Enlightenment Reloaded

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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The Organisation of Nature:
Trends in Theoretical Biology and Cognitive Science

DESCRIPTION: Evolutionary biology is undergoing a profound theoretical shift, one in which dialectical principles—closely tied to organicism—are regaining centrality. These ideas are being reintegrated into a transformed scientific landscape, where new methodological tools make their study more viable than before. This move away from genocentric biology coincides with, informs, and is informed by parallel developments in cognitive science, particularly the enactive approach to mind and cognition. Moreover, it carries significant implications for philosophy of science, enabling a more reflexive, systematic, and critical framework—one in which the principles derived from scientific content can be applied to the study of scientific practice itself.
This Seminar seeks to reconstruct these emerging trends and explicitly link them to dialectics (in form and content), which is being taken up—implicitly or explicitly—by key researchers across these fields. To accomplish this, we will proceed in a circular fashion: from the history and theory of biology, to questions in systems theory and philosophy of mind, and back again. In doing so, we will articulate a renewed naturalism and philosophy of nature capable of bridging philosophy and science—ultimately confronting what Frank, Thompson, and Gleisner (2024) term the scientific blind spot.
Session 1, Modern Synthesis or Extended Synthesis?: The debate over the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis is somewhat confused, given the inchoate nature of the framework it seeks to replace. Is the Modern Synthesis a coherent paradigm, a mutable research agenda, or a philosophy of nature? We examine Betty Smocovitis’ historical critique (1992, 2023) to ask whether these shifts demand a new philosophy of nature, or merely reflect biology’s inherent tensions. We pay special attention to Lewontin’s claim that the organism is both subject and object of evolution, a dialectical tension central to the Seminar’s framework.
Readings: Smocovitis, “Unifying Biology”; “Every Evolutionist Their Own Historian”; Walsh & Sultan, “The Agential Perspective”; Lewontin, “The Organism as Subject and Object of Evolution”.
Session 2, Dialectical Biology and the Organisational Approach: Organicism, revived in the organisational view, challenges more limited frameworks (e.g., cybernetics) and aligns with dialectical traditions from Hegel to Levins and Lewontin. We explore how this approach reframes autonomy, closure, and causality in living systems—and why moving beyond operational closure (autopoiesis) to organisational closure matters for a dialectical philosophy of nature that takes us beyond dynamical systems theory.
Readings: Haldane, “A Dialectical Account of Evolution”; Gambarotto & Illetterati, “Hegel’s Philosophy of Biology?”; Jaeger, “The Fourth Perspective”; Kauffman, “Eros and Logos”; Mossio, “Organization as a Scientific Blind Spot”.
Session 3, Life-Mind Continuity: Dialectics and Enactivism: How does dialectical biology inform theories of cognition? We examine enactivism’s recent turn toward dialectics, asking whether a reformulated notion of natural normativity, rooted in biology, can escape neo-Aristotelian teleology. We outline what this means for a materialist theory of mind—and how it strengthens the ontological footing of philosophy of mind.
Readings: Di Paolo, “Evald Ilyenkov and the Enactive Approach”; “F/acts”; Ilyenkov, “Dialectics of the Ideal”; Illetterati, “Science as Experience of Freedom”; Gambarotto & Mossio, “Hegel and Enactivism”.
Session 4, Facing the Blind Spot: Towards a New Kind of Science: How can dialectical principles critically inform our understanding of scientific practice? We study how recent insights from biology and cognitive science may take us in the direction of a political philosophy of mind and science; moreover, we chart how this reflexive and interdisciplinary approach may address the so-called scientific blind spot: experience.
Readings: Slaby, “Political Philosophy of Mind”; Gambarotto & Van Es, “An Enactive Account of Labour”; Pradeu, “Philosophy in Science”; Frank, Thompson, and Gleisner, The Blind Spot; de Oliveira, van Es, and Hipólito, “Scientific Practice as Ecological-Enactive Co-construction”.

IMAGE: Pierre Huyghe, Zoodram 4, 2011

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Lyotard and Non-Human Language in the Age of LMMs

DESCRIPTION: Large Language Models present us with a new and shattering perspective on language that forces us to put into question our assumptions on the meaning of terms such as thinking and speaking, as they are traditionally linked to the idea of subjectivity. In this seminar we will shed some light on what language is for neural networks through the lenses of Lyotard's anticipatory reflections on the emergence of a non-anthropocentric conception of language.

We will first introduce the view on language that emerges from Le Différend: to master language amounts to correctly enchaining words one after one another according to rules that depend on use, something that a statistical machine could do. From this standpoint, language is not the means of expression of a subject, but the subject is an effect of modes of linking words. We will then see how Lyotard develops this view in the exhibition Les Immatériaux (Centre Pompidou 1985). Here, the philosopher was interested in computer technologies and the way in which they challenge the modern conception of language as well as the status of the subject. The beginning of the internet era, which the philosopher witnessed, invites us, in fact, to rethink the role of humans within an ontology in which everything (including humans) is a more or less complex interface in the global communication network. Finally, we will consider the conception of language that follows the process of vectorization and embedding that allows, today, the deployment of LLMs (large language models). We will see how current natural language processing technologies achieved the non-modern and non-anthropocentric way of conceiving language that Lyotard was invoking while subverting his expectations. We will discuss the promises and risks implied by the vectorization of language, in particular, we will question the social and political consequences of the uses and abuses of the automated system for linguistic production.

Session 1: Le Différend / Readings: Excerpts from The Differend; "In reading your work..." in Jean-François Lyotard: The Interviews and Debates, edited by Kiff Bamford, Bloomsbury 2020.

Session 2: Les Immatériaux / Readings: Lyotard, "After Six Months of Work..." in 30 Years after Les Immatériaux, edited by Y. Hui and A. Broeckmann, Meson Press, 2015; "Les Immatériaux: A Staging" in Jean-François Lyotard: The Interviews and Debates, edited by Kiff Bamford, Bloomsbury 2020; "Les Immatériaux: A Conversation with Jean-François Lyotard" in Lyotard's Interviews on Les Immatériaux, edited by A. Broeckmann and S. Meijide Casas, Les Immatériaux Research, Working Paper No. 11, 2024.

