︎ SMR Summer School: “Revenge of Structuralism: Language, Desire, Mathematics and Rationalism in the Age of A.I.”  
SMR Summer Institute in Stagira/Olympiada (Greece), August 16–20, 2027*



"Revenge of Structuralism: Language, Desire, Mathematics and Rationalism in the Age of A.I.," is the title of a summer school, part of the SMR Summer Institute in Stagira/Olympiada (Greece), scheduled for August 16–20, 2027*. In an era of AI, we are witnessing an intertwining of phenomena that have not only scientific but also political and metaphysical (or ontological) consequences. These come down to the interplay between two axes of thought once considered opposed. The humanities, languages, and linguistics, specifically in the sense of structuralist (Saussurean) linguistic, paved the way for not only the first artificial or programming languages, but are now the foundation of what we call AI, or simply LLMs. On the other hand, LLMs can "think" only through the so-called transformer architectonics, which is inherently mathematical (vectors of statistical probability). One speaks of the crisis of mathematics today as AI is supposedly capable of replacing it, doing so ironically by way of "reading" narrative text (again, by way of applying said transformer architectonics, which is essentially vectorial and mathematical). This banal explication of how AI or LLMs work from a purely mechanical point of view opens several questions that we intend to address: Are the humanities truly obsolete in modern advanced education, and in particular, languages, linguistics, and continental philosophy? Which is more dispensable: so-called continental or analytic philosophy, and does the divide still hold water? Are we witnessing the truth of the pure mechanicity of it all, including presumed AGI? And if so, what does the concept of Rationalism still mean, and what purpose does it serve? What makes contemporary tech-utopians think of religion and eschatology, and is the return to the questions of political theology more pressing than ever? Departing from linguistic and logical structuralism, including deconstruction as its variant, we will pose these pressing questions. Mathematicians will speak of mystics, Marxists of structuralist linguistics, philosophers of category theory and poetry. We believe that this deep dive will yield not only profound philosophical considerations but also some very pragmatic conclusions. Confirmed speakers: Fernando Zalamea, Rocco Gangle, Babette Babich Gil Anidjar, Joel White and Katarina Kolozova.


Masterclass descriptions

Fernando Zalamea:
Structure of Mathematics and Desire in the Cahiers of Paul Valéry and Simone Weil

The dialectics between mathematics, philosophy and poetry has always propelled important heights in a non-reductionist knowledge (e.g. Novalis, Florensky, Broch, etc.), open to the multiplicity of the World. If the dialogue is also sustained by delving in the underlying fabric of thought, we obtain deep insights. This the case of the Notebooksof some important poets and philosophers, as Paul Valéry's Cahiers (1894-1945) and Simone Weil's Cahiers (1933-1943). In our presentation, we will describe many reflections of Valéry and Weil on mathematical creativity, and how they are intertwined with the structural multiplicity of Human condition (action, work, attention, will, desire). In our Age of A.I., particularly after the OpenAI announcement of hundreds of advanced mathematical proofs (October 6th 2026), it becomes important to contrast critically A.I. mechanics with non-reductive imagination. 


Babette Babich:
μὴ φῦναι or Thinking an AI-Apocalypse After the Analytic-Continental ‘Gap’: On Günther Anders’ Titanic Prometheus and Negative Political Theology

The distinction between analytic and continental philosophy is fading or has already vanished and that sometime ago, ca. 1985, according to Reiner Schümann, thinking German but writing in French, “De la philosophie aux Etats-Unis.“ Of course, like ‘objects in the rearview mirror,’ your results may vary. As Nietzsche says, “Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard.”  Talk of the ‘continental’ (what would that have been?) increasingly makes no sense to a new generation that blinks at the term, educated on the signifiers of analytic philosophy, its authors, its problems, its -isms. If deconstructionists might worry, Foucault is still fine, Deleuze better yet set into an analytic framework of philosophical terms/terminological variants on repeat. 

There has never been more need for hermeneutic exigence (Gadamer if not yet Heidegger or Nietzsche) and less competence, less reading.  The analytic philosopher (not the Lacanian) sets the problems and the solutions and limits discourse to its own fatherly names (you can find these in the bibliography or the footnotes and you will find only these). At the same time, references, citation frequency has never mattered less where ideas are mixed/remixed, like pop music, covers without attribution in order to avoid royalties but for a billing model, rents above all, to allow a new subscription, billable by month/week: some diamond deformed gemini or new coin for information on demand, the end of surfing, cue the scroll.

