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Understanding Memetics | This roundtable proposes a Critical Philosophy of Polymodal Discourse, taking memetics not as a subsidiary internet studies phenomenon but as an epistemological framework for analyzing contemporary cultural production. The capacity of memes to destabilize boundaries between aesthetic practice, philosophical interventio... |
The Emergent Poetics of Winding Oars | This workshop takes the metaphor of winding oars (instruments of creation over which the writer has limited control in the rapids of thought, preference, and expression) as its guiding figure. It weaves allusions to what biologist Michael Levin calls the morphospace: a field of possibilities in which embodiments can ex... |
To Draw Away, Matter Space and Time form Media and Meaning | To Draw Away takes its name from the Latin root of abstraction: abs-trah?, to pull away from the material object, and from the Greek aphairesis, things that exist from removing. Drawing itself, originally figurative, names the act of dragging a stylus across a surface. This seminar follows that double etymology across ... |
Road to Neofeudalism: Technology, the Left, and the Politics of Defeat | This roundtable offers a critical intervention into the rising discourse of “neofeudalism.” We argue that neofeudalism is less a coherent theory of a new social order and more an enchanted, neo-conservative project—a political imaginary where, to paraphrase Gillian Rose, “mourning has become the law.” This framework es... |
Necrophilanthropy: Nonprofit Killers and the Carceral State | 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... |
Marx's Capital in the 21st Century | 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 Bibl... |
From Magic to Media: A Hermetic Genealogy of Optical and Communication Technologies | 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 d... |
Tektologus Autodidactus: World-Engineering from Desert Islands to Corrigible Utopias | 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 differe... |
Category Theory for Arts and Humanities | Whether orders, morphisms, algebras, or mappings, the appearance of categories in pure and applied mathematics is ubiquitous. Because of its synthetic nature, its acceptance has foreshadowed the set-theoretic foundational approach to mathematics: that which would otherwise have been a behemoth construction using purely... |
Distance and Social Peripheries: Capital Accumulation on a Global Scale | 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 ... |
The Right Wing | 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 ... |
Technological History of Fiction | What if fiction was never opposed to science, but rather its secret double? Russian Formalism was the first declarative attempt at a "scientific" study of literature: an attempt to map the consecutive evolution of "literary facts" and even to unlock the secret engine of prose as if fiction could be diagrammed like a ma... |
Conspiracy Theory as Method: Speculation and the Infrastructure of Belief | This Workshop invites participants to treat conspiracy theory not simply as pathology or misinformation, but as a mode of world-making: a method of connecting fragments, sensing hidden structures, and producing meaning amidst chaos. Drawing on anthropological, philosophical, and artistic perspectives, we will approach ... |
Philosophers' Diagram | 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.... |
African Philosophy in the 20th Century: Historical Materialism or Ethnophilosophy? | 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 Void Writes | This Workshop examines how writing is engendered by the void, and writing as the site where the void unfolds even if unfolding is its only doing. Drawing on literature and philosophy, it asks what happens when form is not assumed to impose upon nothingness but to arise from, and through, it. The Seminar explores how th... |
Aether, Field, Manifold: Transcendental Aesthetic | 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 groun... |
Limits of Decolonial Reason: Modernity, Universality, and Gnoseological Critique | 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 te... |
Hegel and the Dialectic of Freedom and Necessity | 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. Heg... |
Understanding Microclimates | 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, a... |
Post-Accelerationism: Futurity between Time and Space | 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... |
Autism and Civilization | 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 emotionles... |
The Revenge of Reason: On Inference and its Consequences | 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 ... |
Lyotard and Non-Human Language in the Age of LMMs | 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 neur... |
Jerusalem Syndrome: Symbolic overload & the architecture of belief | This Roundtable investigates Jerusalem Syndrome, a rare psychoreligious phenomenon in which an individual experiences intense religiously themed ideas or delusions triggered by a visit to the city of Jerusalem, as a framework for examining symbolic overload, spiritual cognition, and the embodied architectures of belief... |
Art & Theory Industrial Complex: Capital, institutions, language and the production of value | This Roundtable begins from a critical stance toward the tightening co-dependence between art and theory within the institutional and economic structures of contemporary cultural production. Rather than affirming this relationship as an inevitable or progressive development, it interrogates the mechanisms through which... |