Session 3: The Vectorization of Language / Readings: Juan Luis Gastaldi, "Why Can Computers Understand Natural Language?" Philosophy & Technology, 2021, 34(1), pp. 149–214; Gregory Chatonski, "Vectorial Politics."

Session 4: Students' Presentations /

IMAGE: Julieta Aranda, As the Ground Becomes Exposed, 2016

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The Revenge of Reason:
On Inference and its Consequences

DESCRIPTION: What is the fate of Reason in the twenty-first century? Is its invocation nothing but a cipher for earthly powers that diffuse and retrench as the political terrain shifts, or is Reason the only force capable of eroding the unthinking intuitions upon which those powers thrive? Can it be mobilized into concrete systems of uncommon sense, collective weapons to dispatch all self-serving rationalizations and vacuously 'reasonable' banalities? Or will it be dissolved without remainder in the Bayesian dance of expected utility? This Workshop outlines a Neorationalist conception of Reason that resists postmodern critique and Bayesian dissolution alike. Deploying a collection of texts written over more than fifteen years, it presents an integrated philosophical perspective that delves into the epistemic, semantic, and logical mysteries of inference and extrapolates their metaphysical, aesthetic, and ethical consequences. Lectures will explore theoretical tendencies such as Prometheanism, Inhumanism, and Computationalism, and address questions ranging from 'What is a game?' and 'What is the value of art?' to 'What is real?' and 'Why does anything matter?'
Almost all session readings are taken directly from The Revenge of Reason. The rest will be made available. Readings in bold are mandatory; the others are recommended.

Session 1: Introduction / Neorationalism in Outline, 'On Neorationalism', 'Prometheanism and Rationalism'
'Philosophy and Normativity'
Session 2: Computational Kantianism / 'On Transcendental Logic', 'On Computational Asymmetry'

Session 3: Inferentialism and Inhumanism / 'The Reformatting of Homo Sapiens', 'Artificial Bodies and the Promise of Abstraction'

Session 4: Hegelian Minimalism / 'Essay on Transcendental Realism', 'The Greatest Mistake'

Session 5: Biology and its Discontents / 'Beyond Survival', 'Incarnation'

Session 6: Personhood and its Problems / 'On Containing Multitudes', 'Not So Humble Pie'

Session 7: Art and Agency / 'Art and Value', 'What's in a Game?'

Session 8: Beauty and Freedom / 'Why Does Anything Matter?', 'The Weight of Forever'

IMAGE: Matt Bovingdon, Revenge of Reason, 2025

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Autism and Civilization

DESCRIPTION: Taking the cue from Foucault, this Seminar will look at autism as a flash point within discourse about biology, politics, and culture. Since its description in the early 1900s as a form of childhood schizophrenia, autism has rapidly transformed and shifted from a developmental "catastrophe," to the result of emotionless parents, to environmentally caused, to part of a larger neurodiversity movement. The Seminar will look at how autism has activated and reactivated mad activism, the neoliberalism of neurodiversity, and the questions of biopolitics and the function of norms in contemporary life.

Session 1: From the Ship of Fools to the Hospital Ship / Much panic around autism relies on pathologization and the weaponization of statistics against the condition. The first session will examine how autism was constructed as a kind of general loss of reason and autonomy from within classifications of schizophrenia and psychosis.
Readings: Chapters from Neurotribes; excerpt from The Hospital Ship; Preface to Foucault's Madness and Civilization

Session 2: T.O.M., Tommy, and Sally-Anne / Theory of Mind and Theory of the Self / A central aspect of the diagnosis and medical articulation of autism in the late 1980s and 1990s was the assertion that autistic individuals lacked any notion of sense of self and therefore were incapable of empathy. Here philosophy of mind and psychology mask for cultural norms, particularly prevalent in the way theory of mind (TOM) is treated as psychological fact. We will also explore alternative understandings of theory of mind, such as narrative theory and monotropism.
Readings: Essays from Simon Baron-Cohen and Devon Price; excerpts from Empire of Normality (Chapman)

Session 3: Neanderthals, Animals, and Aliens / Another aspect of the study of autism revolves around splitting autistic humans off from neurotypical humanity. This has been done through associations with Neanderthal DNA on the one hand and by claiming that neurodivergent people are more akin to animals or aliens from another planet. These themes have also at times fed into notions of "Aspie supremacy" or constructions of autistic identity as something superior to allistic or neurotypical individuals.
Readings: The Arachnean (Ferdinand Deligny); "Enrichment of a Subset of Neanderthal Polymorphisms in Autistic Probands and Siblings" (Pauly et al.)

Session 4: Vaccines and Memes, or Autism as Culture Machine / This final session will look at the most recent aspects of autistic identity in the cultural and political present. Increased advocacy by way of neurodivergence has been met with rejuvenated forms of eugenics as well as the discussion of autistic children at the expense of autistic adults. This infantilization of autism has been appropriated by groups as disparate as right-wing mothers of autistic children to reality TV producers. Lastly, we will address the specter of vaccines which refuses to die.
Readings: "Vaccines and Autism: A Measured Response" (hbomberguy); "Ileal-Lymphoid-Nodular Hyperplasia, Non-Specific Colitis, and Pervasive Developmental Disorder in Children" (Andrew Wakefield)

IMAGE: Francisco Goya, Witches’ Flight, ca. 1798.

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Necrophilanthropy:
Nonprofit Killers and the Carceral State

DESCRIPTION:Indebted to the benevolence of grantmakers and one-percenters, liberal 501(c)(3) organizations have consistently absorbed, defanged, and profited from radical movements for social transformation over the past forty years. From a workers' perspective, the web of public and private interests that constitute the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC) might be experienced as constant negotiations between domination and subjugation, exploitation and genuine pleasure. "Necrophilanthropy," the neologism at the heart of this Seminar, invokes necropolitics and necrophilia to probe deeper into the seductive death drive of capital.

The first half of the Seminar surveys the NPIC's structural underpinnings through lecture and discussion, from the late-nineteenth-century "scientific charity" movement through the fall of the welfare state and rise of mass incarceration. We then narrow in on art and culture to historicize the 1990s rise of "social practice," examine how artists have been instrumentalized to beautify the carceral system, look at the contemporary wave of (arts) nonprofit labor struggle, and the US “nonprofit killer” bill—planning to revoke nonprofit status of organizations deemed to be “terrorist supporting” with no recourse, targeting even the most mild Palestine solidarity. These factors and more have brought the liberal 501(c)(3) to its current existential crossroads.

