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Friedrich Nietzsche’s Complete Works: The Critical Study Edition in 15 Volumes
The Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA) of Nietzsche’s Sämtliche Werke presents Nietzsche’s philosophy as to be best read as a complete documentable sequence of textual operations—publication, revision, self-retrospective framing, and posthumous drafting—whose conceptual force depends upon philological exactitude and chronological intelligibility. It fuses, within one portable architecture, the biblical works Nietzsche authorized for print, with the Nachlass…
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Origins of Modern Japanese Literature
Origins of Modern Japanese Literature analyses the historical constitution of “modern literature” by treating it as an institutional and epistemic formation whose apparent self-evidence is produced through determinate operations of perception, language, and social organization. Karatani’s distinctive contribution is in a method that reconstructs “origins” as effects of inversion: the modern system retroactively posits the…
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From Zero to One: Peter Thiel on Monopoly, Differentiation, and the Politics of Innovation
At an event hosted at USC Annenberg and livestreamed to additional viewers on campus, Peter Thiel was introduced as an entrepreneur, investor, and author whose career had moved from PayPal’s early ambition to rethink money and payments to the creation and funding of technology companies across Silicon Valley. The moderator emphasized Thiel’s role in PayPal’s…
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From Zero to One, and Then to Nowhere Else: Thiel’s Case for Uneven Technological Progress
At Harvard’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, the Institute of Politics and Harvard’s Program on Constitutional Government convened a public conversation in which historian Niall Ferguson moderated a wide-ranging discussion with technology entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel. The exchange unfolded as a structured interview followed by audience questions, moving across the near-term condition of Silicon…
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From Stanford to Harvard: Campus Conflict as a Proxy for Civilizational Legitimacy
At the inaugural Conservative and Republican Student Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Peter Thiel—introduced by the host as a prominent technology entrepreneur and investor—used his keynote to revisit a set of campus conflicts from his years as a Stanford student in the late 1980s and early 1990s, arguing that those disputes anticipated larger and more enduring…
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The University Against the Future: Peter Thiel on Stagnation, Risk, and the Return of Total Control
At a Stanford Academic Freedom Conference in early November 2022, Peter Thiel was introduced by Stanford faculty member Russell Berman as a technology entrepreneur and investor with an unusually visible public profile, associated with PayPal, Palantir, Founders Fund, and early involvement in Facebook. Berman situated Thiel’s presence within a longer arc of campus controversies and…
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Stagnation, Founders, and the New Machine Intelligence: Peter Thiel at Aspen on Risk, Power, and the American System
In a wide-ranging conversation at the Aspen Ideas Festival, investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel presented a composite view of Silicon Valley that joins venture practice, institutional critique, and a set of political and cultural interpretations about the United States’ present trajectory. Interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin, Thiel framed his central investment thesis around a particular…
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“Operational AI” and National Power: Alex Karp’s Case for American Technological Primacy
At the Economic Club of Chicago on May 22, 2025, Palantir Technologies co-founder and CEO Alex Karp held a wide-ranging conversation with moderator Sean Connolly, the president and CEO of Conagra Brands, moving between autobiography, corporate culture, the operational use of artificial intelligence, and what Karp framed as the strategic requirements of American power in…
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Agency Under Acceleration: Peter Thiel on Risk, Innovation, and the Next Discontinuity
In a wide-ranging onstage conversation at the All-In Summit 2024—later published by the All-In Podcast under the title “Peter Thiel: The Coming Collapse No One Is Prepared For”—technology investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel frames contemporary politics, geopolitics, and technological change through a single organizing preoccupation: the distribution of agency under conditions of accelerating uncertainty. He…
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The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State
Michael Steinberger’s The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State offers a rare, methodically reported, philosophically alert portrait of a firm whose practical vocation consists in rendering heterogeneous worlds legible to power. Its contribution lies in treating Palantir’s rise neither as a purely technical success story nor as…
