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Informal Intensive Study Courses: Integrated Credit Program, Spring Semester of 2025



As always, our intensive study program offers access to the original research of our teachers and engages you in a process of research as study and vice versa, combining topics emerging from philosophy, the sciences and arts. Materialism is a theme that intersects all areas and topics not only to be defended in its many forms but also to be challenged in a productive fashion. Marxism features prominently too, but we also open space for discussions of religion, Nietzsche, posthumanism, feminism and much more. Our two feminist courses are thought collectively and emerge from actors who either way function collectively (the Anti/Gones collective, whereas Haela Hunt-Hendrix is affiliated to Liturgy while teaching here jointly with Katerina Kolozova). Here is a summary of the overall content of the program: in Tutt’s course, Nietzsche and Marx are examined as productive antagonists whose insights radically diverge from one another, but whose itineraries of thought and investigations share a surprising degree of similarity; Anti/Gones will invite us to delve into “Antigone’s act”: her resistance and dissent, focusing on the dialectics between subjection and subjectivity;  we will engage in 6 sessions offered by Engster dealing with the new ways of reading Marx’ Capital revisiting Marx-oriented social critique in the 1960s, with a focus on the new reading of Marx in Germany: the critique of the commodity form and the return of philosophy to Marxism: Georg Lukács, Eugen Paschukanis, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Walter Benjamin, to name a few;  we will offer introduction into Roden’s “unbound posthumanism, the disconnection thesis and the problem of posthuman agency, Nietzschean agency and hyperagency;  Sacilotto will present a new form of materialist epistemology by way of engaging in examining an ontological matrix that challenges the idealist or “correlationist” results of post-Kantian philosophy, while thinking of the material conditions that present a limit to life (death), and even to materiality itself as a whole (extinction); Joel White will offer an in-depth examination of the concept of logomachy transduced as a thermoinformatic logic of sense, revisiting the notion of logomachy from Plato to Derrida via discussions from the fields of physics and related STEM fields; an artist and a political philosopher, Hunt-Hendrix and Kolozova will engage in examining the links between faith, religion, femininity, Marxism and orthodox gnosis.

Description of courses, timeframes and bios of the teachers:

David Roden

Title of Course: Posthumanism and Posthumans (January 2025)

Description of Course: This four session course re-examines the ideas and arguments explored in my book, Posthuman Life and in subsequent publications with a special emphasis on the unresolved problems they raise. The core philosophical theme will be the wider philosophical implications of a posthumanism structured by the thought of disconnection and discontinuity rather than the relationist or neo-vitalist ontologies of Critical Posthumanism and related philosophical positions. Session 1 will introduce Unbound Posthumanism, the Disconnection Thesis and the problem of Posthuman Agency; Session 2, Nietzschean Agency and Hyperagency; Session 3; Philosophy of Technology, Accelerationism, and Counter-Ethics; Session 4, Horror, Perversion and the Biomorph.


Anti/Gones: Athena Athanasiou and Elena Tzelepis

Title of Course: Political subjectivity, dissidence, and contemporary Antigones  (January 2025)

Description of Course:  As we seek to reflect the possibility for a critical theory responsive to the urgencies of our bleak historical present, οur attempt is to explore how the figure of Antigone indicates the conditions of possibility for political subjectivity and dissidence in response to regimes of injustice. Various names and political concepts can capture Antigone’s act: resistance, disobedience, protest, dissent, refusal, insurrection. Through this course, we hope to engage these multilayered concepts and questions, focusing on the dialectics between subjection and subjectivity. We outline how subjectivity involves the polis, as subjects are produced and foreclosed by means of regulatory schemas (racialized, classed, gendered and sexualized), but it is also through these frames that that subjects occasionally enact practices of embodied disobedience and resistance. Drawing on Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, we take Antigone’s mourning as a way to reflect on how the historical and social contingencies of vulnerability are taken up as situated knowledges for transformative political imagination. We examine cultural and artistic enactments of situational and translocal Antigones from the Global South that point to the ethical and political performativity of contemporary feminist queer decolonial perspectives and activisms.


Daniel Sacilotto 

Title of Course: Materialism and Eschatology: A Genealogy of Modern Thanatropism (February 2025)  

Description of Course: This seminar explores the development of eschatological narratives in modern and contemporary philosophy. Expanding on the genealogy of structural materialisms developed in Structure and Thought Toward a Materialist Theory of Representational Cognition (2024), we will interrogate how thanatropism becomes an inherent dimension of various attempts to travers the critical turn and avoid the anti-realist consequences associated with transcendental idealism. Accordingly, radicalizing the tenets of Kant’s attempt to think of the conditions of all possible experience as the limits of finite cognition, we shall examine how the eschatology forms part of an epistemological and ontological matrix that challenges the idealist or “correlationist” results of post-Kantian philosophy, in order to think of the material conditions that present a limit to life (death), and even to materiality itself as a whole (extinction).


