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Informal Intensive Study Courses:
Integrated Credit Program, Spring Semester of 2026

The courses offered for the Spring 2026 ICP (Integrated Certificate Program) are variously concerned with the unconscious and psychic structures of power, domination, and liberation that are genealogically rooted in ancient Greece but are simultaneously directed toward today's sociotechnical architectures, including the (psychotic) structures of artificial intelligence and rational inhumanism. Taken together, these courses display shared, if divergent, interests in psychoanalysis, materialism, ancient philosophy, and the politics of writing/speech, and use a range of methods and experimental pedagogies to express these commitments.

For instance, Christine Wertheim’s course, “Rethinking Sexual Difference as CON-structural rather than merely Structural,” focuses on the formation of Occidental Patriarchy through the lens of ancient Greek philosophy and tragedy, drawing on the methods of structural materialism; while Oxana Timofeeva’s seminar, “Underground Plato: Between Psychopolitics and Zoocosmology” examines how many of our contemporary concerns, from anarcho-feminism to the materialism of zoocosmology, are already present in Plato. Similarly, Lindsay Lerman is invested in the social and political functions of ancient texts in her course, “The Function of Prophecy,” but is specifically interested in the role prophetic speech plays in shaping reality. Meanwhile, the (Lacanian) unconscious takes centre stage in Alex Taek-Gwang Lee’s seminar, “Lacan and AI,” but does so for the purposes of diagnosing one of the most beguiling, if not prophetic, sociotechnical formations in our age: artificial intelligence. Finally, Jason Bonilla’s course, “There Will Be Blood: Factuality, Modality, Normativity,” navigates thorny debates in recent speculative philosophy to pave the way for a revived Hegelianism that passes through Sellarsian and post-Sellarsian philosophy to do so.


Christine Wertheim
Title of the course: “Rethinking Sexual Difference as CON-structural rather than merely Structural” (April 8,15, 22, 29, 18:30 CET)

Arguing that there is not one Patriarchy, but many, this course focuses on the specifically Occidental form, whose unique conceptual and technical perspective is tied to a particular mode of gender organization. The course postulates that exploring links between Western culture’s ideas, practices of sexuation, and technology, reveals that key concepts in its philosophy and psychoanalysis are not ideologically neutral, but deeply inflected by their material context in Occidental patriarchy.

We begin with two scriptural foundations of this culture in ancient Greece: Parmenides’s conceptions of Being and nøn-being which establishes Western philosophy, and The Oresteia, Aeschylus’s dramatic trilogy, in which the birth of democracy is linked to the institution of a patriarchal social order. A third technical myth of Hephaestus, the god who invented automatons will also be discussed. We then explore a range of praxes that highlight links between the conceptual, psychosexual and technical, in order to see what might need revision: 1)- ideas about space and voids, 2)- notions of matter and form, 3)- various formulations of logical structure, 4)- relations between bOdies and signifiers, 5)- theories of gender and sexuation, 6)- desire for the elimination of bOdies in favor or pure (|n)-Form-ation, and 7)- the perpetuation of all these in contemporary digital technology.

Methodology – The course assumes a perspective in which structures of phenomena – physical, psychological and Sensical – are seen as becoming-knowable through observation and the use of formal notations, which may themselves be amended through observation and interaction. Notations discussed include graphical scripts where iconicity is valued as much as symbolism. The POV may thus be described as a structural-materialism. However, the focal ‘structure’ is not that of Saussure, with its binary notion of difference. Nor is it some extension of this into a quasi-triadic (post-structural) defer-ancé. Rather, our base is a complex CON-structure employing two principles, neither of which may be reduced to the negation of the other. This CON-structural approach is based on Peircean rather than Saussurean semiotics, especially Peirce’s Existential Graph notation for deductive logic, in which a spatial complex comprises as real a component of the meaning system as any signifier. From this notion of logical structure, different to the one used in Lacan’s sexuation formulas, we develop a CON-structivist view of sexual difference that highlights the patriarchal assumptions and limitations built into many current theories of sexuation.