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Inside Palantir: How a Secretive Tech Titan is Shaping the Future of AI, Warfare, and Global Data
J. Hayden Elsen’s Inside Palantir: How a Secretive Tech Titan is Shaping the Future of AI, Warfare, and Global Data puts forward a claim about contemporary power: the decisive institutional transformation of the present is realized through software platforms that convert heterogeneous data into actionable, governable, and contractible forms of knowledge. The book’s contribution lies…
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Peter Thiel at Cambridge Union
Peter Thiel appeared at the Cambridge Union on May 8, 2024, for a talk and extended discussion that combined institutional critique, political economy, and a characteristic skepticism toward fashionable explanatory frames. Speaking as a technology entrepreneur and investor—known for co-founding PayPal and Palantir and for early involvement with Facebook—Thiel used the setting to revisit arguments…
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Peter Thiel on Classical Liberalism
At a bicentenary event of the Oxford Union—an institution that frames its mission around debate, scrutiny of entrenched assumptions, and protection of free expression—Peter Thiel delivered an address that positioned the contemporary university, and “classical liberalism” more broadly, as systems under sustained stress. Thiel, a U.S. technology entrepreneur and investor known for co-founding PayPal and…
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🎶 The Official 2025 GROS Christmas Music Playlist
🎶 The Official 2025 GROS Christmas Music Playlist: Link: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaBkV53aFEksgOUr4tDDzAVgutjPrdgfT 1. Money youtu.be/BYUGCit0u4E2. First Date youtu.be/SLUpSY2xv7E3. What’s Her Name? youtu.be/QK8VG5fBGKw4. A Hundred Million Dollar Victim youtu.be/kltXvPFd9wo5. Different Types of Infinity youtu.be/AFYPrpN9J6s6. System Error youtube.com/watch?v=nUvbpmFW1Xk7. Who Said “Fuck the Police?” youtu.be/rd1X1aXYJ0Y8. Marsh Mask (Not-Diss) youtu.be/SWi9GQlk6CM9. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock youtu.be/mvjVfxH1tlc10. Collateral Murder youtu.be/mdzWVwdkAyY11.…
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Hegel’s World Revolutions
Richard Bourke’s Hegel’s World Revolutions claims that Hegel’s historical and political philosophy yields its central diagnostics only when reconstructed through the sequence of revolutions that, in Hegel’s account, generate modern freedom while repeatedly placing it at risk. Bourke’s distinctive contribution lies in combining source-driven intellectual history with conceptual analysis in order to reinsert Hegel into…
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‘Opera’s Second Death’ by Slavoj Žižek & Mladen Dolar
Opera’s Second Death is not simply a philosophical reflection on opera, but as a sustained theoretical experiment in which opera is treated as a privileged site for thinking some of the most intractable problems of modern philosophy: death and repetition, enjoyment and loss, subjectivity and its dissolution, the relation between symbolic order and bodily excess,…
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Richard Wagner – Der fliegende Holländer (Karl Böhm, Bayreuth 1971)
Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer was recorded live at the Bayreuth Festival in 1971 under Karl Böhm and released by Deutsche Grammophon in the familiar multi-LP configuration. Sung in German, it documents Bayreuth’s festival forces at full intensity in one of Wagner’s most tightly coiled and elemental works, a “sea opera” in which storm, oath, and…
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Richard Wagner – Tristan und Isolde (Karl Böhm, Bayreuth 1966)
This post presents Tristan und Isolde as captured live at the Bayreuth Festival in the summer of 1966 and issued on Deutsche Grammophon in the classic multi-LP configuration. The present edition is sourced from the original vinyl plates and has undergone a restrained digital remastering by Simon Gros, undertaken not to modernize the sound but…
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Cosmopolitan Right at the Borderline: Strict Hospitality, Material Interdependence, and the Juridical Conditions of Peace
Roberta Picardi’s lecture advances a precise thesis: it seeks to determine, within Kant’s Perpetual Peace and the juridical architecture presupposed by it, what cosmopolitan right is as a peace-promoting factor when its content is explicitly restricted to “universal hospitality.” The distinctive contribution consists in a methodical narrowing that refuses two familiar assimilations at once: the…
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The Outside Within: Kant’s Unjust Enemy as an Institution of Peace Through Exclusion
Petar Bojanić’s lecture intervenes in a persistent fault-line of modern practical philosophy: the way juridical language, political theology, and strategic reasoning converge upon a figure—the “unjust enemy”—that promises to secure peace by authorizing destruction. Its distinctive scholarly contribution lies in a reconstruction that is simultaneously genealogical and diagnostic: it treats hostis iniustus less as a…
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War as Self-Conscious Negativity: Contradiction, Mediation, and the Practical Work of Drawing Limits