If today the theological turn once decried by Dominique Janicaud who understood that the gesture toward an empty sky has reached a certain crescendo — the word continues to ascend, as Günther Anders argued that negative theology born of a certain theological absence would turn out to the most productive of scholarly theological turns: infinitely variable. Thereby misappointment would ensure eternal waiting, non-being a confirmation of being: no symptoms, positive proof of the asymptomatic. Continental philosophy utterly dispensable as continental philosophy has been dispensed with and this was easy one simply hired ivy league scholars or those from ‘good’ schools) and: what difference could it make?

In place of ‘infinite jest’ an infinite text, generable on demand, haiku on cue, all for the cost of the roster method required to churn the algorithm through its variants, all of the water and all of the energy and all of the silence, and the land for a result needing only that the reader read (or, if it is a video, some least interval specified, 8 seconds, so that the read registers). 

Rorschach on automatic loop, fractal variance.

That there are unauthored texts, that students claim to have authored the texts they did not author, taking a prompt they asked their professor to provide (one likes to please, thus Freud wonderedwhat do women want, Lacan replies la femme n’existe pas, the student’s sole perplexity a tutor’s preference), professional authors likewise, department admins generate reports for committees, aided by AI as notetaker, failure of memory, military command centers likewise, long since emptying any vaunted singularity of singularity.

The seeming text lost in seeming: the only thing of ‘value’ being consumption, so Anders argued, Baudrillard in his wake: we, the ‘eaters’ swallow what we are fed, like geese, Anders used the German, attention traded for a dopamine fix, a nothing hit for nothing and more nothing.

The eschatological question remains, by definition, of the greatest urgency if we usually pay it no mind (one has to have faith). But having, if one has, and in effect one has, as this is easily done, converted the machine into Baal, it remains to ask with Anders if the turn is theological, or with commentators weaker than Vattimo, anatheological? or nothing besides?  I will seek to read Nietzsche on his ‘unknown God’ along with Heidegger and his gnosis (Heidegger has a century of students he might answer for), beyond μὴ φῦναι, as Nietzsche quotes Sophocles: never to have been, revisiting Anders questioning ‘being without time’, apocalypse style in reverse: the anti-Augustinian question unmaking time.

Rocco Gangle:
Generic Desire: Erotics without Structure

Perhaps the root of desire is neither structural nor phenomenological nor machinic but generic. What is generic refuses abstraction as the proper medium of universality and proposes instead a non-constructible, unquantifiable but nonetheless rigorous form of intelligibility. The concept of the generic serves as a crucial theoretical tool for both François Laruelle and Alain Badiou, although these thinkers deploy the concept in very different ways: Badiou (in Being and Event) primarily by means of set theory and Paul Cohen's mathematical technique of forcing, Laruelle (in Non-Standard Philosophy) on the basis of a radical human gnosis irreducible to either mathematical science or transcendental philosophy. This presentation examines how Badiousian and Laruellian interpretations of the generic potentially evade structuralist models of desire, particularly as drawn from Lacanian and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis. In an epoch of ascendent machine intelligence and apparent social and political autocomplete, is generic desire thinkable for us as a viable alternative? If so, how?

Gil Anidjar:
Structure and Destruction

We will revisit the “structure and genesis” debates of the 1960s and address the way in which, between history and process, patterns, networks, and organization, destruction disappears from view, which today seems not only surprising but downright misleading. How to think destruction, then? Is there such a thing as a “Destruktionstrieb” as Sabina Spielrein and Freud after her proposed? And if not psychoanalysis, what science would enable us to think destruction? Is there, for instance, a mathematical concept of destruction? Or else do modern physics (and the principle of the conservation of energy) offer a better path toward such a concept? If the internet — or AI — have (or fail to have) an off-switch, does it mean we are rushing toward our destruction or past it?