The second half of the Seminar will be responsive to the particular needs and interests of participants. Collaborative student presentations may use case studies, power mapping, and lived experiences to consider what it means to evade mechanisms of elite capture. The Seminar will culminate with individual final works in the form of an essay, presentation, direct action, or workshopping a speculative organization. Themes of death and seduction will remain front and center as we strive toward a range of artistic, administrative, and agitational strategies toward the question of how cultural production, within or against the NPIC, can be materially useful to revolutionary movement work today.

We will study materials by artists and thinkers like Robert Allen, Chloë Bass, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Larne Abse Gogarty, Jarrod Shanahan & Zhandarka Kurti, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, and Jeniffer Wolch. Readings and other assignments will be adjusted based on collective capacity. Artists and cultural workers—salariat or precariat, waged or unwaged—are particularly encouraged to register, though we are eager to study with folks from other sectors who are interested in the broader themes.

Week 1. Pre-reading: Mbembe’s “Necropolitics” chapter 3 (2019), Rodríguez’s “The political logic of the non-profit industrial complex” (2016) (also: introduction to Kurti/Shanahan’s “Skyscraper Jails,” Shanahan’s “Explosive Elements Beneath the Surface of the City of New York”). Review syllabus, requirements, deadlines. Lecture: intro to necropolitics & nonprofit industrial complex, NPIC early history.

Week 2. Pre-reading: Allen’s “Black Awakening in Capitalist America” excerpt (1969), Gilmore’s “In the shadow of the shadow state” (2016), introduction to Gogarty’s “Usable Pasts” (2022), Petrossiants / Arts Workers Inquiry zine excerpt (2025). NPIC history continued 1930s-today via art/culture. Film discussion.

Week 3. Student text presentations (anti-work horizons, ideal alternatives, power research, organizing methods).

Week 4. Necrophilanthropy reflections, flexible for leftover reading/lecture discussions, briefly share final works.

IMAGE: Live Aid Concert, 1984

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Post-Accelerationism:
Futurity between Time and Space

DESCRIPTION: There have been a number of recent attempts at taking stock of Speculative Realism on one side, and of Accelerationism on the other (including the fashioning of new labels: cute/acc, psychotic acc, effective acc, etc.). But from the ashes of that intellectual constellation that formed sometime between 2006, the release date of Meillassoux's After Finitude, and 2015's Xenofeminist Manifesto, including the re-release of Nick Land's texts from the 90s and the launch of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, it is Left Accelerationism that is mostly left out of any serious engagement. Coined in 2013 by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, the term was very rapidly dropped by its own proponents and never appears in their 2015 book Inventing the Future.

This Workshop tackles, if not some influences, some resonances of the specifically left accelerationist constellation from the time on more recent political and intellectual endeavors. With its demand for imagining a new future compatible with abstraction and scientific rationality, the ideas of the Manifesto resonated and took on different guises, some mostly convergent, some only partially so. Starting from a close reading of the MAP and of the Xenofeminist Manifesto, the Workshop shifts emphasis in the middle sessions from the temporal futurity announced in these attempts to a spatialized future harboured by the critics that come from the point of view of the Global periphery. Instead of these provoking a blank rejection of the tenets of L/Acc, the Workshop rekindles its wager on abstraction from a more globally spatialized point of view.

Session 1: Introduction to MAP / The first session is a close reading of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics and of the XF Manifesto, tracing its immediate intellectual influences in Marxist critique of political economy, CCRU-era accelerationist writing, Speculative Realist attempts to rekindle scientific rationality within continental philosophy, and gender politics in xenofeminism. The critique of localist politics is given precedence in the session.

Session 2: Neorationalism / One important mutation is called "epistemic accelerationism," referred to in many writings of the 2013–15 years. Stemming from the connection between the political ideals of L/Acc and the epistemological program coming from the scientific realist wing of Speculative Realism, neorationalism is traced in its program of inferential unpacking of the consequences of Reason and of the Human (as inhumanism) in a few important texts of the time.

Session 3: The Real Abstraction Constellation / In 2008, with the publication of "The Open Secret of Real Abstraction," Alberto Toscano paved the way for the revitalization of the Sohn-Rethelian thesis of real abstraction in the Anglo-American continental milieu. Reflexes of the dissemination of these theses can be seen already in the Speculative Aesthetics volume, out in 2014, where many of the speakers, including Srnicek, Williams, Brassier, and Fisher, among others, mention the real abstraction hypothesis as a way out of the problems put forward by the left-accelerationist espousal of abstraction (a mention that came way too early to be registered at the time).

Session 4: Futurity as Time and as Space / While not a signatory of the Manifesto, the works of Mark Fisher are given place of prominence in the fourth session as defining a new set of attempts to rekindle "Post-Capitalist Desire" and "the Communist Hypothesis" as Badiou and Žižek would have it. With this, the Workshop arrives at a juncture where the point of view of the periphery as depicted in the works of Roberto Schwarz and Paulo Arantes becomes relevant to think of any kind of post-capitalist futurity. The parallax is important: while Fisher wants a new orientation towards the future, these Brazilian authors suggest that the future of capitalist experimentation is to be found in the peripheries of the World System, issuing a challenge to any Global North-led understanding of the dynamics of contemporary capital (a charge that was all too soon led against L/Acc). Here the debate between left-accelerationism and communization theory as led by Ray Brassier can put us on track to a theory of transition in its relation to organizational issues.

IMAGE: #Accelerate Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, 2013

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Understanding Microclimates

DESCRIPTION: In this Seminar, we will be studying microclimates. Microclimates are regions of heightened atmospheric variability that generate divergent forms of life. In ecological terms, microclimates emerge from complex interactions among the physical conditions of a place, such as winds, water currents, temperature, humidity, and terrain. Yet, moving beyond a materialist paradigm, microclimates may also be composed of immaterial aspects like sensations, images, thoughts, and perhaps entities. This seminar asks, what becomes possible if we expand our understanding of microclimates to include the immaterial alongside the elemental? To approach this question, we will enter into several microclimates where thought, image, and sensation interfuse with and shape variations on the surrounding environment: The Antipodes of Unity, Eshraq, and Land of Birds. The Antipodes of Unity arises from a convalescing writer’s immersion in fields, forests, and visions of the night sky. Eshraq appears where computation and virtual worlds intersect with Persian philosophy and myth in a contemporary cityscape. And Land of Birds seeks to restore the land’s connection with indigenous memory and cosmology in a local park, through story and sound. By cultivating nascent microclimates through our own research and multimedia projects, we will explore potentials for inhabiting spaces where the elemental and immaterial converge – not in isolation, but amid the broader currents of a “world of many worlds.”

