The Outer Institute is pleased to announce an exciting new partnership with the Philosophy, Art, and Social Thought (PACT) Division at the European Graduate School (EGS). With this partnership, interested learners can audit any EGS seminar course (online) offered during the 2026 Saas-Fee and Malta sessions through the Outer Institute at a significantly reduced rate.
The PACT Division of EGS gathers world-leading critical theorists, philosophers, artists, and practitioners from fields such as psychoanalysis, film, music, and literature for week-long seminars that provide dynamic, cross-disciplinary encounters through the presentation of new research being pursued by a distinguished list of professors. Offering a range of hybrid seminars across two sessions in late summer and autumn, enrolled students and auditors alike engage in close readings of syllabus materials, nuanced analysis of course concepts, and critical inquiry of articulations which arise along the way. Learn more about the EGS PACT Division.
At a historical juncture in which compounding challenges from multiple fronts complicate what and who education is for, the Outer Institute and the European Graduate School share a mutual investment in exploring what continued learning is in the present tense.
Adjusted price for Outer Institute Auditor per seminar course: $200USD (Discounted from Regular EGS Online Auditor Price: $400USD per seminar course)
Upon signing up for a course through the Outer Institute portal, an auditor will:
Notes:
Official 2026 EGS Seminar Session Schedules
There is a passage in an essay by the poet Charles Olson where he speaks of open field poetry as a poetry that operates through the breath. Breath runs both ways, in and out. It gathers and it disperses. But what it gathers and what it disperses is an open question. What it lets in may not be what it let out. We will begin with the historic 1965 poetry conference in Berkeley, California where Olson presents his poetry and his thoughts on poetry, a conference from which Baraka was conspicuously absent. We will continue with Baraka's inquiry into the role of the poet, and by extension the leader, in projecting for the people. This question becomes direct in the work of Andaiye on George Lamming's seminal novel before we move to other modalities of return that eschew the presumption of seeing for the people, such as in the work of Tom Dent and Fahima Ife. Finally we will consider this question in its (im)proper place, the revolutionary situation, in this case in Guyana.
For some time now, critical thinking has been dominated by an opposition that is described in various ways but always boils down to the same opposition. This is the opposition between the One and the Whole. Or between the singular and the totality - the event and the structure, politics and the police (etc.). The subject is understood here as the power to open up this opposition, to realize it. That is its critical power. Or, in the language of these theories, that is "politics." In fact, however, it is the end, the impossibility of politics. For it leads to a circularity with no way out -- to a bad infinity in which the two poles of the opposition alternate endlessly without being able to conceive of the new. The question for this course is how to proceed differently here and move forward: to a politics that is not caught up by this opposition.
To achieve this, it helps to see that behind those oppositions lies a fundamental problem of modern thinking (and life) as such. This is the problem of freedom and form. Form is what makes something what it is; its form is the structured connection between its elements, its parts (and participants). The question then is how there can be a form of freedom: a form that is generated by freedom and that generates freedom -- not only leaving its elements free but making them free. Or a form that, as Marx said of the political-legal form of the Commune, is not "oppressive," but "under which liberation takes place": a form of liberation.
The first step towards developing this idea is to think form as "active", as "form activity" (Hegel). Only in relation to this activity of form can the question of its freedom (or unfreedom) be posed. Unfree form activity is "automatic", the movement and time of fate, while free form activity is that of a new beginning. The second step is an examination of the form of the social. According to Marx, capitalist society is defined by the form of value, and this form is determined by the automatism of its repetition; value is the "automatic subject" (Marx) of its infinite self-preservation and -increase. This raises the question of how this automatism is mediated by the production and reproduction of the subject. The third step deals with Marx’s formal definition of the Commune, the Commune as the form of liberation. The Commune is the antithesis to the basic political category of modernity: the state. The state is, by its very nature, oppressive or "dictatorial" (Lenin). Therefore, it must "wither away" (Lenin) by building "institutions of a fundamentally different kind." The question of the form of freedom is the question of free institutions.
Slavoj Žižek: The least one can say today about the notion of negativity in all its aspects is that it has seen better days -- it definitely has shot its bolts, its philosophical potentials seem to be exhausted. In philosophy of the last two centuries it was mostly valued as positive (negativity as permanent feature of subjectivity in all its guises, from Hegel through Marx to Freud), while positivity relates to the existing order that should be undermined, transcended, etc. In the last decades, however, negativity is more and more constrained to a disturbance which threatens to undermine our psychic or social health: the task is to get rid of it or, at least, to contain it. I'll try to rehabilitate negativity, going through its main figures: Hegelian negativity, Freudian death drive, mystical experience, withdrawal from social engagement, the prospect of nuclear war, ecological self-destruction of humanity.
