What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
Via negativa
The opening lecture — the thesis for the whole semester, stated once, and the case for taking a course built entirely out of other people's cuts
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
The apophatic turn
Pseudo-Dionysius, Maimonides and the Cloud of Unknowing --- a tradition that got more precise about God by refusing every positive sentence about him
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
Blank silk
Yuan-dynasty ink painting and the unpainted ground --- what a scroll's empty silk is doing when it's doing more than half the composition
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
The rest
Silence as a compositional element, from the rest on a stave to Cage's four minutes and thirty-three seconds of nothing being played on purpose
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
The iceberg theory
Hemingway's "the dignity of movement of an iceberg" and the minimalist fiction that took the metaphor as a literal compositional method
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
The invisible cut
Continuity editing and the century-long project of making a cut feel like it never happened --- and what's lost when it succeeds too well
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
Negative space
What a building or a page does with the room it refuses to fill, from Pawson's monastery to a logo that draws an arrow out of two letters
Week 7 · 5 April 2027
Less is a verb
Dieter Rams's ten principles, Bauhaus functionalism, and the difference between a design that removed something and one that never had it
Week 8 · 12 April 2027
The null result
Why "we found nothing" is the hardest sentence in science to publish, and what a discipline loses when it only keeps its positive results
Week 9 · 19 April 2027
Proof by elimination
Occam's razor, reductio ad absurdum, and a mathematics tradition that treats the shortest correct proof as a mark of taste, not just economy
Week 10 · 26 April 2027
The unsaid argument
Redacted documents, unpriced externalities and the political speech that persuades by what it declines to mention
Week 11 · 3 May 2027
What this course left out
The closing lecture, turning eleven weeks of praising subtraction back on itself --- what does the thesis conveniently fail to explain?
Week 12 · 10 May 2027