The overarching theme for this year’s session is “Departures.” We consider it to be of great urgency to think through conditions of exit, division, and separation as they stand today in regard to the relation between aesthetics and politics. To depart, coming into English from the Old French departir, means to divide, distribute, and/or separate - as a verb and as a nominalization it seems to us to bear an immense significance in the contemporary moment. The first known usage of the word “depart” in English was in the Ancrene Wisse, a 13th century book of rules (which were surely ignored) for anchoresses - there, it was used as a threat. Our supposition is that the questions “what are we exiting?” and “where must we go?” are inextricable, and respond to the respectively to the threat of capitalism’s too-lates and not-yets: the unbearable quality of the present necessitates a dialectical approach to this pincer movement, one that is multiple.
Our 2026 Summer School will therefore aim to teach “Departure” in several different ways. Each of our four main convenors will program one full day, which will consist of three hour and a half-long sessions, facilitated and taught by themselves and two other invited speakers. The fifth and closing day of our program will reflect on the theme again at the level of the collective, by inviting participants to coalesce the materials and the encounters of the first four days in a manner of their own choosing.
This iteration of the School of Late Theory will take place at Lafayette College, in Easton, Pennsylvania. For those interested in attending, or for those seeking information about accomodation in and/or travel to Easton - located about 1.5 hours driving or 2 hours by bus from New York - please contact the convenors at theschooloflatetheory@proton.me.
The program for SLT 2026 can be found below:
The Operatic
Nora Fulton - Melodrama I (From the Cinema of Keisuke Kinoshita)
1:00 to 2:45
Bianca Rae Messinger - Presence and Supplementation: The Instability of “Nature” in Derrida’s Voice and Phenomenon and Rousseau’s Le Devin du Village
3:15 to 5:00
Veronica Davis - Exchange and Recompense in Sirk
Sentimentality, procedure. Romance, notation. The theme of Day 1 is The Operatic, taken both as a possible means of departure and as an arrangment of thinking from which we can and must depart. According to the late Linda Williams, the kind of melodrama normally associated with the operatic “offers the hope that it may not be too late, that there may still be an archaic sort of virtue, and that virtue and truth can be achieved in private individuals and individual heroic acts rather than, as Eisenstein wanted, in revolution and change.” But what is the structure, in itself, of melodrama’s acts of naive temporal inversion? The thesis of Day 1 is that we can separate this structure from what it operates upon; in doing so, we can identify those operations that it, as an objectified operativity, may undergo.
Crisis
Roberto Viviani - The Aesthetics and the Masses; Sorrow or Rejoice?
1:00 to 2:45
Pietro Bianchi - Why Ideology is Made of Signifiers: Jameson, Benjamin, Lacan, and the Problem of the Allegorical Nature of Ideology
3:15 to 5:00
Ylenia Olibet - Documentary Practices and Archival Interventions in Eco-Critical Times
Crisis is the ultimate laboratory. It is precisely when hegemony fractures and “common sense” crumbles that, Gramsci teaches us, aesthetics becomes a battlefield. Ideology reveals itself most vividly when it scrambles to find new forms of reproduction. Day 2, Crisis, asks how we can recognize ideology at work in an image, a film, a novel, rather than as a symptom. When does an aesthetic serve power and when does it become a space of refusal? The parallel between our contemporary moment and the 1920s is revealing: both are eras of collapsing certainties, social conflict, and linguistic rupture. They are, in Gramsci’s terms, interregnums in which the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born. In that void, he warned, “monsters arise.” Dark forces that reorganize consensus around new mythologies. Just as in the twenties art reacted to the crisis of the liberal historical bloc—between avant-gardes and fascist drifts—so today, faced with the fracturing of neoliberalism, we face the same question: does contemporary aesthetics deconstruct our dominant fictions, or does it prime us, through new forms of interpellation, for monsters yet to come?
Totality
Bettina Bergo - Departing from Totality and its Rationality
1:00 to 2:45
Michael Stanescu - TBA
3:15 to 5:00
Myriam Amri - TBA
In what sense do we understand "totalization"? As a limit of our understanding? As a bridge between logic and politics? How did philosophers approach what they considered the pure (linear) causality of nature as a whole, especially in light of free action? Or does "freedom" necessarily break with totality — can we get out of "totalizalizing" logics? Kant, a philosophical father of us all, willy nilly, struggled to defend an idea of freedom consistent with causality, even if he did not try to prove freedom in its possibility, or as a "reality." What he sought was a kind of consistency of freedom with the epistemology of nature and necessity. Day 3, Totality, suggests that philosophy has not much advanced beyond this perspectivalism, and aims to keep its eye on the difficult relationship between totality and its critiques, and between freedom as a question and necessity understood as "natural."
Conditions
Joshua Harold Wiebe and Patrick Marshall - Condition 1: The Weimar Republic
1:00 to 2:45
Ling Zhang - Condition 2: Post-Bandung Tricontinental Exchange
3:15 to 5:00
Chelsey Ancliffe - Condition 3: Oil Shocks of the 1970’s
What might the relationship be between a politics of the future and movements (failed or successful) long passed? We know, after Marx, that the traditions of the past have a tendency to “weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living”– what other connections to history are possible? Day 4’s theme, Conditions, connects the project of speculation to that of determinate critique: revisiting historical moments of turbulence and organization, successes and defeats, alongside their attendant aesthetic projects and the representations tasked with depicting them, we ask after the ways in which what came before is inextricable from what is and from what is still possible.
The School of Late Theory is an annual gathering of scholars, critics, workers, and artists who seek to constitute a site for learning and organisation amid institutional and societal collapse.
The School of Late Theory espouses no unified or homogeneous theoretical orientation, but is committed to intellectuality as a way of negotiating relations between aesthetics and politics. With this in mind, we ask after the conditions of possibility for exiting the situation we all find ourselves in as a collective formation, not only through speculation as to the future, but also through determinate critique of the present and the past.
The School of Late Theory’s programming consists of organic discussions directed through objects assigned in advance - texts, films, performances, problems. Participants are encouraged to stay for the duration of the program, but are also welcome to come and go according to which sessions interest them. No papers will be presented; no credit will be given; no fees will be collected.
This year’s event takes place with the support of the Film and Media Studies program at Lafayette College, as well as the departments and programs of English, History, Engineering, Government and Law, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Languages and Literary studies, and International Affairs.
Nora Fulton
Roberto Viviani
Bettina Bergo
Joshua Harold Wiebe
2026 - Easton, PA