Join us for a weekly close reading of Gramsci&rsquo\;s Prison Notebooks! The group has a twofold goal: first\, to analyze contemporary political events through the categories formulated in the text\; and second\, to critically examine potential blind spots in Gramsci&rsquo\;s work regarding race\, gender\, and empire\, while keeping in mind the historical context in which he wrote.
TIME
THURSDAYS: weekly\, beginning September 24\, 2026.
5-6 PM Eastern US Time.
FACILITATOR
Giusi \;Russo is an associate professor of History at Montgomery County Community College in the greater Philadelphia area. Her research focuses on the relationship between the Italian left and internal colonialism\, as well as the entanglements between bodies and European empires. She is the author of \;Women\, Empires\, and Body Politics at the United Nations\, 1946&ndash\;1975 \;(University of Nebraska Press\, 2023) and has published extensively on the colonial history of the United Nations and on the construction of colonial and post-colonial narratives. She is currently working on a book project under contract with Routledge\, titled\, \;The Aesthetics of Third-Worldism in Italy: Bodies\, Spaces\, and Oppression.
ABOUT INCITE SEMINARS
We are a mix of rogue scholars\, disgruntled academics\, disenchanted buddhists\, enchantment-hungry anarchists\, radical therapists\, and general weirdos looking to create autonomous and accessible forms of &ldquo\;higher education.&rdquo\;
We offer online seminars and reading groups to incite personal exploration and inspire community action. Incite Seminars offers an educational experience. We do so by gathering an engaged group of participants for a dynamic exchange of ideas\, led by skilled facilitators. All of our facilitators have a deep relationship to a subject or topic through intensive study or practice.
Incite Seminars is a 100% member-supported learning community. We depend on member contributions to continue holding space for radical study and practice groups\, putting on rigorous seminars and courses\, and providing our facilitators and organizers with fair compensation. If you are unable to pay the full amount for a session or membership at this time\, we invite you to join us at reduced or no cost with our Solidarity option.
a 4-session seminar with Philippe Lynes\, Alex Obrigewitsch\, Kim Schoof &\; Carlos A. Segovia
SEMINAR DESCRIPTION
Blanchot&rsquo\;s work delves into how thinking and writing both reflect and un-reflect our relation to life and death\, challenging conventional notions of presence and temporality. By tracing his influence on Derrida and Nancy\, and exploring the simultaneous timeliness and untimeliness of his thought\, we can ask how reading Blanchot today continues to transform our understanding of language\, life\, and being.
Session I (&ldquo\;Blanchot Today?\,&rdquo\; with Alex Obrigewitsch) will explore Blanchot&rsquo\;s considerations of writing and literature in their exposure of alterity\, disturbance of temporality\, and their inscription of the anonymous and impersonal&mdash\;for it is the ineluctable binding of writing and mortality which Blanchot has exposed to us\, suspending &ldquo\;today&rdquo\; in the double exposure of a coming future which intersects with a &ldquo\;terrifyingly ancient&rdquo\; past. The title of this opening session\, expresses the double question of the (un)timeliness of Blanchot&rsquo\;s work. If we agree with Jacques Derrida&rsquo\;s claim that &ldquo\;never as much as today have I imagined him so far ahead of us as today. Awaiting us\, still to come\, to be read\, to be reread by those very same ones that do it ever since they knew how to read and thanks to him\,&rdquo\; then it is from Blanchot &ldquo\;himself&rdquo\; that we might learn the double sense of our titular question. What can Blanchot teach us that bears the mark of today? Blanchot has never been more timely to read and think with than today\, insofar as &ldquo\;today&rdquo\; is only ever the mobile limit inscribed between a future to come and a past never present. There is no &ldquo\;today\,&rdquo\; no &ldquo\;contemporaneity&rdquo\; for literature\, and its very writing alters our relation to life\, suspending it in a void from whence all emerges and in which all must efface itself.