Christopher Fynsk: Continuing with the question of negativity in Blanchot, this segment of the seminar will address an engagement with the negative on Blanchot's part that leads him to question the reach of the dialectic with respect to what he understands as a general condition of modern humanity. Following the contribution of Prof. Noys, it will take its departure from what we can glean of Blanchot's political thought in Political Writings, and then move to Blanchot's reflection on nihilism in his essay, "Reflections on Hell (from The Infinite Conversation). In sum, we will see that Blanchot seeks a way of engaging the negative that honors the exigencies to which critical thought must answer, but also opens to what language offers of what he calls "an other relation." For the ethico-political order, what is at stake is a thought of freedom. For the relation he terms "friendship" there is an opening onto a very radical thought of finitude.
Benjamin Noys: Communism is identified with negativity as the movement which abolishes the present state of things. This seminar probes how the notion of communism as negativity is entangled with the spectre of Stalin(ism). It also considers the negation of negation as the production of the body of communism.
This course challenges the view that perspectives confine us within incommensurable subjective worlds. Instead, it argues that perspectives are operators of relation, articulating a shared reality through translation, mediation, and resonance. Drawing on Nietzsche, James, Deleuze, Serres, Latour, Stengers, Descola, Viveiros de Castro, Arendt, Harding, and Luhrmann, perspectivism is reframed against relativism and post-truth as a theory of partial yet connectable access to the real. From the invention of linear perspective and its role in shaping modern subjectivity to its later transformations in cinema, axonometry, and orbital vision, perspectival representation emerges as a framework redefining the observer-world relation. Yet perspectivism continues to grapple with the phantom of the "view from nowhere." This tension resurfaces in modern physics, where relativity and quantum theory challenge the idea of a single absolute viewpoint and foreground local frames of description, while still oriented toward invariant structures. Engaging phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty) and monadological approaches (from Leibniz to Whitehead and beyond), the course sketches a relationist ontology for a pluriverse that accommodates both coexistence and separation through mediating forms such as time and resonance.
This course will screen and analyse major works to have emerged from the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University since its founding in 2006. These include Sweetgrass, Leviathan, Caniba, somniloquies, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, Manakamana, and Expedition Content. The course will also screen and analyse works that have influenced the Sensory Ethnography Lab, and others that have been critical of it, and consider the urgent ethical, aesthetic, ecological, and political challenges that confront image-makers today. Finally, students will undertake various original audiovisual projects with their telephones or cameras that are undertaken each year in the SEL.
In 1787, F.H. Jacobi, instigator of the pantheism/Spinozism controversy (Pantheismusstreit/Spinozismusstreit), famously complains about the role of the thing-in-itself (das Ding an sich) in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787). Writing of this Kantian thing as a "presupposition" of the "system" formed by the first Critique, Jacobi laments, "without that presupposition I could not enter into the system, but with it I could not stay within it." From Kant's time through the present, the notorious thing-in-itself has stood out as a key element of Kantian critical transcendental idealism—albeit one that not only supports this idealism, but also simultaneously threatens to undo this same idealism due to alleged contradictions and inconsistencies within Kant's conceptualizations of das Ding an sich.
Despite the various disagreements of the major post-Kantian idealists with Jacobi as well as amongst themselves, J.G. Fichte, F.W.J. Schelling, and G.W.F. Hegel follow Jacobi's 1787 lead in elaborating overlapping lines of criticism of Kant's thing-in-itself. In so doing, they raise central philosophical questions about the relations between, on the one hand, the Kantian transcendental and, on the other hand, forms of idealism, realism, materialism, and naturalism—with the later Kant of the Opus postumum already raising such questions himself with respect to his earlier critical philosophy of the 1780s. These German idealist disputes have proven fateful for the past two centuries of Western philosophy up through the present. For instance, both the contemporary Hegel renaissance as well as the relatively recent rise of new strains of realism and materialism in Continental metaphysics involve explicit and implicit interpretative stances with respect to the legacy of Kant's theoretical philosophy with its central, load-bearing posit of the thing-in-itself. Moreover, adequately understanding the very "idealism" (or, rather, idealisms) of German idealism unavoidably requires getting to grips with this idealism's infamous "thing."