Daniel Tutt

Title of Course:  Nietzsche’s Theoretical Surplus and Marxism in the 21st Century (February 2025)


Description of Course: In this seminar we will read Nietzsche and Marx as productive antagonists whose insights radically diverge from one another, but whose itineraries of thought and investigations share a surprising degree of similarity, from the critique of political economy, religion, suffering, humanism, ideology, consciousness, to the function of the intellectual, revolution, equality, to a full-blown criticism of the bourgeoisie. 20th century philosophers from Paul Ricœur, Gilles Deleuze, Huey Newton to Alain Badiou have sought to combine the insights of Nietzsche and Marx, but this has come at the cost, most often, of completely sidelining the richness of Nietzsche’s robust reactionary political core. We will unearth the political core to Nietzsche by reading him in a wide-context situated in his time, and by reading Marxist criticisms of Nietzsche, we will discover a paradoxical series of theoretical surpluses in his thought, vital for a renewed Marxism in the 21st century.


Haela Hunt-Hendrix and Katarina Kolozova

Title of Course: Faith, Religion, and the Feminine (March/April 2025)

Description of Course:  Feminist theology and Marxist feminist non-philosophy (in Laruelleian sense) will engage in productive conversation on the topics of faith and knowledge, religion and philosophy, feminism and the feminine as a transcendental category, mysticism, poetry and politics. We will engage in close reading of Marx, Dostoevsky, Irigaray, Laruelle, Byzantine Theology, Orthodox Gnosis, Kristeva and more.


Joel White

Title of Course: On Logomachy: A Conceptual Recovery (April 2025)

Description of Course: I take logomachy to be a transduced thermoinformatic logic of sense. It is concerned with how thermodynamics, the science of energy and entropy, and information theory, the science of information, affects questions concerning the adequacy, validity, and demonstration of sense, what is sometimes called logic or philosophical semantics.  The content of the course, in particular, will explore the etymological and conceptual history of the Greek word λογομᾰχῐ́ᾱ (logmachia) and its subsequent translations into Latin, French and English as Logomachiis, Logomachie and logomachy. I shall track, through the major events in the concept’s history (from Plato and Saul to Artaud via Derrida), what is at stake in logomachy’s philosophical recovery as a thermoinformatic logic or art of sense.


Frank Engster

Title of Course: On the new readings of Marx and Capital in Western Europe in the 20th century (May 2025)

Description of Course: The aim is to present the new ways of reading Marx’ Capital that became established in the course of the renewal of a Marx-oriented social critique in the 1960s. In each case, the focus will be on the basic critical traits and the central exponents: Tronti, operaism in Italy, Louis Altuhsser; symptormatological-structuralist reading of Capital in France, and the logical-categorical reading of Capital of the New Marx-Reading in West Germany. Operaism and structuralism have also each shown post-versions, namely in the form of a “biopolitical” respective a “deconstructive” reading and appropriation of Marx. The innocent term “readings”, however, refers to methods of critique and representation. These readings brought about a renewal in the “critique after Marx”, in the horizon of which the social critique oriented towards Marx's critique of political economy still stands. However, despite the internationalization of the discussion, a debate on the critical content, the respective basic traits and the methodology has largely failed to materialize. Sessions: I. The beginnings of new readings of Capital in the 1960s: 1) the New Marx reading in West Germany (above all the Adorno students Helmut Reichelt, Hans- Georg Backhaus, Hans-Jürgen Krahl, Alfred Schmidt); 2) operaism in Italy; and 3) the structuralist reading of Capital in France; II. The beginnings of the New Reading of Marx in Germany:the critique of the commodity form in the 1920s and 1930s and the return of philosophy to Marxism:Georg Lukács, Eugen Paschukanis, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno.; III. The New Marx-Reading in West Germany and the logical-categorical, form-analytical and value- theoretically oriented reading of Marx: the “critique of monetary theories of value” (Hans-Georg Backhaus, Helmut Reichelt) the “monetary theory of value” (Michael Heinrich), the “fundamental critique of value” (Robert Kurz, Krisis, Exit!); IV. Operaism in Italy and the operaist reading of Capital: Mario Tronti. V. Structuralism and the symptomatic reading of Capital: Louis Althusser.; VI. The post-versions: Post-structuralism (Deleuze/Guattari, Derrida, etc.) and post-operiasm (Toni Negri, Michael Hardt, Paolo Virno, Mario Lazzarato)..