Session II (&ldquo\;Blanchot &\; Derrida\,&rdquo\; with Philippe Lynes) will\, for its part\, trace the history of Blanchot&rsquo\;s influence on Derrida\, as well as instances of a reciprocal influence in Blanchot&rsquo\;s own work. When discussing the &lsquo\;violent&rsquo\; relationship of deconstruction to its three biggest influences&mdash\;Martin Heidegger\, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot&mdash\;Jacques Derrida explains that Blanchot resists this violence best. In the final interview before his death\, Derrida insisted that a notion of &lsquo\;survivance&rsquo\; or &lsquo\;living-on&rsquo\; lay at the heart of his entire philosophical trajectory\, evoking Blanchot&rsquo\;s notion of &ldquo\;a survival which is not one\, a death which does not put an end to anything.&rdquo\; Derrida&rsquo\;s most sustained engagement with Blanchot takes place in the mid 1970s with the publication of &ldquo\;Pas\,&rdquo\; as well as the second year of his just-published La Chose seminar (1975-1977). Blanchot&rsquo\;s thought also features importantly in &ldquo\;Discourses of the End&rdquo\;&mdash\;Derrida&rsquo\;s 1983 conversations on the apocalypse and the disaster with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy\, as well as his final seminar\, The Beast and the Sovereign (2002-2003).
In turn\, Session III (&ldquo\;Blanchot &\; Nancy\,&rdquo\; with Kim Schoof) will explore how it is possible that such contrasting perspectives on literature and the experience it offers us of being&rsquo\;s origin emanate from one another. It will do so exploring how Blanchot and Nancy write (occasionally in direct response to one another) about literature\, community\, ontology and &ldquo\;the neuter.&rdquo\; For Blanchot\, literature opens us onto the &ldquo\;Outside&rdquo\; where being originates\, where &ldquo\;I am not [&hellip\;]\; no one is there\, but the impersonal is: the outside\, as that which prevents\, precedes\, and dissolves the possibility of any personal relation.&rdquo\; Yet\, it is Blanchot&rsquo\;s perspective on literature that has inspired Jean-Luc Nancy to view literature as an exemplary way of being in the world. In Nancy&rsquo\;s perspective\, literature is the &ldquo\;coming of the world&rdquo\; or\, in the words of Aukje van Rooden\, &ldquo\;the point at which connections are made\, in which (the world) is created as being\, time and again\, a set of relations in which and by which we live.&rdquo\;
Lastly\, Session IV (&ldquo\;Blanchot Unreceived\,&rdquo\; with Carlos A. Segovia) will focus on how Blanchot seems to approach the question of the relation between language and reality à\; rebours of much contemporary thought\, which\, in repudiating their once-assumed transparency\, tends instead to affirm their reciprocal opacity. For Blanchot\, however\, language is neither the thing named nor its mere absence\, but the tentative recovery of its presence through its very loss\; just as in Mallarmé\;&rsquo\;s &ldquo\;Sonnet in -yx\,&rdquo\; for instance\, anguish is neither the one felt in the chest by the poet&mdash\;which lacks a voice and hence proves at once present to him as something real but absent due to its silence&mdash\;nor the one named through the universal notion that would conventionally be assigned to it&mdash\;before whose trivial presence the anguish thus felt would recede into absence: it is rather that thing of hard (whether white or black) &ldquo\;nails&rdquo\; like &ldquo\;onyx&rdquo\; by virtue of which word and world become mutually supplementary and translucent to one another. This will be examined both at the crossroads of today&rsquo\;s thought\, thinkable\, and unthought and along with Blanchot&rsquo\;s re-inscription of being as otherness.
TIME
5 SUNDAYS\, weekly\, beginning October 4\, 2026.
10:00-12:00 Eastern US Time.
SESSIONS
1) Blanchot Today?