Most theories of radical democracy (Lefort, Castoriadis, Rancière, Mouffe etc...) have relied on the Cartesian and Kantian splits between minds and bodies, ends and means, animals and humans, morality and instrumentality. Unwittingly, they have perhaps foreclosed the possibility of a common world. Drawing on archives which foreground a relational and processual ontology in which every thing and every body are connected in a web of life, this seminar will build on recent anthropologies of life and interspecies ethnographies which both subscribe to a relational mode of thinking. The hope is that thinking the world relations differently will yield different, substantive conceptions of democracy.
Pedro Costa
see, see, see; hear, hear, hear * work, work, work * distrust your first idea, fear helps * don't think about artistic problems; think about production problems * time is not money; move as fast as you can; move as slow as you can * exhaust yourself, kill yourself thinking * rehearse on film * fight inflated budgets, fuck smart asses with financial packages: know the provenance of every cent of your budget * concentrate, condense, limit * don't pitch; keep it secret * don't use the current, vile movie vocabulary * never give way to sales agents; deal the film yourself * reduce the wage gap to the least possible * go for a small and vulnerable crew * study spaces; they're pieces of time * give people a chance * care for reality; reality will care for you * own your means of production; protect your tripod * take trains and buses to work; time is not money * don't request shooting permits * scorn film studies; scorn soppy film lovers * don't touch bad films with your eyes; don't watch too many films * no one has ever known what cinema is * grow old shooting * think again.
Auteur film in the digital era: the cinema of the future.
Albert Serra is one of the filmmakers in the world that has understood more deeply what the digital revolution means for artistic cinema. Not only at the technical level but mainly at the level of a vision with the goal to create images that will stand unique and completely different from what it comes from mainstream cinema and the products of platforms. A true revolution that just a few people understood and that covers all aspects of making a film, from script, to shooting and of course edit and post-production.
This seminar starts from a deliberately unsettling hypothesis: many contemporary critiques of "technofascism" unconsciously reactivate Heideggerian categories, even as they explicitly condemn Heidegger because of his political legacy. The result is a paradoxical situation in which Heidegger is both rejected and silently reinstated as the conceptual background of today's anti-technological discourse.
Through a close reading of key texts by Martin Heidegger--including The Question Concerning Technology, The Danger, The Turn, and On the Question of Being--the seminar examines the persistence of notions such as Gestell, danger, domination, calculability, and world-loss in contemporary analyses of technology.
The seminar is organized around these central questions:
Rather than attempting either a rehabilitation or a dismissal of Heidegger, the seminar treats his thought as a conceptual machine whose effects continue to structure contemporary critique, even where his name has been excluded. Heidegger thus functions both as a foil and a provocation: a way of clarifying the limits of current technocritical discourse and of reopening the question of how to think technology, AI, and power today.
The seminar concludes by engaging contemporary thinkers and alternative frameworks that allow us to move beyond both Heideggerian metaphysics and purely moral denunciations of technology, in order to rethink critique at a time when concepts themselves are becoming artificial.
The more the world unworlds itself, the more autonomy becomes automatized and automation increasingly autonomous. The question What to be done? screams out of itself at the same time it silences within itself. How to give today a sense and meaning to the relation between thinking and language when thinking and language lose the language of thinking and the thinking of language? In the whirlpool of the today, what fades more and more away is the sense and sensation of existence. In times of the planetary violence of calculability, of destruction and extinction of uncountable forms of life and of existence, what rests is not silence but the is-existing of existence, the gerundivity of existing. Rather than to ask what to be done? or how to do? The main question is what does the act in actu do? It is about acting rather than action.
In this lecture course, I propose a reading of Clarice Lispector's writing as a lesson of thinking the is-existing of existence, its gerundivity. The reading attention will be directed to the poietics of thinking is her work, the ways and manners thinking enacts itself, the way it is being. For Clarice, writing is thinking the is being of being itself. It is not a course engaged in reading philosophically her work, extracting philosophical motives or philosophical influences out of her books. It is about reading Clarice as a radical experience of what is called thinking. Clarice Lispector is the great thinker of the “is-being”, presenting a gerundive and transitive ontology in its unique language, an ontology capable to respond to our times. From the experience of her reading, I will depart reframing the relation between philosophy and literature from the viewpoint of what is a phrase, leaving behind current discussions about mythos and logos, conceptuality and metaphoricity, reality and fiction, etc. I bring instead into discussion the tension between philosophical and literary phrases , which opens up the tensional between with its oscillations, suspensions and tremblings.