Yuval Kremnitzer’s lecture intervenes in a familiar moral certainty—war’s futility—by converting that certainty into a determinate philosophical problem: the mismatch between war’s overwhelming gravity and the thinness of the concepts and speech-forms through which modern publics try to grasp it. Its distinctive contribution lies in treating this mismatch as more than a rhetorical discomfort. The…
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Ewiger Friede on the Earth’s Surface: Aesthetic Testimony, Historical Complicity, and the Inherent Negativity of Peace in Kant
Anna Enström’s lecture proposes a reorientation of the contemporary reading of Kant’s peace theory by binding Zum ewigen Frieden to an aesthetic and material reflection on surfaces: the textual surface of the essay, the earthly surface that grounds Kant’s cosmopolitan right, and the historically sedimented surface of Europe’s war architecture as it reappears in Elle-Mie…
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Perpetual Peace as Rational Capacity: Nature, Antagonism, and the Exercise of Reason in Kant’s Political Philosophy
The lecture Kant on Perpetual Peace as Capacity proposes that Kant’s idea of perpetual peace must be grasped neither as a naturally given condition of human coexistence nor as a merely regulative horizon that forever eludes realization, but as a rational capacity whose very being consists in its exercise under historically and politically concrete conditions.…
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Hostility, Personhood, and Commerce: Reconstructing Kant’s Cosmopolitan Right to Be Spared Hostile Treatment
The lecture advances a precise and demanding thesis: that Kant’s sparse formulation of cosmopolitan right in the third definitive article of Toward Perpetual Peace contains, once read through the lens of his practical philosophy, a normatively complex and structurally ambivalent right not to be treated with hostility. Corinna Mieth’s contribution lies in reconstructing this right…
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Evil’s Actuality and the Modal Ground of Hope: Kantian Hylomorphism, Anthropological Standpoints, and the Structure of the Good
The lecture delivers an ambitious thesis: that the actuality of evil—conceived as the rational subordination of the moral law to self-love—discloses, in actu, the very modal structure that also makes the good materially possible, and thus gives warrant to hope for its predominance. Its distinctive contribution lies in rethreading Kant’s three guiding questions through a…
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War in Kant’s Political Philosophy: Alexei N. Krouglov on the Limits of a Pacifist Reading
Alexei N. Krouglov’s lecture examines Kant’s understanding of war in order to clarify, and partly correct, the widespread image of Kant as a straightforward pacifist whose treatise Perpetual Peace anticipates the international order of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Krouglov argues that this reception is one-sided: alongside the tradition that reads Kant as a prophetic…
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Beckett, Lacan, and the Gaze
The book advances the claim that Beckett’s visual universe can be described neither through a general theory of “modernist perception” nor through a simple psychoanalytic allegory of seeing, but only by reconstructing the specific way in which the gaze functions as an impersonal, structuring dimension where subject and world fail to meet. In forming a…
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Beckett, Lacan, and the Voice
Brown’s Beckett, Lacan and the Voice stakes its claim on a very precise terrain: it proposes that Beckett’s entire œuvre can be re-read if one takes seriously the Lacanian thesis that the voice is a specific psychoanalytic object—neither pure sound nor mere vehicle of meaning, but the residue of language that both grounds and unravels…
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Susan James presents ‘When does Truth Matter? The Politics of Spinoza’s Philosophy’
This lecture explores a central tension in Baruch Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus: how can theology and philosophy be both strictly independent and yet arranged in a clear hierarchy of cognitive and ethical excellence? Written in the highly charged political and religious climate of the Dutch Republic, the Theological-Political Treatise was a polemical intervention in defence of…
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Aaron Garrett presents ‘Knowing the Essences of State in Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus’
Spinoza’s political philosophy is often treated as detachable from his metaphysics and epistemology, as though the Ethics and the Theological-Political Treatise (TTP) addressed fundamentally different projects. This talk challenges that division. Reading the Ethics together with the TTP and the Political Treatise, it argues that Spinoza’s political theory is organised around a robust, though rarely…
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Catherine Malabou presents ‘Before and Above: Spinoza and Symbolic Necessity’
In the Theological-Political Treatise, Baruch Spinoza elaborates a daring conception of revelation in which God is nothing other than the immanent order of nature, and prophecy is rooted in the imagination rather than in a privileged speculative intellect. Prophets do not receive transparent concepts but vivid images and signs shaped by their temperament, prior beliefs,…
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Simon Gros 