I added a few things to read for January term/winter break as we were caught up and had a few weeks to include original material that I thought I had to cut for the sake of time. As it turns out, we do have the time to include it, thus the updated syllabus.
The material now included comprises a small little section
of its own which I call "Relational Being" (this in addition to the
first part called "Organic Being" and the, now, third part, called "Technological
Being"). It is more a less a transition from the tale end of part one's
discussion of desire and need or libidinal drive in organisms and then Deleuze's
notion of "desiring machines" to the idea of organisms-as-machines or
cybernetics and the union of organism and machine via technical objects.
We begin Part Two, "Relational Being" with Simondon's On the Existence of Technical Objects and newishly translated essay "Technical Mentality." From there we read a few small pieces of Byung-Chul Han's In the Swarm and The Burnout Society to make the transition into part three, "Technological Being" where we go over how technological being affects organic being when (cybernetic, or otherwise) modal entanglement and unions occur as they have in the 21st-century.
Part Three, "Technological Being," closes with some of Bernard Stiegler's Nanjing Lectures and selections from Technics and Time vol. 1, Jason Reza Jorjani's concept of "Prometheism" in Chapter 1 of his book Prometheism, and finally Ernst Junger's Promethean call to heroically march forward into the cosmic technological unknown in his essay "At the Wall of Time" (1959) and The Worker (1932).
The link to the updated Syllabus is HERE. As a side note I plan to begin posting on my YouTube channel recordings of the seminars once January term is over (this way I'll have gone through at least half of the material before posting it). I'll probably discuss it as a long-form series on my weekly Sunday night YouTube live-stream on as well.