Session 1. The Antipodes of Unity
–Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics”
–Blaise Cendrars, “At the Antipodes of Unity”

Session 2. Eshraq
–Samir Mahmoud, “‘Alam al-Mithal or Mundus Imaginalis”
–Ali Eslami, Eshraq

Session 3. Land of Birds
–Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, “Pluriverse”
–Djaara storytellers with Olivia Guntarik, Land of Birds

Session 4. Microclimates
–The final session is reserved for in-depth discussion of seminar participants’ work.

Group Assignment: For the second or third week, find an example of a microclimate and share it with us.
Final Assignment: For the final week, present your exploration of microclimates using the medium of your choice.

IMAGE: Pierre Huyghe, Camata, 2024.

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Hegel and the Dialectic of Freedom and Necessity

DESCRIPTION: Are we the authors of our own actions and decisions? Or are we always already determined, conditioned, and influenced by our social, historical, cultural, and economic environs such that our agency is merely a reflection of these processes? This Seminar tackles these questions head-on by engaging with G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel was a radical and incisive thinker whose ideas have shaped the face of political philosophy and critical theory. With questions of political agency and free will as urgent as ever, this Seminar examines Hegel's ideas of freedom and the weight they carry in the political, economic, and social contexts of the 21st century by engaging with my book Freedom, in Context: Time, History, and Necessity in Hegel (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Examining the concept of freedom from a Hegelian Marxist perspective, I demonstrate that the essential relation between self-determination and causal necessity in Hegel's thought is a multifaceted process to be viewed through historical, temporal, logical, and ontological lenses. Using examples from the Black Lives Matter movement, environmental justice, economic inequality, and democratic uprisings in Iran, the value of Hegel's philosophy is emphasised in contexts beyond the colonial, Eurocentric tendencies of his worldview. Emphasizing the central role of temporality and history in the conception of free will gives this new reading of Hegel real practical import for the pressing political issues of our time.

Session 1: Introduction(s) and the Problem of Freedom in Modern European Thought / An introduction to the Seminar by a general presentation of the core philosophical context: concepts, themes, questions, and problems associated with self-determining freedom and the logic of necessary causation in European modern philosophy (Descartes, Spinoza, Rousseau, and Kant). We see how Hegel's intervention into these debates not only develops the philosophical significance of freedom, but more importantly how his dialectical approach provides helpful conceptual tools to diagnose and critically think through contemporary social and political movements of self-determinacy.
Readings: Malabou, "Contextualizing Freedom," in Freedom, in Context (2024), pgs. x–xvi; Radnik, "Introduction," Freedom, in Context, pgs. 1–12.

Session 2: Freedom, Necessity, Self-Reflexive Historicity / This session examines the essential relation between the concepts of self-determining freedom and causal necessity in Hegel's early Jena writings (up to and including the Phenomenology of Spirit). We explore how temporal and logical movement is constitutive of this relationship in Hegel's thought.
Readings: Radnik, "Chapter 1: Freedom, Necessity, Self-Reflexive Historicity," Freedom, in Context, pgs. 13–54.

Session 3: Christianity and the Temporality of Freedom /
Through an examination of Hegel's philosophy of religion, we see that his account of Christianity demonstrates how being-with-oneself-in-one's-other, in addition to expressing human freedom, is simultaneously a temporal formula to the extent that it reveals how human freedom sublates the external causal factors that serve as its necessary ground. Since the causal factors temporally precede and condition human freedom, they constitute a historical necessity.
Readings: Radnik, "Chapter 3: Christianity and the Temporality of Freedom," Freedom, in Context, pgs. 127–157.

Session 4: Hegel's Political Theory and Freedom /
We finally turn to Hegel's political thought. By examining Hegel's concepts of "free will," "right," "ethical life," "the state," and "world history," we explore that insofar as they are external and particular shapes of the universal and eternal absolute idea, these concepts express their historicity since they are shapes of the idea of freedom in its historical process of actualization.
Readings: Radnik, "Chapter 4: Political-Social Freedom and Philosophy's Historicity," Freedom, in Context, pgs. 159–189.

IMAGE: Paul Delaroche, The victors of the Bastille in front of the City Hall, July 14, 1789, 1830-39

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Limits of Decolonial Reason:
Modernity, Universality, and Gnoseological Critique

DESCRIPTION: This Seminar assesses the major conceptual contributions and limitations of the so-called "modernity-coloniality" movement in Latin America from a philosophical standpoint. It examines the major theses elaborated by this movement while diagnosing the internal fissures that open decolonial thought beyond the original tenets adopted by its foundational figures and their guiding methodological strictures. Above all, the Seminar explores the purported extension of the critique of Eurocentric reason advanced by historicist thinkers since the 1940s, and by the philosophy of liberation since the 1970s, to interrogate the methodological foundations of Western epistemology and "occidentalism" in its complicity with the coloniality of knowing and power that accompanies the institution of the "modern world-system," as described by Immanuel Wallerstein.

First Session / In the first, introductory session, we depart from a retrospective localization of the "decolonial turn" through a genealogical reconstruction of Latin Americanist thought in the twentieth century. We then consider some of the foundational texts published in the 2000 collection Colonialidad del Saber (Coloniality of Knowledge), which functioned as a first definitive collective statement for the movement. In particular, we focus on foundational texts by Aníbal Quijano and Enrique Dussel, which also clarify the continuity with and departure from the liberationist program in its sociological and historical aspects. In this context, we find the concepts of the coloniality of power and knowing become explicitly elaborated and belabored as an extension of the critique of Eurocentrism.