Three main books of Clarice Lispector will be read: Agua Viva, The Passion According to G.H. and her posthumous novel The Breath of Life. Some few Chronicles and philosophical texts are added. The central questions are: how to follow the thread of a thinking of the is-being, indeed of the act in actu? In which sense writing is thinking, what is gerundive and transitive existence? What does it mean to say that thinking is behind thought? From the perspective of the is-being, spatiality and temporality are shaken, all frameworks and grounds are in turmoil, the only stability is the instability of the whirlpool, where hands lose their grips and discover themselves lose and idle, dancing hands in the air. What does it mean then to hold a hand, to think, say, existence according to lose hands and formlessness? What does it mean to touch without grasping, indeed, how to touch the night when one is touched by the creative unconsciousness of the world? What can hands in the air do if not to imitate breathing, breathing which emerges then as the animal that God is?
Are we living in the times of the worst alienation ever experienced by humankind? With the breathtaking technological development which threatens to get out of hand any moment, with the impending ecological disaster, with the rise of new populisms, indeed the ominous signs of fascism, with bloody wars and increased violence, the idea (or the fantasy) of 'the end of the world' seems to be looming large -- our own human forces confronting us as alien forces run amok. Or are we living in the extension of the Enlightenment project, having it better than in the harsh times that humanity had to endure through history, as e.g. Steven Pinker would have us believe, with the unprecedented expansion of human capacities? His bestselling book has the telling title Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018, with the endorsement by Bill Gates, 'my favorite book of all time') -- but eight years later it seems to belong to another era now gone.
The course will return to the notion of alienation and try to scrutinize its multiple facets. The notion has been amply commented on, yet can one find some new resources in it? We will concentrate on the central figures of Marx, Hegel and Freud-Lacan, trying to disentangle the different logics that underlie their conceptual endeavors. While with Hegel and Marx alienation is indispensable but posited as something to be sublated and overcome (though by starkly differing means and ways), in psychoanalysis alienation is constitutive, given the alien kernel of the unconscious that lies at the core of our subjectivity (we are not masters in our own house, as Freud strikingly put it). But is there a way that one can find means of emancipation precisely in alienation, if properly conceived? What would be the proper concept of alienation (of alterity, strangeness) in face of alienation that we massively experience every day of our life?
The course will be in dialogue with Todd McGowan's recent Embracing Alienation (2024) and a selected number of other takes on alienation (e.g. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Rahel Jaeggi, also in a different vein with Heidegger, Karl Löwith etc.).
This seminar explores the renewed political urgency of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis in a time increasingly experienced as dystopian rather than progressive. Its aim is not to revive the idea--or the hope--of historical progress, but rather to insist on the strange vitality and critical force of dystopian thinking itself, particularly in its darkest and most radical forms, where no reassuring horizon of redemption is offered and disorientation reigns supreme.
The course combines theoretical inquiry with references to literature, philosophy, and art. Alongside close engagement with key Freudian and Lacanian concepts--including the unconscious, fantasy, drive, desire, perversion, and the superego--we will address broader themes such as Freud's reflections on war in the aftermath of the First World War and Maurice Blanchot's reflections on (nuclear) apocalypse during the Cold War.
Although our contemporary "end times" differ significantly from these earlier historical constellations, revisiting such moments through the urgency of the present allows them to function as more than objects of historical interest. They become conceptual tools for thinking the present and future without reducing them to mere repetitions of the past.
Particular emphasis will be placed on the ways artificial intelligence disrupts and reshapes our understanding of subjectivity. The seminar will examine the specific forms of subjectivity introduced by AI and their implications for psychoanalytic theory. In parallel with our investigation of breakdowns, interruptions, and the "monsters" of contemporary existence, the seminar will also examine those forces that sustain life and desire within these conditions. We will discuss psychoanalytic notions of causality and certainty, especially where they intersect with discontinuity, epistemological gaps, truth, enjoyment, fiction, semblance, and appearance. Questions of art and politics will remain central throughout the seminar.
