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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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‘The Unnamable’ by Samuel Beckett
Beckett’s The Unnamable presents itself as the limit‐case of narrative fiction and as an experiment in what remains of subjectivity when every conventional support of the novel—plot, character, world, and even a stable first person—is progressively dissolved. It pursues, with almost pedantic consistency, the question of whether there can be a self at all once…
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Introduction to the Reading of Lacan: The Unconscious Structured Like a Language
Introduction to the Reading of Lacan: The Unconscious Structured Like a Language stakes its claim by demonstrating, with didactic patience and analytic precision, how Lacan’s structural re-founding of psychoanalysis can be reconstructed from within the field that grounds it: the speaking subject’s formations of the unconscious as they are anchored in language and staged in…
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Lacan and Other Heresies: Lacanian Pscyhoanalytical Writings
The volume’s distinctive contribution lies in its rigorous effort to reinscribe Lacanian psychoanalysis within a living practice of collective invention, rather than a doctrine of settled theses. Framed by the Freudian School of Melbourne’s long experiment with institutional forms proper to psychoanalysis and catalyzed by the Melbourne seminars of the Belgian analyst Christian Fierens, the…
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Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society
The volume stakes a precise claim: by reconstructing Lacan’s concept of discourse across clinical, social, and cultural registers, it offers a model in which language and what exceeds language are locked in a structured reciprocity—so that subjects are formed in discourse and yet sustain modalities of resistance through it. The distinctive contribution lies in formalizing…
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‘The Psychology of Love’ by Sigmund Freud
The Psychology of Love gathers, in a single, carefully sequenced volume, Freud’s principal inquiries into how erotic life is constituted by fantasy, conflict, and the vicissitudes of development. Its scholarly stake lies in showing—with clinical and metapsychological precision—that human sexuality is always already symbolically mediated, that desire is organized by scenes and substitutions rather than…
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Simon Gros 