Second Session / We focus on Walter Mignolo, Catherine Walsh, and Ramón Grosfoguel's critique of Western epistemologies in the name of a gnoseological critique that would rehabilitate non-Western gnoses, and their critique of universalism in the name of a pluriversalist perspective. We interrogate the protracted reconstruction of Western philosophical modernity in its complicity with the coloniality of knowing, which conditions the challenge to universalism as a covert Eurocentrism, as well as the methodological coherence of the subordination of ontology to epistemology.

Third Session / We examine an alternative trajectory of decolonial thought that resists the wholesale denunciation of modernity as inextricably bound to coloniality defended by Mignolo and others. First, we focus on the genealogical critique adopted by Santiago Castro-Gómez, inspired by Foucault, who, in El tonto y los canallas, proposes a retrospective delineation of the depoliticizing effects of the abandonment of universality in the aforementioned vectors of decolonial thought. Second, we focus on Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui's trenchant critique of the complicity between the adoption of decolonial thought within the Anglo-Saxon academy as symptomatic of a nefarious complicity with neoliberal constituency in its distance from, if not hostility to, insurgent popular movements.

Fourth Session / We examine the recent attempts to formulate an alternative mode of decolonial thought that would not only rehabilitate the possibility of a modernity without coloniality, but also of a universalism without Eurocentrism. Focusing on the work of Gabriel Catren, we see a program for a reconstituted systematic philosophy that reactivates the universalist spirit of the early twentieth-century Latin Americanist project while traversing its residual humanist, anthropocentric, and Eurocentric elements. At the same time, we evaluate the extent to which such a program risks relapsing into a pre-critical metaphysical program that elides the development of Latin American consciousness since the historicist turn of the 1940s.

IMAGE: Jatiwangi art Factory (JaF), New Rural Agenda, 2022

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Aether, Field, Manifold:
Transcendental Aesthetic

DESCRIPTION: From Descartes to Feynmann via Faraday and Einstein, the notion of some abstracted spatiotemporal domain in which matter and its motions interact has posited as the fundamental ground of physical theory. As Kant demonstrated in the “Transcendental Aesthetic” of the Critique of Pure Reason, such a formal geometric ground is one of the necessary a priori conditions for the possibility of experience. The pure forms of intuition—space and time—are what render the “manifold” of sensation receptive to order; they provide the understanding with the structured data it requires to synthesize appearances spatiotemporally. Without these forms, sensations would not be arrayed in any configuration of “simultaneity” or “succession”: experience would become rhapsodic, lacking all coherence and unity.
Kant’s aesthetic, however, is developed within a Newtonian framework. Space is the a priori form of outer intuition, homogeneous and essentially Euclidean; time is the pure form of inner intuition, continuous and one-dimensional. Yet even within this Newtonian framing, Kant, as per the Metaphysical Foundation of the Natural Sciences, still maintains the notion (still widespread in 18th-century natural philosophy) of the “aether,” a dynamic plenum of matter underlying all interactions. Though Kant carefully avoids positing a physical aether as a constituent of things-in-themselves, the concept nonetheless lingers as a heuristic constraint: forces require a domain of possible transmission, and the understanding requires an organized manifold to operate upon.

However, the emergence of the field in the works of Faraday and Maxwell, the relativistic reconceptualization of the spacetime manifold in Einstein, and the development of quantum field theory in the 20th century, collectively displaced the Newtonian framework that silently underwrites Kant’s aesthetic. What once appeared as fixed, absolute forms of intuition have become plastic and relativistic. The manifold of spacetime is no longer understood as an empty formal container (what Leibniz and Kant called absolute space and time) but a medium whose very geometry depends upon energetic and material configurations. Indeed, matter and energy bend the very fabric of spacetime, and the geometry of this interactive manifold dictate what it is possible to intuit (the speed of light sets an absolute limit to the informational intuitable horizon). Furthermore, in quantum field theory, even the notion of “particles” as objects in space and time gives way to excitations of underlying fields defined over highly abstract manifolds. That is to say, no longer can we separate those objects of experience from the field in which they said to be experienced. Matter is not place in a field, the field is matter.
This course takes this paradigmatic revolution as its central problematic. It will examine how the concepts of aether, field and manifold ultimately compels a rethinking of the very transcendental aesthetic framework within which physical experience is possible. The guiding question is: What would a transcendental aesthetic look like if it were transductively reconstructed in light of the historical and scientific development of the field and the manifold from out of the notion of the aether? Or put differently: Can we articulate an a priori framework adequate to a world in which the fundamental entities are not substances in space and time, but relational, energetic fields whose structure determines the geometry of their own manifold?
Over four weeks, we will trace this conceptual evolution:
• from the early modern aether as a medium of forces,
• to Faraday’s and Maxwell’s reconception of physical interaction as continuous field activity,
• to Einstein’s fusion of spacetime and field into a single dynamical structure,
• to the radical ontology of quantum fields in which particles are modes of excitation and the vacuum itself is structured,
• and finally to contemporary philosophical attempts to interpret fields and manifolds not merely as scientific constructs but as potential transcendental conditions of appearance—conditions for the intelligibility of experience in a post-Newtonian world.

Session 1 — From Substance to Medium: The Aetherial Cosmos
Theme:
The early modern transition from Aristotelian substance to mechanical plenum; aether as the universal medium of forces and waves.
Primary Texts:
• René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy (1644), Part II (“Of the Principles of Material Things”).
• Isaac Newton, Opticks (1704), “Queries” 18–31.
• Christiaan Huygens, Treatise on Light (1690), Preface and ch. 1.
Secondary Readings:
• Mary Hesse, Forces and Fields (1961), ch. 1–2.
• E.A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1925), ch. 6 (“Newtonian Dynamics and the Aether”).

Session 2 — Electricity, Magnetism, and the Birth of Field Thinking
Theme:
Faraday’s empirical turn from action-at-a-distance to lines of force; the conceptual shift from medium to relational topology.
Primary Texts:
• Michael Faraday, Experimental Researches in Electricity (1831–1855), §§ 3078–3110 (“On Lines of Force”).
Secondary Readings:
• Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie (1983), ch. 2 (“Field and Force”).
• Peter M. Harman, Energy, Force, and Matter (1982), ch. 4 (“Faraday and the Field Concept”).

