2025-2026 FROM CONFLUENCE TO CONFLUENCE ~ Amit Rai's seminar: Attending to Erasure
SEMINAR: April 17, 18 & 19, 2026
In this final meeting of the year, we will continue our ontological deconstruction of the sovereign subject of modern thought, the subject master of His own attentions. We will continue affects that can help us to diagram the counter-tendencies of revolutionary becomings in and through collective attention, and through Manning, Massumi, and other we will continue our critique of the primacy of cognition, marking the becoming undecidable of the form/content binary, fixity vs flow, through the refusal of any intervening 'third' (= mediator). We will, in short, continue to consider a politics without mediation, a politics of immediation. Having considered the critique of the generic schema of mediation in political science mis-interpretations of the supposedly failed revolution in Palestine (Abourhame 2019), we consider this critique of mediation through chapters on the political economy of Palestine. We will do freewriting, stretching, listening to music, watching films and videos, and take walks in between nourishing, generous, intensive, and critical discourses that do something with theory.
SEMINAR: March 13, 14 & 15, 2026
In March, we will pursue our question: How can we collectively create concepts, technologies, durations, and practices of attention that refuse the erasures of colonial violence and for the creation of monstrous attentions useless for fascism, Zionism, racist capitalism, capitalist racism, heteropatriarchy, and settler colonialism? Our discussions will be focused on the attentional proposition of Vivieros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics, among other texts. You will lead a workshop on individuality, Palestine, and the post-Soviet hangover. We will watch media concerning the colonial legacies of anthropology. We will engage in a small group exercise on perspectivism, multinaturalism/ multiculturalism. Our topics will include:
What is (French) anthropology? What is (feminist) philosophy?
What is the Ontological Turn? Of a philosophy to come?
What would have been “Anti-Narcissus: Anthropology as Minor Science”?
Multi-naturalism, perspectivalism
Essentialism? What ‘is’ cannibalism?
A metaphysics of predation: moving beyond phenomenology
Ingold, Descola: overcoming ontological partitions
Affinity, kinship, and its deconstruction
Deleuze and the “other structure.”
What is reverse anthropology? Prolonged watching of the corpses of European colonizers?
Ethnocentrism/androcentrism and anthropology
Battle of equally valid interpretations: (change of) perspectivisms – cf quote from Deleuze from Nietzsche and Philosophy
Shamanism, and the idea of knowledge (vs. objectivism—based on the split between subject and object), the opacity of, intrinsic capacity to be something else
Humanity of each species of Being.
SEMINAR: January 17, 18 & 19, 2026
In Nida (January 2026), we discuss Anzuldúa, her use of the language, and language as a border. We explored decolonial theory as a variety of different meetings of cultures, defetishisation of fossilized language, which Édouard Glissant suggests that we attend to. We pursue a questioning of why humans seem to express so violently a relentless desire for domination and power, which, as you have pointed out, leads to the erasure of identity, history, and land. The notion of fictions, reclaiming myths and stories; shattered and fragmented histories, how does memory work? We ask. We discussed in the context of Arboleda’s Planetary Mine analysis and Anzuldua’s theory of the borderlands, how revolutionary forces can use fiction for anti-colonial struggle. We discussed what it means to pursue a degree at the DAI today – for a full-tuition paying non-Eurozone student, the stress of being half-alive is added to the stress of not reading fast enough; where is our border between self and the world? We spoke as well of the white supremacist cultures in which we live while we critique all the compradour class ‘representatives’ of the oppressed and all the meaningless preferential attachments of the left—but still is it inevitable that the rich get richer? You pointed out the method of following the 100 most used words . . . in a culture, say, DAI culture. You all noted that all the code words for the art world seem to be hollowed out; how is the fragmentation of meaning is used, deployed against us? Language has power in contexts: Zionism deliberately blurs the meanings of words (eg “collateral damage” for child slaughter). We considered how materials intertwine in practices of resistance. What is your question for the day? Who benefits the most from these infrastructures? How to ask a question? What did I write down, writing and patience, under what sky are we today?
SEMINAR: November 22 & 23, 2025
In this first HTDTWT seminar week, we will discuss the current situation in Palestine and the historical conditions of Palestinian liberation today. Topics will include: The Marxist theory of Base/Superstructure; the different uses of the Dialectical method to break with the reproduction of the ruling class order; breaking determinism of ‘history’; capitalist commodification of art, and the emergence of art as negative critique; engaging with Sadaawi’s interpretation of Marina Vishmidt: how art is inscribed in valorisation (not about the value of certain artworks, but why does value today also take the form of art); what is the relation of the affect of revolutionary becoming in Palestine and elsewhere to the capitalist totality? ; why art cannot save itself; the necessity of what Harney, Sadaawi, and Vishmidt call infrastructural critique--capital flows, speculative artist risks and wagers; how is the call to Boycott Zionism a transformation of the workers’ strike; art as platform of social engagement and social impact bonds; what is mediation? art mediation, and art mediated; we will consider what is meant by ‘transparent politics critiqued’ (Sadaawi); mediation is transluscent; a system of non-culture; Zionist writing, and the literary style of settler colonialism—the affirmations and work of Ghassan Kanafani’s revolutionary war machine assemblage; why is everything indeterminate except Palestinian liberation in the art world? We will do free writing, stretching, movement, walking, reading outloud, close literary analysis of theoretical and historical texts involved in the liberation of Palestine.