What Is Democratic Economic Planning? | In partnership with the International Network for Democratic Economic Planning (INDEP)
DESCRIPTION: This Roundtable explores Democratic Economic Planning (DEP) as an alternative to the financialized market-based economy. With neoliberalism in crisis and authoritarian movements on the rise, there's renewed interest in ... |
Accelerationism as a Philosophy of Energy | This Roundtable maps the extent to which accelerationism can be understood as a philosophy of energy, fostering discussion around what a supposed “point of view of energy” implies for human beings and our collective desire for energy transition—and how these implications have been theorized elsewhere within acceleratio... |
How to Fix Brain Rot: A Soviet guide to AI, labor, dialectics, and reflexivity | This Roundtable addresses the widespread sense that current discussions about AI and cybernetics are creating cognitive breakdowns rather than genuine insights. Instead of producing new philosophical understanding, today's AI often promotes what we might call "existential stupidity" – a kind of ideological brain rot th... |
The Essence of Analytic Philosophy | What is analytic philosophy, really? Does it have an essence or at least some stable feature that defines it? Is there such a thing as ‘analytic’ style, and how do we recognize it? The answers to these questions are ambiguous. Some blame analytic philosophy (hereafter, AP) for the lack of internal values—claiming that ... |
Scalar Darwinism: Is There No Alternative? | This Roundtable offers a critical inquiry into the directionality, ontology, and developmental logic of contemporary Artificial Intelligence through an experimental framework—Scalar Darwinism. The Roundtable argues that, with its proprietary regimes, uniformist and essentialist presuppositions, data-centric ontology, a... |
Artist Writing / Artistic Production: The Perspective of Perspective (A World Mediated by a Faulty Image of the World) | DESCRIPTION
This seminar will focus on the relationship between artistic practice, art theory and artistic writing; probing ways to cross cultivate writing and art making as two sides of an artistic practice. While artists have become increasingly reliant on theory and philosophy in order to find avenues to produce wo... |
Internet as a Platform, Programming as a Medium | DESCRIPTION
This Seminar will explore the constructive and expressive aspects of programming, and approaches the internet as a platform for building new systems and/or mediating between the real and the cybernetic. As the web matures, programming has become the most versatile means for the production of lucrative econ... |
Marx & Technology | "Marx alone sought to combine the politics of revolt with the 'poetry of the future' and applied himself to demonstrate that socialism was more modern than capitalism and more productive. To recover that futurism and that excitement is surely the fundamental task of any left 'discursive struggle' today.” -Fredric James... |
Cut of the Real: Non-Philosophy & the Question of Subjectivity | DESCRIPTION
Following François Laruelle’s nonstandard philosophy and the work of Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, Luce Irigaray, and Rosi Braidotti, this seminar reclaims the relevance of categories traditionally rendered “unthinkable” by postmodern feminist philosophies, such as “the real,” “the one,” “the limit,” an... |
Posthuman Life I: Humanism Unbound | DESCRIPTION
Since its emergence in the 1990s, the term “posthuman” has been used to mark a historical juncture at which the present and future status of the human are radically destabilized. Thus, two distinct posthumanisms can be discerned over this period. Futurists regularly concatenate “post” and “human”` when spe... |
Curatorial Practice II: Curating the Future | DESCRIPTION
The 20th century, particularly after the Second World War, witnessed the emergence of a new class of cultural producers named curators who worked with with artists, museum officials and private collectors to organize art exhibitions. Through an ongoing process of self-specialization, curators began to play... |
Art and its Reason(s): Retooling the Horizons of Practice | “If art already embodies the potential of a non-standard existence, would this not mean that we would be stuck in a semantic game of interpretational formalism: reinterpreting the artwork in novel terms but without altering the principles of its production? On the other hand, what possibility remains for any investment... |
The Anarchy of Objects II: Onto-Cartography | DESCRIPTION
Since the revolutionary work of Immanuel Kant, Continental philosophy has been dominated by the idealist or correlationist paradigms wherein it is argued that mind structures and constitutes reality. In 20th century Continental philosophy, this correlationist turn has been manifested in the thesis that it ... |
Aesthetics of the Generic & Non-Event | “[T]he generic is capable of supporting a multiplicity of heterogeneous acts or predicates, among other things the thoughts of science and philosophy: the generic is endowed with extension but without totality or singularity, thus under-determined, non-absolute” --François Laruelle from The Generic Orientation of Non-S... |
Hyperstition & The New Weird II: Fictional Worlds & Possible Futures | DESCRIPTION