Joel White:
Energy, Information, Signification

Taking Jean Rousset's structuralist account of literature in Forme et signification (1962) and Jacques Derrida's critique in “Force et signification” (1963) as its starting point, this lecture turns to the problem of signification and its thermoinformatic conditions of possibility in light of large language models (LLMs). If structuralism understood signification through the formal differential relations between signs, and deconstruction through their dynamics, what happens when we think these relations in thermoinformatic terms? What, moreover, happens to signification and structure when the signifier ceases to be the principal unit through which language is technically organised? Large language models, for example, operate through the computational manipulation of tokens rather than signifiers. Yet the technical organisation of language is hardly a novelty introduced by AI. The question is rather to what extent sense was always already technological, dependent on inscription, repetition and the material conditions of its transmission and maintenance.

Michel Serres's Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques (1968), particularly his mathematical conception of structure, provides a way of approaching this problem, especially the relation between the operations of a system and the elements upon which they operate. Tokenisation, the vector representation of linguistic elements, and the operations of linear algebra through which transformer architectures calculate attention and generate probability distributions bring this question into a different technical domain. The issue is whether these operations constitute a continuation of structuralist reasoning, or whether they alter the very terms through which signification is to be understood. But if these mathematical operations are themselves technically instantiated, then the question of structure cannot be entirely separated from the material conditions under which its operations take place.

It is here that I propose to return to Derrida's critique of Rousset, and in particular to the question of force. Derrida's use of energeia, and its relation to the modern scientific concept of energy, opens onto a problem that the formal description of structures alone cannot resolve. If the differential relations constitutive of signification depend on their technical and material conditions, what happens to différance, to the spacing and temporalisation of differences, when these are thought through thermodynamic work, entropy and irreversibility? Drawing on Gilbert Simondon's concept of metastability, and on the thermoinformatic logic of sense developed in my ongoing work on logomachy, I propose to examine how the energetic and informational conditions of signification bear upon its emergence, persistence and transformation. The problem is not only that signs require material supports, but that the production, maintenance and destruction of sense may themselves be understood as thermoinformatic operations. The emergence of LLMs, far from inaugurating the technological constitution of sense, only further highlights the extent to which sense is, and has always been, thermoinformatic.

Katarina Kolozova:
Mechanistic Formalisms Behind the Seemingly Pure Nous of A.I

The process of signification itself is a fundamentally machinic, material operation. Rather than treating language or computation as an ethereal vehicle for disembodied meaning, this lecture focuses on how signification functions as a de-subjectivized automaton combining physical traces (Derrida) through its materially determined mechanics. The sign belongs to the plane of the Transcendental, and not despite but because this process is entirely continuous with, and restricted by, its mechanical execution. “Artificial” or programming languages, the practice of coding, and “natural” languages, as explained by structuralist linguistics, operate formulaically, and the scientific accounts of both are formal(ized) yet lack the elegance of the “purely rational” mathematical form. The reason for that is that their formalism is rather mechanistic, “crude,” resembling a set of engineering instructions.  Yet again, they describe what is deemed the most “authentic,” virtually ethereal thing – spoken language, and its mimetic clone, the artificial language of AI.  This formulaic processing constitutes the core materiality of any language, be it natural or artificial, and is supported by, and continuous with, the physical hardware and the biological body. The talk brings into alignment Marx’s “mechanical materialism” (a thesis my co-authors and I elaborate on in Defending Materialism, Bloomsbury 2024), Laruelle (non-philosophical Marxism and machinic materialism), de Saussure, Wittgenstein, tying them all together with Kant’s method of Kritik and notion of the Transcendental. Within this architecture, the concept of the "non-human," a term coined by John Ó Maoilearca applying Laruelle’s non-philosophical vocabulary, serves as the specific variant of the posthuman, designating an asymmetric, radical dyad of raw physicality and the automaton of signification.


Practicalities: application process, ECTS certificates, fees, and hospitality at the campus including a week to eight days of accommodation

Application process

We invite you to apply as a participant to the summer school which allows you to simply follow the program but also to submit a proposal to present in the afternoon panels. Such active involvement turns you into a speaker at an academic symposium rather than just a student, you become part of the official program and are included in the book of abstracts.  If you opt for active participation of this sort of your chances of obtaining a grant from your home institution or other institutions (Erasmus, different foundations, etc.) increases.
Based on your application, and particularly the motivation section of the application form, we will select not more than 28 prospective participants for in person participation and not more than 10 for online participation. The online component is fully integrated in the program which takes place fully in the zoom room as on-site. All discussion and interjection in exchanges must take place via zoom as well, a task for which SMR is fully prepared in 2027. 