Oxana Timofeeva
Title of the course: “Underground Plato: Between Psychopolitics and Zoocosmology” (March 2, 9, 16 and 23, 18:00 CET)

This course explores how Plato’s philosophy, conventionally regarded as the foundation of Western idealism, secretly harbors an underground materialism — a thinking of the immortal soul as a living medium between body and world, between the psychic and the cosmic. Reading the Timaeus, Republic, and Phaedo alongside modern thinkers such as Freud, Georges Bataille, and Alexandra Kollontai, we will trace a genealogy that links psychopolitics (the correlation between psychic structures and political communities) with zoocosmology (the idea of life unfolding on planetary and cosmic scales). Throughout the course, we will uncover Plato’s hidden geophilosophical and anarcho-feminist tendencies, and examine how his cosmology resonates with questions of memory, the unconscious, and immortality in an era marked by ecological crisis and mass extinction.

Programme:
1. Undead Souls: Plato’s Hades and the Question of Immortality;
2. Psychopolis: Between Logos and Eros;
3. Zoosphere: A Brief History of the World Soul;
4. Chōra and the Anarchic Matter of Becoming.

Lindsay Lerman
Title of the course: “The Function of Prophecy” (April 16, 23, 30, May 7, 18:30 CET)

From the Old Testament to the Vedas to Greek tragedy, the oracle—or prophet—has always served a number of social, political, and epistemic functions. This course will examine those functions as more than mere literary or rhetorical devices. As Silvia Federici writes, “prophecies are not simply the expression of a fatalistic resignation.” We live in an age when it is abundantly clear that words structure reality, and in particular, that new words are the beginnings of new realities, and that new realities can be shaped to liberate and to control. This requires that we ask ourselves what is prophetic speech, and how it might differ from ordinary speech.
For this course, we will read a selection of texts employing the prophetic or oracular voice, in order to explore the epistemic, social, political, and ontological functions of prophecy.

Alex Taek-Gwang Lee
Title of the Course: “Lacan and AI” (April 3, 10, 17, 24, 10:30 CET)

This seminar explores how the contemporary rise of AI can be understood through the lens of Lacan’s later work, especially his concept of ordinary psychosis. Rather than treating AI as the outcome of a purely technological evolution, the course situates its development within the dynamics of cognitive capitalism, big data accumulation, and neoliberal theories of human capital. AI emerges not from its own internal logic, but from the material expansion of global capitalism and the dissolution of boundaries —i.e., privacy, copyright, and authorship —that once stabilised the subject.

Lacan’s later theory offers a unique entry point for analysing this transformation. Ordinary psychosis names a subjective structure in which the symbolic support that anchors meaning becomes fragile or inconsistent, yet without the dramatic symptoms of classical psychosis. Today’s AI-driven environments, e.g., algorithmic feeds, predictive analytics, automated decision systems, intensify exactly this condition: a world where symbolic guarantees waver, where opaque algorithms constantly modulate meaning, and where subjects experience both hyperconnection and derealisation. In this sense, AI operates not only as a technical system but as a psychotic machine that produces a new mode of subjectivity.

The course traces how contemporary AI technologies, built on sub-symbolic architectures such as neural networks and deep learning, replicate the logic of the unconscious while removing the operator who assigns meaning. This creates an environment in which the subject is addressed by a machinic “Other” that does not speak but nevertheless structures experience, a condition strikingly close to Lacan’s account of ordinary psychosis. By bringing Lacan’s later theory into dialogue with AI’s political economy, the course examines how algorithmic automation generates new forms of voluntary servitude, new modes of disorientation, and paradoxically, new possibilities for resistance. Ultimately, students will consider how subjects might inhabit or subvert AI’s emerging regime of non-symbolic control.

