Teaching period: 4-8 March, 2024

Location: Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway

Teacher(s): Jan Verwoert

ECTS: 4

Number of available places for KUNO students: 1-2

Level: BA/MA

Requirements: attendance, attention, supportive listening to others, readiness to take the risk of thinking out loud.

Course description:
The alternative was there: Spinoza ridiculed Descartes for splitting the living creature into mind and body, raising an isolated rationality to godlike status, and reducing all else to stuff for rational domination. Instead, Spinoza wrote an ethics, a psychology, and a political philosophy of connected beings, expressing modes of embodied cosmic energy in multiple significant constellations, and elementary (interspecies) relations. Much critical thinking has been born out of writers tuning in with Spinoza, among others Nietzsche, Deleuze and neomaterialist feminists like Rosi Braidotti or Donna Harraway.

Closely reading text excerpts from the Ethics, we will familiarise ourselves with the joys and pains of getting into Spinoza, and then follow up with contemporary thinkers putting his ideas to work in reimagining society and relations between creatures, with the planet, on the planet.

A key question will be: After centuries of heteronormative thinking being inscribed into (reductive dualistic accounts of) energy relations (spirit/form masculine, body/matter feminine etc…), how to live and express energy relations in the Spinozian spirit of true cosmic multiplicity (with 7 planets and counting, why settle for 2 genders)?

Application deadline: 8th of February, 2024, 23:30 (Norwegian time)

How to apply:  Please apply via this online form https://nettskjema.no/a/394632

Financial Support by KUNO:
Travel support between countries: 330 € (except 660 € to/from Iceland)
Subsistence per week: 250 € per week.

In case of any questions please contact kjerjens@khio.no