Heidegger's work is normally read in a fragmentary fashion. Commentators (particularly in North America), will tend to focus on the Heidegger of the "existential analytic" of the 1920's (Being and Time is the principal text from this period). This is the "early" Heidegger. In the "later" Heidegger, we will find the thinker of Ereignis and Technik, the reader of the pre-Socratics, or the writer of some very abstruse essays on poetry, language, the "fourfold," or "what calls for thinking." Only very rarely are "early" and "later" brought together (though some readers are devoted to unearthing the presence of the National Socialist in Being and Time) and much of the later Heidegger is left to its supposed obscurity. Of course, some commentators will offer reflections on many parts of the corpus, moving through the text chronologically, but rarely is the thought that moves through this corpus drawn forth in what Heidegger would term it's "way" (or ways). In this course, we will pursue one path by which a very considerable portion of Heidegger's thought finds articulation.
In the most general terms, this path is given by the relation Heidegger attempts to grasp between what he terms "Being" and human being (which is the question of the existential analytic). We will join this path as it takes form in the mid-thirties, at the moment Heidegger draws back from his overt political activism (recoiling from what was happening in the university system under the name of "national science" and failing to advance his own vision) and turns to the question of art. After a close examination of what happens in this "turn," we will see how the later work on language takes forward issues encountered there. There are certainly numerous ways through Heidegger's text. The one described here will allow us to see how Heidegger's thought manifests a sustained questioning that moves constantly back toward an astounding account of difference and relation. It will also allow us to glimpse what Heidegger's great readers in "post-structuralism" (Foucault, Derrida, Blanchot, Lacan) were recognizing in his text.
This path also has the advantage of being approachable, even for one encountering this text (in depth) for a first time. I want to emphasize this point. Heidegger's thought on art is not exceedingly difficult. It is astonishing, but not impenetrable. And once one grasps what he is proposing there, the thought on language becomes far less strange. We can also glimpse, from this ground, the essentially post-humanist dimension of his effort to rethink the question of the human (obviously, a vital question for our time). The aim of this course will be to use the path of the questioning I have sketched as an introduction into Heidegger's thought (where "introduction" does not involve producing some general, inevitably simplifying sketch, but rather a "leading into").
True breaks in thought are breaks that not only change our relationship to the present and the future, but also to the past. In this sense, Kafka was once said to have created his very own predecessors. There will have been something Kafkian in, say, Dante -- after Kafka. If we concede that such breaks cannot only happen within the arts but also in other domains of thought, we are justified to ask what such breaks effectuate when they occur within the space of philosophy. Our seminar will tackle this question by examining the thought of Alain Badiou and its repercussions. Since it is Badiou himself who asserted that he transformed the very conceptualizations of negativity that we call dialectics and that he created a Platonism for the 21st century.
We are thus in a situation in which after Plato invented the complex method and system of operating with the negative (dialectics) and Hegel systematized all its possible forms and matters, Badiou claims to have transformed it. But how to transform the systematic thought of transformation? Is this not just another negation? And what happens to Hegel after Badiou? Can there be a Hegelianism for the 21st century, a Hegelianism undeveloped by Badiou? And how would we read Badiou's system from the perspective of such a Hegelianism? These are some of the questions that we will address in a seminar that will be appreciative of the logical loops, torsions and twists that will make us appreciate the potential renewal of dialectics.
This seminar brings together film director Joshua Oppenheimer -- whose documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, and post-apocalyptic musical drama The End, have explored the mechanisms of self-deception underpinning mass violence and denial -- and philosopher Srećko Horvat, author of After the Apocalypse.
Horvat redefines the apocalypse not as a distant end-time scenario but as a revelation of the present: climate breakdown, nuclear threat, pandemics, rising authoritarianism, and extreme inequality expose a world already in crisis. The apocalypse is not something to come -- we are already living after it. Oppenheimer's The End refuses the consolation of futurity. Set after ecological collapse, it follows a wealthy family surviving in a bunker, clinging to the rituals and narratives that protect them from guilt and responsibility. By staging the apocalypse as a musical -- a form whose beauty has always moved us, and always kept us from seeing clearly -- Oppenheimer turns the genre of consolation against itself: the loveliness that draws us in is the same loveliness that makes denial possible.
The seminar will explore the apocalypse as a condition of the present rather than a fantasy of the future. Both Horvat and Oppenheimer have spent their working lives confronting systems of violence and the stories we tell to make them livable -- from ecological devastation to genocides, occupations, and war. But the deeper subject of their work has not merely been the obvious perpetrators alone. It is the rest of us: the ways we all, in everyday life, participate in and naturalize exploitation; the narratives that render invisible what we would rather not see. In a world where systems of violence are revealed and rationalized away in real time, the question is not only how the powerful profit, exploit, and absolve themselves -- but how we all do, and how we move from complicity toward subversion and active resistance.