Session 3 — Maxwell’s Equations and the Ontology of Energy
Theme:
Field as continuous energy distribution; mathematical formalization and unity of electricity, magnetism, and light.
Primary Texts:
• James Clerk Maxwell, A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873), Book II, ch. 1–4; Book IV, ch. 20–23.
Secondary Readings:
• Jed Z. Buchwald, From Maxwell to Microphysics (1985), Introduction and ch. 2.
• Hermann von Helmholtz, “On the Conservation of Force” (1847).

Session 4 — Relativity and the Dissolution of the Aether
Theme:
From electromagnetic field to spacetime field; the collapse of absolute medium into geometric structure.
Primary Texts:
• Albert Einstein, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” (1905).
• Albert Einstein, “Ether and the Theory of Relativity” (1920).
• Hermann Minkowski, “Space and Time” (1908).
Secondary Readings:
• Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function (1910), Part II.
• Thomas Ryckman, The Reign of Relativity (2005), ch. 3.

IMAGE: Pierre Huyghe, De-Extinction, 2014

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African Philosophy in the 20th Century:
Historical Materialism or Ethnophilosophy?

DESCRIPTION: Today there are voices, such as that of Cedric Robinson and his followers, that speak of the existence of an "African metaphysics" which can provide an alternative to historical materialism as a theoretical orientation for emancipatory projects. However, this contention is not new; in fact, it goes all the way back to the birth of African philosophy as an academic subfield in the mid-twentieth century. It was also subjected to criticism from a historical materialist perspective by Paulin Hountondji. This Workshop revisits this debate and explores its current significance. Our readings will focus on two texts by the Beninois philosopher, Paulin J. Hountondji: African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (1983 [1976]), and The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture, and Democracy in Africa (2002 [1998]). Hountondji's work is interesting for a variety of reasons, but his most important contribution, at least for the purposes of this Workshop, has to do with his claim that a certain way of doing African philosophy (what he labels "ethnophilosophy") is liable to impede development on the African continent through mystification. We will critically assess his arguments in support of this claim and try to reconstruct and evaluate his positive proposal, which gives a rather deflationary account of the role of philosophy in development and in political movements more generally.

Session 1: The Origins of the Debate / We start with a text that has been the subject of controversy in African philosophy from 1945 onwards, namely Placide Tempels' Bantu Philosophy. Tempels' book was positively received by key African philosophers and politicians such as Léopold Sédar Senghor and Alioune Diop. We examine how Tempels presents "Bantu Ontology" and what the implications are for debates about African alternatives to historical materialism.
Readings: Placide Tempels, Bantu Philosophy

Session 2: The Critique of Ethnophilosophy / This session introduces Paulin Hountondji's critique of ethnophilosophy through the first part of his book, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality. Hountondji contends that Tempels' approach to African philosophy is liable to mislead both Africans and Europeans. Hountondji tries to show how ethnophilosophy can be critically assessed on philosophical terms and then explained in sociological terms.
Readings: Part I of African Philosophy: Myth and Reality

Session 3: Nkrumah and the Shadow of Ethnophilosophy / Kwame Nkrumah championed a national development campaign in Ghana and produced a philosophical discourse to legitimate it. The key text in this philosophical discourse is his Consciencism. Hountondji contends that the African socialism that Nkrumah champions in this text is yet another iteration of ethnophilosophy.
Readings: Part II of African Philosophy: Myth and Reality; Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism

Session 4: The Place of Marxism in African Philosophy / In this session we study Hountondji's The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture, and Democracy in Africa to understand how his critique of ethnophilosophy was driven by a commitment to a Marxist political project. We investigate the nature of this project and its bearing on debates about development and emancipation on the African continent today.
Readings: Paulin Hountondji, The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture, and Democracy in Africa

IMAGE: Wosene Worke Kosrof, Woman of the Nile, 1998

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Philosophers’ Diagram

DESCRIPTION: What happens when philosophy is visualized rather than merely verbalized? What if its most elusive problems like time, subjectivity, emergence, and metaphysics require not just concepts but diagrams?

This Workshop investigates the conceptual and affective power of diagrams across the history of continental philosophy. From Plato's cosmological schemas and Husserl's time-consciousness graphs to Deleuze's rhizomes and Barad's agential cuts, we explore how philosophical diagrams operate as devices (dispositifs), both exposing and producing structures of thought. Drawing from ancient metaphysics, media theory, and speculative technics, we engage diagrammatics not merely as interpretation but as method. Each session is organized around a specific thematic or philosophical problem (time, perception, subjectivity, interface, the event) and activated through a curated archive of historical and contemporary diagrams. As much a visual as a conceptual inquiry, the Workshop "delaminates" the diagrammatic unconscious of philosophy, revealing how thought itself can be shaped and unfolded through spatial-logical forms. The Workshop culminates in a hands-on practicum where participants develop original diagrams in real time. These may range from philosophical systems to affective cartographies, cinematic temporalities, or synthetic cosmograms. The goal is to equip participants with tools to construct their own situated, speculative diagrammatics: intuitive yet precise, aesthetic yet structural, metaphysical yet grounded.

Session 1: Cosmological Origins / Plato's Timaeus and the diagram of the khora; Neoplatonist systems of emanation; Gnostic cosmograms and the mytho-diagrammatics of Bertrand Russell's Icarus.
Readings/References: Plato, Cornford, Plotinus, Proclus, Derrida, Kristeva.

Session 2: Time, Perception, and Memory / Diagrams of temporality in Husserl and Bergson; Whitehead's event-diagrams and their mutations in Stengers and Manning; constructing processual diagrams of attention and bracketing. Readings: Husserl, Bergson, Gell, Whitehead, Stengers.

Session 3: Dispositifs and Media Apparatuses / Foucault's diagrams of epistemes and the dispositif; C.S. Peirce and diagrammatic logic; Mitchell and Stjernfelt on diagrammatology as an epistemic mode. Readings: Foucault, Bird & Tusa, Peirce, W.J.T. Mitchell.

Session 4: Platonism, Event, and the One / Deleuze and Badiou on metaphysical seriality; diagramming the One and the multiple; the tension between immanence and transcendence in diagrammatic form.
Readings: Badiou, Deleuze, Hallward, Rolfe, Masciandaro.