Jason A. Bonilla
Title of the Couse: “There Will Be Blood: Factuality, Modality, Normativity” (April 4, 11, 18, 25, 18:30 CET)

Inspired by Huw Price’s 2008 article—or perhaps by Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 film of the same name—this course aims to trace a genealogy of the factual, the modal, and the normative. A genealogy of factuality is the project of establishing the objective facticity of existence. A genealogy of modality is the project of understanding how individuals in our factual situation come to rely on modal language (i.e., use terms such as contingency/necessity/possibility/impossibility). A genealogy of normativity is the project of explaining how we use conceptual vocabulary to evaluate ourselves via inferences. Price traces a lineage from David Hume to Robert Brandom, but we would like to broaden the post-Sellarsian spectrum toward neo-rationalism, understood as a rational inhumanism that pursues the autonomy of thought through a Promethean pragmatism. Following Anna Longo in her contribution to the volume The Legacy of Kant in Sellars and Meillassoux, in the post-Kantian problem of synthetic a priori judgments, knowing no longer consists either in deriving particular truths from innate general ideas or in generalizing from isolated sense-data, but rather in understanding objects in accordance with the concepts that pre-structure our experience. To evade both the Scylla of dogmatic rationalism and the Charybdis of skeptical empiricism, Kant restores the terms of the problem by evaluating representations with respect to the laws of our understanding. However, in view of the imminent risk of perpetuating ontological correlationism—when we should retain only epistemological correlationism—we should also inquire into the laws of nature. It is within this horizon that the Hegelian project of a metaphysics of reasons articulates the orientation of a critical speculation in the 21st century.


Further Information About the ICP:

Deadline for Applying: January 31th 2026

Enrollment takes place in two stages:
- assessment of the quality of application by a faculty selection committee (not letter then February 5th 2025)
- enrollment fee 1st payment, to be completed 1 month after the notification of acceptance

Upon the completion of these two steps you are formally enrolled which will be confirmed by an official letter sent to your provided email address

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 and Certificates: About the ECTS certificates
Credits, depending on the number of courses and individual work put in, can vary from 1 ECTS to 3 ECTS credits. The certificates are issued by one of the European Higher Education Area member institutions of SMR, participating in the Erasmus+ program as full members holders of a valid Erasmus Charter of European Quality in Higher Education (ECHE). It is co-signed by our co-director who represents one of the founding institutions, Arizona State University – Centre for Philosophical Technologies. 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, ISSHS has been accorded 97 out of maximum 100 points of the independent Erasmus ranking agency, which describes it as one the "best places to study in Europe." 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.

Participation fees:
SMR is a self-sustaining initiative with modest infrastructural support from its founding institutions. In order to maintain its independence from the founding institutions themselves and from major donor and grant programs it sustains itself through funds collected through participation fees. Our aim is to constantly reduce prices, increase the number of participants, diversify forms of participation and, through different forms of affiliation, expand and reinvent its concept of ownership. In the meantime, we suggest you apply for scholarships at your home institutions for which we can provide a support letter. If you have to pay from your own pocket we offer installments if that helps (depending on the price as sometimes the transfer fees can be higher than the discount itself). Finally, those who will enroll in the ICP Spring 2026 courses qualify for a discount in the range of 15 to 30 percent for one of our summer schools organized in Greece (with an online component)

One course: 180 euro

Discount for combined multiple courses:

A package of 2 courses: 290 euro for up to 1.5 ECTS.

A package of 3 courses: 370 euro for up to 2 ECTS

A package of 4 courses: 400 for up to 3 ECTS.

All participants or conformed applicants for the Summer Institute in Greece can participate in ICP Spring 2026 free of charge.

One credit equals 25 work hours, and those include the participants' individual work and preparation, work between sessions and qualitative assessment of their engagement and contriubiton during the interactive parts of the session.

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. 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:

Candela Guyot at schoolofmaterialistresearch@gmail.com

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.


Application form