This spring seminar, “Fictional Worlds & Possible Futures”, builds on the previous one (“Entities and Worlds/Genres and Climates”). By focusing on the philosophical and literary concepts of the world and world creation, it will examine the fictional and the possible, philosophically, but more specifically ... |
Bitcoin and Philosophy | DESCRIPTION
This principal purpose of this seminar is to constitute Bitcoin – in all of its main senses, as a protocol, a currency, and a contemporary industrial revolution – as a definite philosophical object. Through this process, philosophical conceptuality and method undergoes significant reciprocal modification. ... |
Reintroduction to Metaphysics II: Method & Practice | DESCRIPTION
The end of metaphysics was a dominant theme in early 20th century philosophy. Even though the Western philosophical tradition sundered in two, one of the few things its analytic and continental halves seemed to agree upon was that the age of metaphysics was over, either because physics had finally usurped ... |
Global Politics of the Anthropocene | DESCRIPTION
This seminar is structured upon the premise that we are already in the grip of the Anthropocene, a turbulent era of human caused, planetary changes in which we are confronted with the transformation of the very conditions of possibility for both organic and social life. Our goal for this seminar will be to ... |
Capital as Computation & Cognition: From Babbage’s Factory to Google’s Algorithmic Governance | DESCRIPTION
Since the times of Smith, Ricardo and Marx, if not for even longer, capital has functioned as a form of computation constituted by and as a complex mathematical system. After WWII the numeric essence of capital has been coupled with the informational dimension of cybernetics and computing machines, while a... |
Philosophy and Mathematics I: Consequences of Diagonalization | DESCRIPTION
Metamathematics (alternately metalogic) may best be regarded as naming an experiment in self-reference: what happens when we realize not only that mathematics is encoded, but that the encoding has, in turn, mathematical properties, raising the problem of the mathematics of the code of mathematics? Is there... |
Building the Commune: Insurgent Government, Communal State | DESCRIPTION
When Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez died in March 2013, he left behind an unfulfilled dream that was never his alone: that of the “communal state.” Amid the complicated maneuvering of the post-Chávez era, this aspiration—which would see the expansion and unification of nascent communal councils, alongsid... |
New Rationalism: The Shape of Systems to Come | Reason & Time | DESCRIPTION
First Module - The Shape of Systems to Come: Following the Copernican revolution, thought witnessed an unprecedented array of epistemological devices and methods of abstraction which jolted the totalized universe of myth and removed the epistemic blockage created by pre-critical philosophies constructed fr... |
The Legacy of Michael Fried’s Art and Objecthood | This Seminar examines Michael Fried’s seminal 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood” and the debates in art criticism that have surrounded it from the time of its publication to the present. Beginning with a close reading of the essay itself, we will then explore notable responses to Fried, including those by artists like Rob... |
The Organisation of Nature: Trends in Theoretical Biology and Cognitive Science | 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 fr... |
Accelerationism and Revolution in Russia | Vladimir Lenin once said: “I’m certainly not radical enough. One can never be radical enough, that is, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself.” Realities indeed circumscribe the very domains of our struggles, whether social or ontological. In other words, our thought and action are always rooted in thei... |
Coming Anarchy: Philosophy of Decentralization and Cryptography | The rise of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies over the last few years has largely unfolded without a properly philosophical and historical critique, giving shape to new forms of political and economic organization, from libertarian network states to emerging models of digital governance and surveillance. Exi... |
AD HOC, The Second Contemporary | The Seminar examines contemporary art's evolving landscape through a comprehensive investigation of its histories and discourses. Aimed at students of curatorial studies, artists, and cultural practitioners, it presents contemporary art not merely as a creative domain but as the fastest-moving discipline capable of inf... |
UNDERSTANDING EXOCAPITALISM | Exocapitalism is the idea that capitalism does not belong to humans. The titular book (Becoming Press, 2025) and this accompanying Seminar spring from a dissatisfaction with the sameness of Marxian critical social theory. This theoretical lineage appears to be poisoned by a Marvel Cinematic Universe approach to storyte... |
Animals Against Earth and the question of Planetarity | Contemporary thinking about the more-than-human world approaches its topic from an ecological perspective. But as theorists like Bronislaw Szerszynski, Nigel Clark and Lukáš Likavčan have begun looking at Earth from an astrophysical viewpoint, we are reminded that nature is more than an economy of life. Living beings a... |