IMAGE: Alexander von Humboldt and A.G. Bonpland. It is titled, Geography of Plants in the Tropics, 1803.

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The Right Wing

DESCRIPTION: This Seminar introduces students to the broad parameters of right-wing thought. This includes discussions of some of its seminal figures (Burke, de Maistre, Hayek, and Nietzsche) alongside more modern movements and figures like Yoram Hazony and the National Conservative movement and post-liberal "aristopopulists" like Patrick Deneen. The Seminar unpacks the throughline between different right-wing thinkers in their commitment to hierarchy and the principle that there are "recognizably superior" persons and groups in society. It also situates right-wing intellectuals alongside contemporary developments like the rise of MAGA.

Session One: What is the Right? / This class introduces students to the debate around the nature of right-wing thought, with different explanations given by conservative authors like Russell Kirk and leftists like Corey Robin. We will also touch on the right's nostalgia for "pre-modern social imaginaries" centered around hierarchical complementarity and symbolized in the great chain of being.
Readings: Don Herzog, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders, Introduction and Chapter One

Session Two: Early Right-Wing Thinkers / This class introduces students to early right-wing thinking, focusing heavily on the twinned influence of Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre. Burke and de Maistre embody variations of right-wing thought. Both opposed the French Revolution, but Burke did so from a more moderate and less staunchly reactionary standpoint. His bourgeois inclinations made Burke open-minded about reform in a way an aristocratic royalist like de Maistre couldn't countenance.
Readings: Selections from Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Joseph de Maistre, The Generative Principle of Political Constitutions

Session Three: The Rise of the Radical Right / This class looks at thinkers that belong on the "radical right." These are those who regard society as so decayed by the forces of liberalism, socialism, and democracy that there is nothing left to "conserve." Only radical change via a "conservative revolution" or "refounding" will work. This includes some of the right's more interesting, but also disturbing, thinkers. We'll discuss the alignment of these figures with fascism and other far-right movements.
Readings: Selections from Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, and Bronze Age Pervert, Bronze Age Mindset

Session Four: The Modern Illiberal Right / We conclude the Seminar with a discussion of the contemporary illiberal and in many ways "postmodern" right that is currently ascendant. This focuses particularly on the United States as the current locus of world reaction. We will look at various MAGA intellectuals and see how and whether they wield substantial influence as they hope.

IMAGE: Erika Kirk, CEO of Turning Point USA speaking at the memorial service for her slained husband Charlie Kirk, 2025, Getty Images.

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Distance and Social Peripheries:
Capital Accumulation on a Global Scale

DESCRIPTION: Mianstream Marxism has more or less understood the logic of commodity production as a fundamental component of industrial capitalism. However, according to some neo-Marxists, this perspective has focused primarily on the production circuit and overlooked the circulation process (commodity exchange) in the formation of surplus value. Since commodity exchange occurs between communities, once capitalism becomes a world-economy, these trading relations no longer take place between individual buyers and sellers, but rather between places—namely, states. Another fundamental trait of the capitalist circulation process is its inherent imbalance and inequality, which leads to the development of advanced national economies while others are subjected to exploitation and extractive activities. This phenomenon underpins political terms such as underdevelopment and Third-Worldism, which gained popularity in the 1990s.

Several theoretical frameworks have emerged to clarify the imbalance in trading terms. Two stand out in this context: world-systems theory, with its center-periphery axis (and semi-peripheries, as discussed in the works of Wallerstein and Arrighi), and Marxist dependency theory, which introduces the concept of unequal exchange—ideas best understood in light of the relationship between capital and state power. Some concepts are particularly useful for examining the connection between states and the capitalist system on a global scale: Karatani's idea of the capital-nation-state trinity, Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the Urstaat, and Amin's explanation of the tributary state. This political analysis suggests that capitalism, far from being a homogeneous system, displays structural imbalances—especially from a spatial point of view. It is an asymmetric totality that began with the colonial process in the Americas, creating peripheral social formations (former colonies) in contrast to the centers of capitalism. This Seminar is intended for those interested in understanding how capitalism spreads across the globe through a logic of spatial engulfment, radically transforming the lives and cultures of communities and individuals, and establishing a material accumulation process grounded in exploitation and political disempowerment.

Session 1: Introduction / World-systems theory and the center-periphery axis
Readings: Wallerstein, Gunder Frank, Arrighi, Samir Amin

Session 2: Karatani and the Capital-Nation-State Trinity / Global capitalism as all-encompassing system, political and cultural phenomena enabling accumulation, modes of exchange
Readings: Karatani, Marx, Hegel, Benedict Anderson

Session 3: Unequal Exchange and the Axioms of Periphery / Capitalist engulfment of pre-capitalist areas, transformation of socio-economic structures and political order, tributary state, Urstaat, axioms of capitalism
Readings: Samir Amin, Deleuze and Guattari, Gunder Frank

Session 4: Peripheral Social Formations and Post-Colonial Critique / Colonial reshaping of labor systems and subsistence activities, racial and gender stratifications in the social order
Readings: Maria Mies, Veronica Bennholdt-Thomsen, Claudia von Werlhof, Quijano, Rosa Luxemburg, Fanon

IMAGE: Hedda Sterne, NY, NY no. X, 1948

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Tektologus Autodidactus:
World-Engineering from Desert Islands to Corrigible Utopias

DESCRIPTION: The Seminar studies a sequence of philosophical constructions of solitary intelligence and collective organization: Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzān, Ibn al-Nafis’ Theologus Autodidactus, Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit. Each work marks a different configuration along the path from desert island consciousness to objective spirit: the self-taught islander, the rational theologian reinserted into community, the revolutionary visitor confronted with a completed communist planet, the dissident physicist inside an exhausted anarchist order, and finally the collectivist construction site whose utopian project digs itself into non-viability. The concern is not socialist literary criticism but the use of these constructions as conceptual instruments for questions about collective labor and the maintenance or breakdown of complex social forms.

Utopian arrangements here are treated as models of organization with a computational profile: they specify inputs, update rules, channels of transmission, and costs. The seminar will ask how much logical depth—buried work, irreversibility, dependence on long chains of prior decisions—is condensed in the institutions, norms, and feedback mechanisms that sustain these worlds, and how that depth is rendered legible or left opaque. A central concern is structural tenability: how these constructions propose to withstand scarcity, conflict, and metabolic constraints without collapsing into predation, stagnation, or self-cancellation. Here, The Foundation Pit is included as a limit case in which the organizational project becomes an open-ended algorithm of descent: work and resources are sunk without convergence on a tenable structure, as the utopian project collapses into its own excavation—an ever-deepening object where labor and history are stored as depth that no habitable form can occupy.

