Seminar Archive:
SARTRE WITH MARX with Michael Pelias
HOMO DATUM: THE EMERGING CONTOURS OF NEW SUBJECTIVITIES
WARS AND CAPITAL: A CLOSE READING OF OUR CONTEMPORARY SITUATION with Michael Pelias
Technology, Technics, and Time: Where are “We”? with Michael Peilas
Donald Trump: The Most American President in History? with Peter Bratsis
The Subversive Weber: Two Seminars on Max Weber's Teaching with Carlos Frade
Slackers, Sabotage, and Syndicalism: Irish Soul and American Labor with Kristen Lawler
Overcoming Servitude? Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus with Michael Pelias
Plato for Revolutionaries: Justice and Power, Then and Now with Michael Pelias
Bernard Stiegler: Critical Interventions with Michael Pelias
On Methods of Inquiry: From Aristotle to Evald Ilyenkov with Arto Artinian
The Presocratics and their Contemporary Relevance with Bruno Gulli
German Idealism and its Aftermath: Philosophical and Poetic Reactions with Michael Pelias
Marxism after Marx with Stanley Aronowitz
What Does it Mean to be Left? with Stanley Aronowitz
Freud and Philosophy: Overcoming the Self and its Aporias with Michael Pelias
The Age of Anxiety Co-taught by Peter Bratsis and Michael Pelias
The Frankfurt School and the Paradoxical Idea of Progress with Stanley Aronowitz
Marx, Marxism and Philosophy Today with Michael Pelias
Democracy and Marxism with Peter Bratsis
Time after Time: A contemporary reading of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” with Michael Pelias
Introduction to Dialectics and Dialectical Thinking with Stanley Aronowitz
Under the Spell of Sympathy: Forging Concepts for a Radical Society with José Eisenberg
The Institute for the Radical Imagination presents:
SARTRE WITH MARX
A ten-week seminar with Michael Pelias
Beginning Wednesday, January 31st
at 6:30 PM EST
SARTRE WITH MARX
A ten-week seminar with Michael Pelias
Beginning Wednesday, January 31st
at 6:30 PM EST
Readings:
Volume I of Critique of Dialectical Reason
Search for a Method
hermeneutic and practical relevance of the late Sartre’s monumental engagement with Marx in Volume I of Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960 Editions Gallimard, and 1976, 1st Verso edition). Beginning with Sartre’s radical conversion to Historical Materialism, a reading of the Question of Method, our
course of inquiry will involve an adventure of Hegelian reconciliation betwee individual praxis and collective action, marking crucial distinctions betwee dogmatic and critical dialectic, constituted and constituent dialectic, defining and shaping groups in fusion, and the practico-inert with new forms of alienation and demoralization.
This seminar will involve a close reading of the text and attempt an understanding
of the processes of dialectical totalization, often confused with totalitarian thinking. We will try to penetrate the movement of dialectical circularity and History through the brilliant paths opened by Sartre in this work.
A weekly syllabus will be available for the schedule of readings and the historical thematics involved.
$175 for ten sessions or $20 per session.
To register for the seminar, please follow this link:
The Institute for the Radical Imagination presents:
HOMO DATUM: THE EMERGING CONTOURS OF NEW SUBJECTIVITIES
With Professors Arto Artinian and Michael Pelias
A six-week seminar meeting weekly beginning Wednesday, October 4th @ 6:30 p.m.
HOMO DATUM: THE EMERGING CONTOURS OF NEW SUBJECTIVITIES
With Professors Arto Artinian and Michael Pelias
A six-week seminar meeting weekly beginning Wednesday, October 4th @ 6:30 p.m.
Readings:
Homo Datum and Socialized Cybernetics: Emerging Contours of the Latest Phase of Capitalism
Andrei Fursov: CONSPIROLOGY– The crypto-political economy of capitalism as a basis for the stud of Western elites
Understanding algorithmic societies: Hybrid intelligence and its zombies
Johann Chapoutot: Free to Obey
Stiegler, Bernard: Chapters 3 and 4 in For a New Critique of Political Economy, pages 14-70.
Wilden, Anthony: System and structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange
1. Understand Capitalism at its limit and in its ends
2. Politics as War (rethinking the war machine)
3. Tracing the processes of socialized cybernetics
4. Production of new subjectivities from the ever-present generalized proletarianization of the world and the new biological being endowed as human capital and what this means for our future.