Will to Power and the Nature of Intelligence | This Seminar provides an in-depth look at Nietzsche's infamous but often misunderstood doctrine of "the will to power" by reconstructing how it is presented, developed, and refined across his published works and unpublished notebooks, as well as in contemporary Nietzsche scholarship. Rather than approaching the will to... |
Psychotic Accelerationism | Accelerationist philosophy still lacks a proper grounding and systematization of its key concepts such as the Outside, intensification, and acceleration itself. The project of Psychotic Acceleration contends that this grounding can be achieved by synthesizing Lacanian psychoanalysis with Nick Land’s accelerationist tho... |
The Labor Theory of Life: Capitalism in the Web of Life Revisited | Upon its publication in 2015, Capitalism in the Web of Life reconceptualized capitalism as a world-ecology of power, profit and life, sparking widespread conversations and critiques on the academic left. In this four-session Seminar, we revisit the book to elaborate three key conceptual innovations that have built upon... |
Political Economy of Construction: Design, Bureaucracy, Labour, and Money | Like many named places in California, it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts—census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway... [A] hallucinatory vision of a city imposed onto the blank suburban plat, filed in some county reco... |
The Cinematic Frontline | In Girls of the Sun, a film written and directed by Eva Husson, rooted in the real-life resistance of Kurdish women fighters against ISIS, narrative becomes a weapon, and the filmmaking process itself a war of logistics, ethics, and representation. This Seminar investigates what it means to build a politically charged ... |
The Pathos of Modernity | In the wake of Kant’s epochal intervention in the history of philosophy and amid the tumultuous aftermath of the French Revolution, a generation of German philosophers and poets took up the task of rethinking knowledge of the absolute, the problem of freedom, the methodology of dialectical reasoning, the concept of the... |
Marxism with Chinese Characteristics | Amongst the menagerie of Marxisms past and present, few have been as successful or more misunderstood than Chinese Marxism. Critics have dismissed it as revisionist, anachronistic, exceptionalist, and primitive, and debated its true color. Is it red? Too red? Not red enough? Complicating matters, many who’ve embraced C... |
Enlightenment Reloaded | 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 Enlighten... |
Video games: Between Contagion and Reality | Over the past decade, video games have undergone a dramatic politicization. Once viewed as an asocial pastime, gaming communities have, since events like #GamerGate and the 2016 U.S. presidential election, been increasingly cast as incubators of far-right and reactionary politics. However, mainstream critiques have rar... |
Future Libraries | This Seminar theorizes and designs the library of the future—an infinite archive encompassing books that have never been written, might be written, or can never be written. Drawing inspiration from mythological, imaginary, and long-lost libraries, participants will explore both the spatial and conceptual architectures ... |
White World Lost Lands: The Mythical History of the West | This Seminar investigates the historical and ongoing role of myth, pseudo-history, and the imagination of lost lands in constructing and reinforcing right-wing and white supremacist ideologies in the West. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Western European societies, confronted by new discoveries in archaeo... |
THE TRIAL OF NICK LAND | We have yet to be Nick Land’s contemporaries, too late and too early at the same time. Unlike any other living philosopher, the courtroom of Land’s trial has been ongoing since the publication of Fanged Noumena. From his generalized criticism of the 90s to a rightward turn in the new millennium, Land’s philosophical ex... |
A Triple-Helix Philosophy of History | OR BUY CREDITS FOR THIS SEMINAR & OTHERS AT SPECIAL RATE
DESCRIPTION: This Seminar reexamines the philosophical underpinnings and the historical contexts that shape our understanding of “history” itself. By critically engaging with diverse schools of thought—from classical historiography to contemporary philosophies... |
The Depthwise and the Diagonal | This four-session Seminar undertakes an analysis of ‘the structure of world history’—to adopt Kojin Karatani’s term for organizing phenomena and processes which span across historical, economic, religious, political and mass psychological horizons. The analysis will be conducted in the vein of a synthesis between horiz... |
Computer Games and Hellscaping of the Unreal Engine | CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE WORKSHOP'S OPEN SESSION
DESCRIPTION: Gaming is ever more important not only as a cultural form and industry but also in the artworld and contemporary philosophy. This Workshop thematizes the main aspects of this growing medium while avoiding its mere assimilation (into art or discourse) by fo... |
Prototyping Para-Institutional | PURCHASE CREDITS HERE & ENROLL DESCRIPTION: Over the last few decades, para-institutions emerged in the cultural field in response to major events such as the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, indicating a demand for knowledge production that engaged with critical socio-political junctures. These respons... |
Copresence Research Laboratory | PURCHASE CREDITS HERE & ENROLL
DESCRIPTION: Where are you, right now? Where are you present?