Across four sessions, the seminar alternates close reading with explicit philosophical thought experiments. Island scenarios, organizational redesigns, and counterfactual modifications of key institutions are used to stress-test the constructions and to extract from them a set of problems about orientation, coordination, and the reparability—or irreparability—of complex systems.

IMAGE: Vladimir Lenin plays chess with Alexander Bogdanov, 1908

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From Magic to Media:
A Hermetic Genealogy of Optical and Communication Technologies

DESCRIPTION: This Seminar examines the genealogy (in a Nietzschean sense) of technical and optical media—from pre-cinema technologies through film and beyond—through its occulted roots in Hermeticism, magic, and alchemy. With the rise of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and artificially constructed images of illusion and deception, it is becoming increasingly imperative to trace the history of our technologically mediated realities to the little-known genealogies of shamanic performance, ritual, and Hermetic magic, and to question the cultural, philosophical, and political significance this knowledge holds for our time. The intersection of magic, technology, and art—especially occult technologies such as alchemy and talismans—reveals the predecessors of much of what we consider technical media and optical technologies: photography, film, the internet, social media, and AI.

To provide a sample of what we cover: we examine Giovanni Fontana's influential treatise Illustrated and Encrypted Book of War Instruments, written around 1420 CE, an illustrated book of military instruments, optical media, and automata. This treatise contains one of the first ever depictions of an early version of the magic lantern or lanterna magica in Europe. We trace how such optical devices and automata as military technologies appear in the literature of Islamicate or Arabic Hermetica by excavating its earliest sources in the little-studied Pseudo-Aristotelian Hermetica, much of which was influenced by Harranian astral magic. We consider figures such as the enigmatic Balinus or pseudo-Apollonius of Tyana, a disciple of the legendary Hermes Trismegistus, called in the sources "the lord of talismans" (sahib-i tilismat). In these texts, Aristotle or Balinus creates automata called "talismans" (tilismat) for the purpose of helping Alexander conjure illusions to deceive and frighten his enemies in battle—precisely the function of the optical device illustrated in Fontana's manuscript, considered an early version of the magic lantern. The early magic lantern device described in Fontana's book is a talisman (Arabic: tilism, Persian: telesm) with its genealogy in the literature of Hermetica transmitted via Arabic and Persian sources into Europe. In this way, the Seminar contributes to discourses on decoloniality by decolonizing the largely Eurocentric narratives of the history of media technologies.

We also consider how the very technological devices we use and hold in our hands today—smartphones, AGIs such as ChatGPT—may be understood as talismanic media rooted in Hermetic magic, possessing different operationalities from their current forms and uses under late capitalist and neoliberal regimes. What is at stake today and for the future is who controls and wields these powerful talismanic media. We think through these issues with theorists and philosophers including Ernst Bloch, Yuk Hui, Gilbert Simondon, Siegfried Zielinski, Vilém Flusser, Ernst Kapp, and Friedrich Kittler, Perso-Islamicate philosophers such as Suhrawardi and Ahsai, and the writings of early avant-garde movements such as The Great Game and Surrealism.

Session 1: Introduction / A Hermetic genealogy of technical media, decolonizing Eurocentric narratives of media history, talismanic media and Hermetic magic, late capitalism and neoliberal regimes, who controls talismanic media

Session 2: Archaeoapocalypse / A Hermetic archaeology of technical media, Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge and media archaeology, archaeoapocalypse as alternative methodology, the motif of discovery of hidden and arcane knowledge

Session 3: Media as Talismans / Theorizing talismanic magic, Fontana's Illustrated and Encrypted Book of War Instruments (1420 CE), the lanterna magica, Pseudo-Aristotelian Hermetica, Harranian astral magic, Perso-Islamicate sources, optical media's magical heritage through to cinema

Session 4: Cinematic Cosmos / Islamicate philosophy and cinema theory, decolonizing Eurocentric media and film discourse, the concept of hūrqalyā, Suhrawardī and the Illuminationist school, Shaykh Aḥmad al-Aḥsāʾī and the Shaykhi school, the world of images (ʿālam al-mithāl), correspondence between cosmic and cinematic ontology

IMAGE: Vera Dg, Calligraphy Abstract Expressionism, 2017

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Marx’s Capital in the 21st Century

DESCRIPTION: Capital, Vol. 1 is both a totally unique literary masterpiece and the most insightful book ever written about the economic order that continues to shape all of our lives. It's full of both technical economic points illustrated with mathematical precision and a dense web of references to Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Dante, Greek and Roman history, and more. Add the complications of reading it in translation, and it's easy to get lost very deep in the weeds.

In this Seminar, we zoom out to cover the core themes of the book, taking on two of the eight sections per session. Instead of getting lost in what can, at worst, become a sort of secular socialist equivalent of scriptural exegesis, we think hard, with care and analytical rigor, about Marx's core arguments in each of the eight sections. What was the most important case he was trying to make in each case, and how does it all fit together on a high level?

Session 1: Commodities and Money; The Transformation of Money into Capital / Marx on commodities, value, and money, transition to analysis of capitalist class structures, simple commodity circulation versus the circuit of capital, source of profit in labor-power

Session 2: The Production of Absolute Surplus Value; The Production of Relative Surplus Value / The beating heart of Marx's analysis of capitalist exploitation, necessary labor and surplus labor, capitalism's historical uniqueness, mute compulsion and vertical market relations, horizontal competition between capitalists

Session 3: The Production of Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value; Wages / Recap from a different perspective, disconnect between exploitation and legal forms of compensation, time-wages versus piece wages, capitalism as a global system

Session 4: The Process of the Accumulation of Capital; So-Called Primitive Accumulation / Simple reproduction versus runaway accumulation, wealth at one pole and social misery at the other, organized labor and the welfare state, the true horrors of capitalism's origins

IMAGE: Ludwig Engelhardt, Marx and Engels Monument, Berlin,1986

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