The Interminable Default\, Between a Coming Future and a &ldquo\;Terrifyingly Ancient&rdquo\; Past with Alex Obrigewitsch
2) Blanchot &\; Derrida
La Mort La Chose
with Philippe Lynes
3) Blanchot &\; Nancy
Literature: Being (In and) Outside (of the World)
with Kim Schoof
4) Blanchot Unreceived
Transparency\, Opaqueness\, Translucence
with Carlos A. Segovia
ABOUT INCITE SEMINARS
We are a mix of rogue scholars\, disgruntled academics\, disenchanted buddhists\, enchantment-hungry anarchists\, radical therapists\, and general weirdos looking to create autonomous and accessible forms of &ldquo\;higher education.&rdquo\;
We offer online seminars and reading groups to incite personal exploration and inspire community action. Incite Seminars offers an educational experience. We do so by gathering an engaged group of participants for a dynamic exchange of ideas\, led by skilled facilitators. All of our facilitators have a deep relationship to a subject or topic through intensive study or practice.
Incite Seminars is a 100% member-supported learning community. We depend on member contributions to continue holding space for radical study and practice groups\, putting on rigorous seminars and courses\, and providing our facilitators and organizers with fair compensation. If you are unable to pay the full amount for a session or membership at this time\, we invite you to join us at reduced or no cost with our Solidarity option.
a 3-session seminar with Andrea F. de Donato\, Gorica Orsholits &\; Carlos A. Segovia &bull\; with guest contributions by Luigi Attademo &\; Gaia Ferrantini
SEMINAR DESCRIPTION
Fractured Ontologies in Music explores musical forms in which fracture becomes a productive way of organizing musical experience. From the spectral dispersions of the French style brisé\; to the phantomic operations of fantasia and the mutable structures of variation in the Romantic piano repertoire\, music emerges as a field where presence is continually refracted through absence\, interruption\, and excess. Across these perspectives\, the seminar asks how musical forms might resist organic wholeness without simply celebrating its dissolution\, opening instead onto modes of existence that are multiple\, unstable\, and generative.
Session I (&ldquo\;Style Brisé\;&rsquo\;s Ghost: Neither Unity Nor Its Loss\,&rdquo\; with Carlos A. Segovia and a guest contribution by Luigi Attademo) explores how French Baroque music&mdash\;and the lute world within it in particular&mdash\;is an anomaly running perpendicular to the principles of development of modern European music. Neither is architecture in it prior to expression\, as in Renaissance polyphony\, nor does drama determine form\, as in the Italian Baroque&mdash\;the development of these tendencies having resulted in Classicism and Romanticism\, and post-Romanticism having dissolved organic wholeness wherever it emerged. The French style brisé\; or luthé\;&mdash\;which is not merely a style but an aesthetic field with its own affective ontology&mdash\;thus amounts to modernity&rsquo\;s musical ghost. Two ideas define it: the refraction and diffraction of the experienceable. Through them\, harmony and rhythm\, to which melody is subordinated\, disperse into echoes\, delays\, and interruptions\, from the repertoire to the individual note. Music thus becomes spectral: neither does unity precede fragmentation\, nor is fragmentation the effect of its loss\; rather\, fracture itself becomes the condition of its manifestation. Hence\, the French style brisé\; inhabited positively what modernism would seek through negation\, thereby unsettling the narrative of today&rsquo\;s dominant musical aesthetics.
In turn\, Session II (&ldquo\;Fantasia: The Sounding of a Phantom\,&rdquo\; with Gorica Orsholits) examines fantasia: an imagined musical composition that represents the free-form\, improvisational\, and irrational power of imagination through sound\, overcoming the limits of ordinary conceptual thinking. The structure of fantasia is a bridge between the sensory and the supersensory\, where music does not imitate the external world\, but directly expresses the inner essence and movement of consciousness\, ignoring common harmonic structures to achieve hyper-sensual experiences. Fantasia operates through phantasm which represents a phantomic sound operation that exposes the visibility of its being through a disguise\, a phantom\, a non-being. The phantomic event of non-being is a combination of real and completely invented situations where the trace of a presence appears as an absence. The original fantasias were compositions intended for the lute and related string instruments\, and later for keyboard instruments. In Baroque music\, fantasia acquires a more extensive\, technically complex structure while in the classical period\, it appears in more freely-formed sonata movements. In the Romantic period\, it is encountered as the title of various compositions. Fantasia in contemporary music changes shape and embodies musical expressionist melodrama\, speech-songs and forms of dark\, phantasmagoric musical fantasias.
