2025 Braidotti Summer School

Description

The 2025 Braidotti Summer School will focus on the theme of affirmative ethics by analysing, together with a selected group of participants, contemporary patterns of social and personal negativity. The course will continue Braidotti’s pioneering exploration of the intersections between critical theory, feminist philosophy, posthumanism, and the politics of life and death. This year’s program critically engages with the negative forces shaping the contemporary present—such as necropolitics, neo-fascism and illiberal governance, unequal distribution of wealth and access to the new technologies, the persistence of technologically mediated wars and surveillance strategies, left-wing melancholia, and the bio-politics of reproduction—while seeking affirmative alternatives that foster hope and creativity in the face of these challenges.

Structured into five parts across a week’s time, the program will deepen participants’ engagement with Braidotti’s posthuman theory and affirmative ethics, asking how we might respond to contemporary negativity through a posthuman, non-dualistic lens.

The week-long course will take place in person, at Utrecht University, and will consist of lectures and work groups led by Professor Braidotti, as well as guest speakers. 

1.Left-Wing Melancholia: Political Loss and the Posthuman Convergence
The opening session will introduce the theme of left-wing melancholia as a perennial trait of a critical stance that engages with the present, the better to resist it. It will explore especially the contemporary  sense of grief for the unfulfilled promises of  many political utopias inherited from the previous century and re-frame it within Braidotti’s posthuman convergence. The thesis will be argued that we need a neo-materialist affirmative ethics in order to deal with the conflicts and challenges of our current predicament and  allow for more creative, future-oriented forms of political action. The focus is on environmental, technology studies and the new social inequalities.

2. Necropolitics and Illiberal Governance: Death in an Age of Transition.
Drawing on Braidotti’s work on biopolitics and necropolitics, this section will examine how sovereign power today is expressed through practices of exclusion, violence, war and control over life and death. We will discuss the resurgence of authoritarianism, fascism, and populism in contemporary societies, interrogating their connections to the technological and social management of bodies, sexualities,  populations, public health, epidemics, racial and ethnic diversity and social fears. This session builds on Braidotti’s critiques of both humanism and anthropocentrism and explores how these forces operate within a posthuman framework.

3.The Death Drive: Psychoanalysis, War, Negativity, and the Posthuman
Engaging with psychoanalytic concepts through a posthuman feminist lens, this session foregrounds Freud’s notion of the death drive, questioning some of its popular interpretations. It argues that the destructive force of systemic violence and state-driven wars continues to manifest in political and social life. Drawing from Einstein’s and Freud’s dialogue: Why War? and Braidotti’s own work, participants will explore the generative elements of the death drive. It argues that the negative effects of drives can be rethought within the posthuman condition, opening up possibilities for resilience and affirmation in the face of persistent negativity. References to Spinoza’s view on death and violence will provide a moral compass.

4. The Bio-Politics of Reproduction and Ethnic Replacement Theories: Rethinking Life.

This session analyses the bio- and necro-political effects of contemporary reproductive politics, beyond both Eurocentric Humanism and anthropocentrism.
Using Braidotti’s posthuman feminist thought, the session will advance a critique of patriarchal sexual politics and reproduction, as well as the increasing efforts by illiberal regimes to restore the patriarchal heteronormative family structure. We will then analyse how contemporary anxieties around life, death, gender and national identity are tied to the multiple axes of the posthuman convergence. On the one hand advanced technological mediation of both living and dying. On the other hand social manifestations of racism, xenophobia, and broader struggles over who controls the future of life itself.

5.Between Hope and Affirmation: Creative Humanities in the Posthuman Era
The closing session of the program, inspired by Braidotti’s philosophy of affirmative ethics, explores the role of hope and creativity as a praxis that aims at resisting negativity. With a focus onthe generative and creative force of the humanities, especially the “new” humanities, this section will engage with how art, culture, and critical theory can offer alternative modes of approaching the negativity of our times and create alternative visions for the future. Participants will reflect on the tensions between critique and affirmation, and how we might navigate the complexities of contemporary politics through positive, life-affirming action, in alignment with Braidotti’s call for sustainable futures.

Lecturers

These will be announced at a later date.

Study load

MORNINGS: 9:30-11 Lectures by Rosi Braidotti and selected guests, with Q&A

11:15-12:30 Open discussion or panel discussions

AFTERNOONS:

14-14:45 Short talks by invited guests

15-17 Seminar session with Rosi Braidotti : panel presentation by 6 participants on mandatory reading material

Tags

• Posthuman
• Rosi Braidotti