You can access the application form directly by clicking on this link

The deadline for submitting you application is January 30th, 2027

Program completion and certificates

We issue ECTS certificates for the participants of the Summer School for graduate, doctoral and postdoc level of informal education. Such certificates serve the teachers and professionals that would apply as they count as part of their LLL efforts, highly valued in the EHEA. The European (ECTS) certificates are co-signed by our US member institution (Arizona State University - Center for Philosophical Technologies, more precisely.)

Scholē (in the original Greek sense: leisure and study as part of it), or simply time for pleasure and relaxation, is as important as the program itself: It is a key part of the overall experience, and we will make sure to allow for sufficient beach time, as the Campus is placed only 40 feet away from the beautiful city beach of Olympiada, and only 1000 meters from the site of ancient Stagira and the beautiful rocky beach next to it called Amos. The break between lunch time and late afternoon sessions will allow you to do just that: enjoy a holiday in Greece with peers with whom you can exchange all sorts of ideas inspired by the morning talk, discussions and the informal program we (but also you) will put together such as movie nights with wine, and similar.

Housing and hospitality at the Campus

In the dormitory area we offer fully furnished and newly built bedrooms, toilets, and showers, and shared spacious balconies facing Mount Athos where you can have your breakfast if you choose so. Along with the accommodation you receive access to the kitchen/coffee station. Breakfast is served by us every morning.  Also, we will all sometimes cook dinners for you or cook together.

The kitchen/laundry area is linked with a corridor with the classroom area, a building attached to the dormitory, and will be accessible between 09.00 AM and 07.00 PM. To see the capacities of the building, check out this website https://www.smrgreece.com/ Breakfast will be served every morning with a rich variety of choices, covering a spectrum dietary preference including vegetarian and vegan.

We have included additional pieces of furniture, decoration, balcony furniture and other details and we trust you will enjoy your stay. Keep in mind that we cannot accommodate more than 14 participants at the campus. Some of you will have to arrange your own accommodation in Olympiada which, if shared, is quite affordable; we will help you reach to the local operators, match with roomates as single room accommodation is rarely available in Olympiada. So, if you wish to be housed by us, try to submit your application as soon as possible (opt for the category full package.

Program fee

This fee is charged to help raise funds to reward our speakers, the onsite team and the coordination and organization itself, as well as you access to the program be it as auditors or speakers or both. The program fee is 550 euro, and it will be charged by one of the academic institutions constituting SMR as a platform or one of the partner institutions depending on program responsibilities. Some of you can apply for partial waivers and the criteria as always are a balance between your academic merit and your socio-economic situation. SMR affiliates are automatically granted 40% discount.

Note: Most of our participants are funded by their universities and thus require our invitation or confirmation of acceptance to apply for funds. So, if this is your case, apply sooner rather than later in order to arrange the letter of support or invitation that you will require for your university’s financial support. Some of you will need a Schengen visa and therefore should also submit sooner rather than later.

Transportation from and to the airport

Your airport of destination is International Thessaloniki Airport, and Olympiada-Stagira is only 50 to 60 minutes away by car. There is shuttle service leaving straight from the airport taking you to our campus (the SMR building in Olympiada, right at the town square). If you want a more affordable transportation, take the metro to the city center of Thessaloniki and from there a bus from the Regional Bus Station. We can help self-organize in time-slots depending on your arrival/departure hours so you can share a shuttle for a price of 30 to 50 euro per person.

Online participation

The online component is fully integrated in the program which takes place fully in the zoom room as on-site. All discussion and interjection in exchanges must take place via zoom as well, a task for which SMR is fully prepared in 2027. Your experience will be seamless as close as possible to being at campus in person. You can also apply to present as part of the official program. Participation fee for the online component is 370 euro (VAT included).

* The work program always begins on Mondays, so in this case, on August 16th, 2027 in the morning and runs till Friday evening (or August 20th, 2027); we include a day extra for the arrival (15th) and departure, and also let you spend the whole day of Saturday to have some extra holiday time.