5. To attempt to encounter homo datum with possible alternatives through asking the question, What does it mean to be human in this automated society? What new subjectivity must be developed to confront and move beyond the automated and robotized society into new forms and practices of “communist eudaimonia?”
Please join us for a radical experiment in thought and practice in forging various imaginative approaches to encountering the brave new world we inhabit and in overcoming obstacles standing in the way of the promise of the liberating potential of the cybernetic revolution.
Our readings will include works by Bernard Stiegler on the effects of proletarianization of the world, Anthony Wilden on analog and digital communication, the important study on modern management techniques, Free to Obey by Johann Chapoutot, as well as a working paper by Artinian on homo datum, and other relevant studies. A comprehensive reading list will be disseminated to those participating in the seminar.
$135 for six sessions or $25 per session.
To register for the seminar, please follow this link:
The Institute for the Radical Imagination presents:
WARS AND CAPITAL:
A CLOSE READING OF OUR CONTEMPORARY SITUATION
A six-week seminar, beginning May 23, 2022
Mondays at 6 PM EST
Michael Pelias presenting and facilitating
Readings:
Correspondence 1949-1975 (Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger) - Part II
Wars and Capital (Eric Alliez Maurizio Lazzarato Ames Hodges)
Gilles Deleuze - A Thousand Plateaus - The War Machine
About this Seminar:
This seminar will engage in a close reading of the new collaborative work of Eric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato, Wars and Capital, Semiotext(e), 2016, and attempt to situate this original historical and speculative text in the current conjuncture of the warfare state (circa 1938-present).
We will begin with an early work by Ernst Junger, Towards the Line (Uber die Linie), and give a brief background regarding its rewriting by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. For the first week, the “subjectivation of civil wars” amidst the age of the world picture(s) and the construction of new war machines (as reserve stock) will be thought through alongside the close connection of capital, industrialism, technology, and the military and the militarization of everyday life.
The seminar will ground us in new theoretical territory and give us new weapons of conceptualization and tools for struggle in a time of massive geopolitical shifts. Of course, the questions of governmentality, maintaining hegemonies, and creating new subjectivities will be problematized throughout our reading of what now is termed the “3D” capital era: deregulation, departitioning, and deintermediation (allowing investment banks to act as banks). Alongside these symptoms, we will discuss the continual everyday weaponizing of class struggle against positive individuation, the theft of time limiting reflection and militant practice, the refined techniques of deflection by the propaganda industry, and the ongoing war against education which has materialized in an over-bloated class of non-thinking pencil pushers and planners of “job-ready“ schooling rather than developing subjectivity and an ethos of freedom and responsibility.
$115 Suggested Contribution for 6 Sessions or or $20 per seminar*
* Sliding scale registration, if you cannot pay the full registration email info@radicalimagination.institute
* Zoom details will be emailed shortly before the seminar starts
The Institute for the Radical Imagination presents:
Technology, Technics, and Time: Where are “We”? with Michael Peilas
A ten week seminar, beginning November 1, 2021
Mondays 7 to 9 PM EST
Michael Pelias presenting and facilitating
About this Seminar:
This 10-Week Seminar organized by the Institute for the Radical Imagination and the Left Forum intends to explore our contemporary liminal and psychic position(s) in relation to the onslaught of technological overload and its determinate domination over our everyday lives. Through selected readings from Heidegger’s Question Concerning Technology and the Age of the World Picture to Benjamin’s seminal and often optimistic take on technical reproduction, we will frame some modern thinkers’ (Stiegler and Kittler) response to the problematic of the metaphysical and epochal thinking of Heidegger and the historical materialist approach of Benjamin.
A series of serious questions will be addressed: In the pandemic era, are we now passively resigned to the new order of the Screen and its new deals, or can we forge a liberatory response through original engagements with the “wired” economy? Can we find a line of flight from ensnarement and enframing so pervasive and encompassing in our everyday lives?
Is a new avant-garde of thinking as (and) acting a real possibility and what categories need to be overturned in order for this emergence to occur? What new weapons are needed for interpretation, understanding, and concurrently (and most importantly) transformation?
*The single fee of $175-$225 covers registration for the entire 10-Week Course*
Readings will include:
Heidegger, Martin. “The Age of the World Picture”
Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology”
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproduction”
Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, Volume 3: Cinematic Time and the question of Malaise
Stiegler, Bernard. “The Automization of the super-Ego and the passage of Desire as Original Diversion of Libidinal Energy” in The Lost Spirit of Capitalism
Kittler, Friedrich. Optical Media
To Register for the full seminar, Click Here!