Our bodies, our minds, our ideas, our data: where are they —where are we— present at any given moment? On whose territory —on land, on paper, on servers— are we living our lives and how does that serve us? This Seminar is des... |
Critique of Pure Plasticity: The Thermo-Informatic Transduction of Kant | In Hans Vaihinger’s neo-Kantian masterpiece “The Philosophy of ‘As If,’” he argues that the “unjustified transference to the world” of the Kantian categories “leads to all those philosophically important ideas, such as world-substance, cosmic energy, cosmic causes.” For Vaihinger, these ideas are mere “logical illusion... |
Creativity and Intoxication | Beer served as a nourishing staple in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, while wine in Greece and Rome symbolized vitality and truth, encapsulated in the phrase In vino veritas (In wine, truth). In Christianity, wine continues to embody a sacred symbol of unity and renewal, as seen in the Communion ritual. Virginia Woolf e... |
Art Writing Against the Grain: Towards a New Criticism | Art criticism has become a hot topic recently, after a long period of repressed dormancy in the art world. Even the forces that formerly sought to smother criticality out of existence now give lip service to the need for criticism. However, this has not coincided with an improved understanding of criticism's means or e... |
Logical Time and the Production of the Intelligible | In Jean Cavaillès’s On Logic and the Theory of Science (1942–1943; published posthumously in 1947, hereafter LTS), two central theses emerge:
\tScience operates outside of time as understood through the lived experience of consciousness (LTS 22).
\tNon-simultaneity is not historical but an intrinsic feature of th... |
Loser Gods and Deities | Every ancient pantheon refers to its own loser gods. Whether we look to Babylon, Egypt, Greece, China, the Aztecs, or myriad indigenous cosmologies, we will find the stories of those lesser deities who have been disgraced, banished, or punished. Some have absurd physiologies or disfigurements; others follow paranormal ... |
Avant-Garde Today: The Question of Autonomy | This Seminar brings together two understandings of the problem of the avant-garde in art: the now classic approach offered by Peter Bürger in his seminal book “Theory of the Avant-Garde” (1974) and Harry Lehmann’s essay “Avant-Garde Today” (2008). The Seminar hypothesizes that these two understandings illustrate differ... |
Critical Collapsology Part 2: Limitless Risk | Last season, in the first part of this Seminar, we established a new frame for studying the rapid decomposition of social structure, called 'critical collapsology.' This theory more adequately conceptualizes the vulnerabilities faced by global capitalist societies and sketches an orientation toward collapse.
However... |
Reading Simondon: On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects | This Survey Seminar will offer a collaborative close reading of Gilbert Simondon’s book On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. First published in 1958, this has become a seminal work in the philosophy of technology. In the text, Simondon challenges the conventional dichotomy between humans and machines, arguing... |
Autonomous Self-Creation: Foucault Beyond Neoliberalism | Neoliberalism is facing a deep crisis. Everyone seems to agree that it is the cause of a wide range of current issues, from growing economic inequalities and increasing indebtedness to the erosion of interpersonal relationships, climate change, and more. It is hard to tell if this turbulence is a catalyst for further a... |
The Geographers that Ate Themselves | This Seminar will examine the idea of losing oneself to space. Taking a cue from Roger Caillois' speculations about a deep-rooted temptation of all beings to recede into a generic background, we will examine the allure that the environment poses for thought. The corollary of Caillois' speculation is that space is a pro... |
Catechism for Revolutionary Philosophy | In this Eight-Session Seminar, we shall entertain a profound puzzle, not only regarding the nature of time but also concerning radical constitutional transformation and revolutionary subjectivity—that is, the crisis of social and political leadership in the contemporary West. This represents an infinite dilemma, a fork... |
Critical Collapsology: Theory and the Ends of Worlds | Collapsology has been one of the most strikingly underthought areas of the social sciences. Conceptually surrounded by the problem of the 'indeterminate totality,' as well as the hackneyed quality of invocations of 'the apocalypse,' the practice of studying social disintegration remained fragmentary and ad hoc. We stil... |
Pop and Contemporary Music Criticism Workshop | CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE WORKSHOP'S OPEN SESSION
DESCRIPTION: An apocrypha, misattributed at different times to Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, and others, states that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” This maxim is a provocation against music critics, who would try to ... |
Cognitive Mapping: Althusser, Sellars & Giannotti | In Grundrisse, Marx comments on his method for the critique of political economy:
