Non-Buddhism

Towards a Minimal Pneumatology

a 3-hour seminar with Carlos A. Segovia

 DATE: Sunday, September 6, 2026
 TIME: 10:00–13:00 Eastern US Time • 16:00–19:00 Central European Time. See time zone converter if you’re in a different location to make sure you get the time right. A Zoom link will be provided on registration.
COST: Three options (registration at bottom of this page):
(i) $45 for non-members (become a member).
(ii) $30 for members.
(iii) Solidarity (new options  see below).

SEMINAR DESCRIPTION

The Spirit, then?

Yes and no—no and yes.

Not Spirit as substance, nor Spirit as subject. Not even, perhaps, Spirit as such. Let us attend instead to what the word leaves behind in its wake: spiritus, “breath.” A trace of air, an opening, a passage.

Nothing more. Yet, perhaps, nothing less.

Hence the proposal of a minimal pneumatology.

But what does it mean to breathe? What does it mean to leave room—for ourselves, for others, for things themselves—to breathe? And what kind of question is this, once it has been separated from the familiar vocabularies of self-help, self-optimization, or popular psychology?

If a minimal pneumatology is neither a theology nor—at least in the Hegelian sense—a phenomenology, it cannot simply become a psychology by default. Shall we turn, then, toward hermeticism? I feel here too we would be choosing perhaps the wrong door. For behind it we often find a room crowded with damasks and pleated velvets, where Spirit, overburdened by symbols and correspondences, survives only as a captive creature, adorned and enchained at once.

Let us begin elsewhere.

Breathing as a minimal gesture—or rather as a constellation of minimal gestures: to open, to make space, to give time, to set aside, to choose, to move beyond, to challenge, to hollow out, to celebrate… Gestures so slight that they often escape notice, and yet it may be through them that Spirit passes.

A pragmatics of Spirit, then?

Fine. Yet I would prefer to speak of an aesthetics.

For what is at stake here is, before all else, a restoration of perception to its primary dignity. Not perception as mastery, nor as the reduction of things to what can be identified and possessed, but perception as hospitality: a way of receiving what appears without exhausting it.

Accordingly, throughout this session we will linger with a series of images and related materials. Together we shall attempt to discover—with attentiveness, patience, sensitivity, and generosity, not least towards one another—the ways in which Spirit, rather than being summoned through prescribed practices, and rather than becoming the object of our conceptual constructions, quietly makes its way through the penumbra of what we see and do not see.

Emerging in its simplicity, it appears uncannily before us, reminding us that it had been there all along: near yet elusive, intimate yet withdrawn, concealed within what we habitually overlook or, conversely, feel compelled to overinterpret. It inhabits neither the obvious nor the occult, but the interval between them—the delicate space where attention hesitates and meaning has not yet closed upon itself.

This session is therefore intended for all those drawn to the adventures of art and aesthetics across the centuries; to philosophy and mythology; to poetry and poetics; to symbolism, surrealism, and the life of images; and, more generally, to those strange and beautiful encounters in which imagination comes into contact with what is too readily called ineffable, though it may be asking for something else entirely: not to be named, mastered, or decoded, but simply sheltered in its fragility.

The Spirit, then?

Indeed.

More than what you see. Less than you might interpret. Yet more than you could ever imagine.

CONTENTS

1. Towards a Minimal Pneumatology
2. The Spirit’s Difference • Rothko’s Blue, Green, Blue (1969)
3. The Spirit’s Threshold • Fra Angelico’s Annunciation (1440s)
4. The Spirit’s (Un)timeliness • Titian’s Sisyphus (1548–1549)
5. The Spirit’s Off-Screen • Caravaggio’s Salome (c. 1609)
6. The Spirit’s Choice • Rubens’s Judgement of Paris (1639–1639)
7. The Spirit’s Insight • La Tour’s Saint Sebastian (1644)
8. The Spirit’s Vision • Redon’s Beatrice (1890)
9. The Spirit’s Interpellation • Velázquez’s Three Musicians (1616)
10. The Spirit’s Gain • Balthus’s Street (1935)
11. The Spirit’s Loss • Balthus’s Room (c. 1953)
12. The Spirit’s Audacity • Mallarmé’s Sonnet in -yx (1887)
13. The Spirit’s Domain • Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse (1910)

All materials will be provided during the session.

