the graduate program in Critical Theory and the Arts at SVA.

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