Enlightenment Reloaded

Instructor: Reza Negarestani
Program: Critical Philosophy, History, Design, Worldmaking, Transdisciplinary Studies
Credit(s): 1
Date: February 27th, March 6th, 20, 27
Time: 14:00-16:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: This module–in line with the past New Centre Seminar Cartesian Conflagrations– examines Descartes and in addition Spinoza–the heretic Jewish prince of philosophy–as the revolutionary progenitors of a radical Enlightenment. In doing so, this Seminar challenges fatigued interpretations with which the project of Enlightenment in its Cartesian lineage is often associated with: mind-body dualism and rigid rationalism among others. We will explore how Descartes’s mature philosophy initiated a stark philosophical movement that posed the greatest challenge to Aristotelian scholasticism, where philosophy had become subordinated to a branch of sciences with inbuilt blindspots with regard to where they have come from and where they are headed. The Seminar traces Descartes’s schema for rational computational mechanics back to the systematization of perennial philosophical ideas, from Plato’s dialectica to Euclid’s geometric codification of it, and subsequently, al-Khwarizmi’s algorithmic take on the latter where ‘Thus Spake the Algorithm’ (by which the first Latin translation of al-Khwarizmi’s begins) is more akin to a profound distillation of philosophy’s revolutionary ideas than an AI-informed ratification of a legacy of the Enlightenment that has been usurped and now is being taken for granted.
To this end, central to our investigation are the methods and ethics put forward by Descartes and Spinoza as armamentariums of an authentic Enlightenment–by all means, an emancipatory and revolutionary labor in its inception–that has been hijacked by a surviving scholastic counter-revolutionary force that was never fully quashed. This counter-revolutionary force as we shall investigate has moved through the likes of Thomas Hobbes to Immanuel Kant at which point the project of the Enlightenment simply finds itself settled and rested upon mere conciliatory epistemological or knowledge acquisition problems riddled with ad hoc and arbitrary political and religious addendums whose major purpose is to whitewash over the false-hearted spirit of this appropriated Enlightenment we have inherited.
Session 1, The Hijacking of Enlightenment and Historical Disasters: This Session examines how the original revolutionary Enlightenment vision was hijacked by counter-revolutionary forces, leading to concrete historical disasters through scientific and political crises. We analyze the critical juncture where science’s emancipatory role began to fracture and how counter-emancipatory tendencies masqueraded as legitimate Enlightenment offshoots. Students explore the social, economic, technological, and political consequences of this hijacking process.
Session 2, Contemporary Scientific Crisis and False Paths: Students investigate how uncritical adoption of natural sciences as paradigms creates significant internal and external crises within scientific frameworks themselves. We examine the dangerous bifurcation between narrow scientistic reduction and anti-modern reactions, both betraying authentic Enlightenment principles. The Session analyzes how essentialist biases resurface under Enlightenment guises, creating hysterically bipolar historical unfolding.
Session 3, The Technical Parasite and Ideological Overdetermination: This Session explores how contemporary Enlightenment has mutated into a technical parasite through empty technological mastery and liberal economic manipulation. We analyze how this strain mimics authentic Enlightenment vision while remaining anti-revolutionary, especially in AI discourse within capitalist frameworks. Students examine how absent critique of images leads to ideological overdetermination and imaginative indeterminacy.
Session 4, Pathways for Enlightenment Recovery: The final Session investigates concrete pathways for recovering authentic Enlightenment as an emancipatory project accountable to its philosophical history. We explore why neutral scientific conceptions are no longer tenable and how excluding revolutionary voices leads to militarized imperialism with pseudo-resistance. Students develop strategies for standing up to images of power while correcting modernity’s trajectory toward genuine emancipatory ambitions.

IMAGE: Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates, 1787

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