Lastly\, Session III (&ldquo\;The Mutant Sound Object: Paganini-Liszt &\; Variation\,&rdquo\; with Andrea F. de Donato and a guest contribution by Gaia Ferrantini) focuses on the problem of variation. After providing an introductory overview of how the concept of variation can be defined differently in philosophy and musicology\, the session presents a case study of Franz Liszt&rsquo\;s Grandes é\;tudes de Paganini\, S. 141\, from 1851. This work serves as an exemplary case to demonstrate how creative thought and the structuring of a musical style can constitute multiple levels of ontological expressibility. Thus the session begins with a comparative analysis of the 1851 é\;tudes and an earlier version\, published by Liszt in 1838 under the title É\;tudes d&rsquo\;exé\;cution transcendante d&rsquo\;aprè\;s Paganini\, S. 140. Next\, focusing on É\;tude No. 3\, &ldquo\;La Campanella\,&rdquo\; four different modes of variation are identified: functional\, semantic\, sound\, and spatial variation. Supported by specific audio and score excerpts\, key harmonic characteristics are analyzed\, providing the following conclusions: 1. the four modes of variation structure a distinctive sound object&mdash\;not monadic and isolated\, but processual and mutant\; 2. from this sound object\, an ontology based on variation may be derived. Whether and how this variational ontology\, derived from the Paganini-Liszt é\;tudes\, might constitute a fractured ontology is likewise examined.
TIME
3 Sundays\, November 8\, 15\, and 22\, 2026
10:00&ndash\;12:00 Eastern Time Zone &bull\; 16:00&ndash\;18:00 Central European
SESSIONS
Session I &bull\; November 8\, 2026
Style Brisé\;&rsquo\;s Ghost
Neither Unity Nor Its Loss
with Carlos A. Segovia
Session II &bull\; November 15\, 2026
Fantasia
The Sounding of a Phantom
with Gorica Orsholits
Session III &bull\; November 22\, 2026
The Mutant Sound Object
Paganini-Liszt &\; Variation
with Andrea F. de Donato
ABOUT INCITE SEMINARS
We are a mix of rogue scholars\, disgruntled academics\, disenchanted buddhists\, enchantment-hungry anarchists\, radical therapists\, and general weirdos looking to create autonomous and accessible forms of &ldquo\;higher education.&rdquo\;
We offer online seminars and reading groups to incite personal exploration and inspire community action. Incite Seminars offers an educational experience. We do so by gathering an engaged group of participants for a dynamic exchange of ideas\, led by skilled facilitators. All of our facilitators have a deep relationship to a subject or topic through intensive study or practice.
Incite Seminars is a 100% member-supported learning community. We depend on member contributions to continue holding space for radical study and practice groups\, putting on rigorous seminars and courses\, and providing our facilitators and organizers with fair compensation. If you are unable to pay the full amount for a session or membership at this time\, we invite you to join us at reduced or no cost with our Solidarity option.
GROUP DESCRIPTION
Is there any mutualism between art and philosophy? Can philosophy contribute to art and vice versa? Is anti-philosophy actually just one of many philosophies which is able to better comprehend artistic expression and lead to a mutual consensus?