FACILITATOR

Carlos A. Segovia (PhD) is an independent British-born, Spanish philosopher and writer, working on contemporary philosophy at the crossroads of the philosophy of mythology and the philosophy of art; and author of fifteen books.

Among his publications, Dionysus and Apollo after Nihilism: Rethinking the Earth–World Divide (with Sofya Shaikut; Brill, 2023), Guattari Beyond Deleuze: Ontology and Modal Philosophy in Guattari’s Major Writings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), Félix Guattari and the Ancients: Theatrical Dialogues in Early Philosophy (with Gary Genosko; Bloomsbury, 2025), Nietzsche’s Pre-Dionysian Apollo and the Limits of Contemporary Thought (Peter Lang, 2026), and Poetry and Philosophy after Zambrano and Blanchot: Between Word and World (forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan in 2028).

He has been associate professor of philosophy and religious studies at St Louis University Missouri (Madrid Campus), visiting professor at the University of Aarhus and the Free University of Brussels, and guest lecturer at the European Research Council, the Collège International de Philosophie, the École Normale Supérieure, University College London, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, the European University at St Petersburg, Waseda University in Tokyo, Ryukoku University in Kyoto, and the University of Lilongwe.

Convinced, though, that higher education within mainstream academia is undergoing a form of intellectual exhaustion—brought about by academic standardization, epistemological bureaucratization, and the compartmentalization, ideologization, and commodification of knowledge, alongside the cultivation of middlebrow mediocrity and the reduction of learning to a consumer experience—he has turned to other scholarly venues in which thinking may still be pursued for what it truly is: a way of confronting the unknown—the as-yet unthought but thinkable—with renewed awe and in the spirit of an art rather than a science.

He collaborates regularly with Incite Seminars, where he has facilitated courses like “Anarchia and Archai: Re-Imagining the Pre-Socratics” (with Hannes Schumacher), “Life as an Untotalizable Enigma: The Lame Ontology of Greek Mythology,” “Plato Inside Out – or: as You Never Imagined It,” “Between Death and Beauty: Diving into René Char’s Post-Nihilist Poetics,” Foucault’s Greeks as Savages? A Cross-cultural Approach to the Aesthetics of Existence (with Camilo Rios), and “Chaosmic Landscapes in Guattari’s Latest Works” and where he will be facilitating other like “Untimely Blanchot” (with Philippe Lynes, Alex Obrigewitsch, and Kim Schoof) and “Fractured Ontologies in Music” (with Andrea de Donato and Gorica Orsholits) this very year.

He is currently based in Berlin with his life partner, Sofya Shaikut, a performance artist and butō dancer, with whom he is also engaged in ongoing joint work.

R e g i s t r a t i o n

Non-Members (become a member)

Members

Solidarity: We are happy to make our offerings available at reduced or no-cost if you can not otherwise join. In exchange, we would like you to get involved at Incite Seminars by promoting this seminar on your blog, website or social media. Depending on your needs and time commitment, we can propose to you one of the following options:

(a) one post after the seminar ($30)
(b) one post before the seminar (one week prior) ($15)
(c) one post before (one week prior) and one after the seminar ($0)

If you would like to request one of these options, please email us at inciteseminarsphila@gmail.com with the following information: (1) seminar of interest; (2) reason for requesting a solidarity ticket; (3) the option you choose. Please note that for options (b) and (c) we ask you to get in touch at least one week prior to the beginning of the seminar.

Thank you.