Further Information About the ICP:

Deadline for Applying: December 1, 2024

Deadline for Admission Notification: December 5, 2024.

Deadline for fee payment (or first installment): December 12, 2024


Requirements: 
Graduate level preparation for courses. Applicants do not necessarily need to have the formal level of education that is equivalent to second and third cycle university study programs, it suffices if they can self-assess they are capable of following the courses. Graduate level is second and third cycle as per the European Higher Education Area (Bologna Signatory Countries in Europe that issue ECTS credits, which include all of our European HEI partners at SMR) and as in North America. Integrated Credit Program is an intensive program of informal education co-organized by ISSHS (EHEA/ECTS institution) and ASU-CPT, in the frameworks of SMR, and our Estonian partner charged with organizational responsibilities. The selection of participants (students) is carried out by the academic institutions running the program.

The motivation statement embedded in the application form and the short bio should suffice to assess ability to follow the course. When you are applying for a given semester there is an application form in which you can fill out all relevant information. The link to the form is at the bottom of this page. 

Credits:  ECTS/US credit certificates of up to 2/1 credits are offered by SMR which is a digital informal study platform of European and US accredited higher education institutions; this Fall’s ICP (Integrated Credit Program) are organized and offered by  CPT-Arizona State University and SSHS. Note: ISSHS, just as the other founding SMR institutions from Europe—CIL- Design Academy Eindhoven and ATTP-Technical University of Vienna—is a holder of an Erasmus Charter of Excellence in European Higher Education Institutions 2021-2027. Arizona State University is a top US institution in the area of research innovation across a vast array of fields: in 2024 ASU is ranked nr. 1 in the US for global impact, innovativeness, and multidisciplinary research. ASU ranks alongside MIT, University of California-Berkeley, Georgia Tech and Purdue University and ahead of Carnegie Mellon University, Princeton among the top 5 universities in the US in a number of other categories https://www.asu.edu/about/rankings/ranked-number-one.   

Certificates and Fees

 
170 - for one (1) certificate course for students, and 340 euro - for one (1) certificate course for university, science institutes staff and postdocs (as well as all other professionals interested in LLL/life long learning)

Discount for combined multiple courses:

A package of 2 courses: 280 euro for students, and 570 for university staff and faculty.

A package of 3 courses: 360 euro for students; and 600 for staff and faculty.

A package of 4 courses plus 1 or more: 400 for students, and 680 for staff and faculty.

In order to earn 1 credit you should enroll in at least two courses. Also, you can simply audit any course if you are not interested in ECTS credit cetificates.

Scholarships for the Global South

Instead of offering partial and full scholarships for the Global South, the Integrated Credit Program offers an automatic 40% discount to the applicants from the Global South, which has been called by the UN, since late 2022, also the "China +77" group of countries. Please, note that it is not so much of a geographical category as it is (also) a socio-economic one, updated annually by the UN and/or World Bank. You can check the status of your country HERE. As a shortcut, we would, however, point out that the category does coincide with geography to a considerable extent, esp. when it comes to Europe and North America, however, it does not come down to geography (Australia isn't Global South nor is Turkey).

Payment: Payment instructions will be sent to all successful applicants at the same time they receive their acceptance letters. If anyone has difficulties to make the first payment which is necessary to officialize the enrollment, please contact us directly, and we will do our best to make sure we work it out together. Likewise, all applicants are eligible to pay on installment plans if they are otherwise unable to cover the fees. If you wish to pay on installment plans, please be sure to check the relevant box in the application form.

How to Apply: Interested applicants can find the full application form, as well as at the very bottom of this page. All application forms must be filled out in full and sent in by the above stated set deadline in order to be considered valid. If you have any inquiries please send them to all the following email addresses:

Isidora Hennig and Jake Levinston at schoolofmaterialistresearch@gmail.com

info@isshs.edu.mk

CPT@exchange.asu.edu


About SMR: The School of Materialist Research is an international platform, founded by the Center for Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University, the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje, the Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics at TU Vienna, which, in cooperation with the Critical Inquiry Lab at the Design Academy Eindhoven, functions as a global online school combining education, research, and mentorship to advance academic study at the intersection of the social sciences and humanities (SSH) and the STEM sciences.


The question schedule prior to completion of enrollment: Each class/seminar begins (normally) at 18.30 CET or 12.30 EST; the exact dates cannot be announced now as they are still subject to scheduling and SMR runs as a school with multiple streamlined courses, so once established dates can also be subject to change (even though these changes happen quite rare). Please, consider SMR more as a school even though informal than a series of events. We cannot announce a schedule before we complete the selection process.

Application form