“The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes, in turn, are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g., wage labor, capital, etc,"... |
Film and Forensic Workshop: Towards a Documentary Practice | In the age of social media, where content is distributed algorithmically with attention to political or psychological biases, we are immersed in the landscape of post-truth. In this paradigm, the testimonies of witnesses and victims can be easily dismissed as false or subjective, challenging the credibility of journali... |
Fear | What are the thousand typologies of fear? Is fear a primordial problem of consciousness; does it rest in the realms of perception, sensation, psyche, imagination; or does it emanate from the outer atmosphere as a kind of spatial mood? In this Seminar, we will explore both those supposed universal categories of phobia (... |
200 Years of Life Part II | This Seminar tracks the history, politics, and philosophy of biology over the last 200 years, since it cohered as a scientific discipline in the early 1800s. It breaks out of two critical dead-ends in interpreting biology: the political and historical limitations of analytic treatments of biology, and the disregard for... |
Art Writing in Context | The term “art writing” emerged in recent years to encompass the many ways that art is mediated by text, overlapping with but not limited to art criticism and academic art history. The purpose of this Workshop is to provide a general orientation on art writing while encouraging students to think about verbal and textual... |
Variations on the Great Refusal II | The first Variations on the Great Refusal Seminar situated this notion in the speculative aesthetics of Alfred North Whitehead and in Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. This Seminar proposes the idea of great refusal as a lens through which to look at the nature of aesthetic achievement in contemporary artistic p... |
Reflexive Architecture II : Seven Continua for the post-digital | Reflexive Architecture is a synthesis between the virtual, the actual, the biological, the cyborgian, the augmented, and the mixed in the context of constructed worlds. Above all, such architectures express the complex entanglement of what Deleuze & Guattari termed “the chaoids or the daughters of chaos: Philosophy, Sc... |
Simondon: Imagination and Invention | This Survey Seminar will offer students of the New Centre a collaborative close reading of the recently published English translation by Joe Hughes and Christophe Wall-Romana of Gilbert Simondon's seminal work, Imagination and Invention.
Imagination and Invention is a lecture series delivered by Simondon at the Sorb... |
Antonin Artaud and Journey to Mexico | On January 10, 1936, the poet, actor, and dramatic theorist Antonin Artaud departed Europe on a journey to Mexico that would take him not only to the streets, cafés, and lecture halls of Mexico City but to the remote mountains of the Sierra Tarahumara.
The Journey would only last ten months, culminating in some six ... |
On the Destruction of Life: in the Epoch of the Fourth Industrial Revolution information, anti-production and the ecological crises | On the Destruction of Life in the Epoch of the Third Industrial Revolution is the subtitle of Günther Anders’ second volume of The Outdatedness of Human Beings. This Seminar proposes a reflection on the increased destructive power of the digital revolution despite its apparently augmented productive efficacy. Neglected... |
Modes of Transit in the Necropastoral | This Seminar is a collaborative investigation of decaying, decomposing and/or dying nature, uncovering the subterranean precincts and possibilities of the Necropastoral. The Necropastoral designates a way of thinking about both ecology and aesthetics that eats away at categories like cause and effect, past and future, ... |
200 Years of Life I | This two-part Seminar will track the history, politics, and philosophy of biology over the course of the last 200 years since biology cohered as a scientific discipline. We will attempt to break out of two critical dead-ends in interpreting biology – political and historical limitations of analytic treatments of biolog... |
Worldmaking between Prometheanism & Perspectivism | The goal of this Seminar is to treat the question of planetary design at the often-polemical intersection of two contemporary streams of thought: On one side perspectivism, cosmopolitics, and/or the "ontological turn" and, on the other, prometheanism, neorationalism and/or left-accelerationism. This is structured on th... |
Secrecy: Return of the mystery cults | How does one design the perfect secret? How does one become an architect of ciphers, and can it resurrect the atmospheres of the mystery cults? In this seminar, we will explore those code-worlds of secrecy and techniques of encryption through which disguised, covert, subterranean, and cloaked zones are generated. Imper... |
Long-Form Writing Laboratory | What makes a good idea for a writing project? How do you move from a curiosity/impulse to an idea/argument? What would you tell an editor to persuade them to publish it? How do you follow through? This hands-on Writing Lab is a first collaboration between Liza Featherstone, a journalism professor and a columnist for Ja... |
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