Ever since Plato proclaimed all arts as inappropriate for life in Ancient Greek society and permitted only military or patriotic music and songs\, art has gone through many phases of existence. For Badiou art belongs to the four truth procedures related to philosophy alongside love\, politics and science. In his book Handbook of Inaesthetics he examined poetry\, theatre\, cinema\, and dance in order to elucidate the relationship between philosophy and art. Badiou&rsquo\;s perception of this link can be summarised as follows:
&ldquo\;Historically\, philosophy and art are paired up like Lacan&rsquo\;s Master and Hysteric. We know that the hysteric comes to the master and says: &lsquo\;Truth speaks through my mouth\, I am here. You have knowledge\, tell me who I am.&rsquo\; [&hellip\;] In so doing\, the hysteric takes charge of the master\, &lsquo\;barring&rsquo\; him from mastery and becoming his mistress. Likewise\, art is always already there\, addressing the thinker with the mute and scintillating question of its identity while through constant invention and metamorphosis it declares its disappointment about everything that the philosopher may have to say about it.&rdquo\; (translated by Alberto Toscano)
The aim of the reading group is to approach Badiou&rsquo\;s artistic configuration in Inaesthetics from a philosophical standpoint\, as well as from an anti-philosophical ground specifically developed by the influence of his reading of Nietzsche\, in his words the &ldquo\;prince of anti-philosophy.&rdquo\; Through Nietzschean anti-Platonism and his entire effort &ldquo\;to be cured of the sickness of Plato&rdquo\; we can ask if Badiou seeks to dance with Nietzsche in Plato&rsquo\;s Republic. What Badiou aims to accomplish by entering the realm of anti-philosophy is to allow philosophy to remain alive and active while creating a rapprochement with art. Does artistic expression as a sensory\, intuitive and finite practice demonstrate the potential of rendering the truth of an event (a rupture of given orders of being and understanding) and what role can it play for &ldquo\;true life&rdquo\; to happen? And more generally\, how can &ldquo\;the experience of the limit &ndash\; philosophy as a limit experience&rdquo\; be overcome?
We can agree or disagree with Badiou&rsquo\;s propositions\, but the goal of this reading group is to refine our own thoughts on this vicious entanglement between philosophy\, anti-philosophy and art. All participants can also propose texts they consider relevant for this topic\, and together through readings and discussions we can build a space for future Incite seminars.
TIME
SATURDAYS: bi-weekly\, starting November 28\, 2026.
13:00-14:30 Eastern US time / 19:00-20:30 Central European Time.
GROUP MATERIALS
The main reading will be Handbook of Inaesthetics by Alain Badiou translated by Alberto Toscano as well as excerpts from the journal INAESTHETICS edited by Wilfried Dickhoff &\; Marcus Steinweg and Nietzsche: anti-philosophy 1 also by Badiou. All texts will be provided.
FACILITATOR
Gorica Orsholits (PhD) is an independent scholar\, theoretician\, artist\, and musician (flautist). She studied and taught at the University of Toronto and the European Graduate School from which she received her PhD under the supervision of the French poet Philippe Beck. She has lectured extensively and participated in numerous international conferences. Dr. Orsholits is on the Advisory Board of Inscriptions and was board member and convenor of the seminar at the Ereignis Center for Philosophy and the Arts. Her research interests are in continental philosophy\, poetry and poetics\, literary theory\, film\, music\, and theatre. Her chapter &ldquo\;Event and its Compossibility with Truths and Subject in Badiou&rsquo\;s Thought&rdquo\; will appear in the forthcoming volume Contributions to Continental Event-philosophy (Mohr Siebeck). She resides in Geneva\, Switzerland.
ABOUT INCITE SEMINARS
We are a mix of rogue scholars\, disgruntled academics\, disenchanted buddhists\, enchantment-hungry anarchists\, radical therapists\, and general weirdos looking to create autonomous and accessible forms of &ldquo\;higher education.&rdquo\;
We offer online seminars and reading groups to incite personal exploration and inspire community action. Incite Seminars offers an educational experience. We do so by gathering an engaged group of participants for a dynamic exchange of ideas\, led by skilled facilitators. All of our facilitators have a deep relationship to a subject or topic through intensive study or practice.
Incite Seminars is a 100% member-supported learning community. We depend on member contributions to continue holding space for radical study and practice groups\, putting on rigorous seminars and courses\, and providing our facilitators and organizers with fair compensation. If you are unable to pay the full amount for a session or membership at this time\, we invite you to join us at reduced or no cost with our Solidarity option.