French philosopher Martial Guéroult, a decisive influence on the generation of the 1960s including Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, held a uniquely titled chair at the Collège de France in the 1950s: the History and Technology of Philosophical Systems. What does it mean to treat a philosophical system as a "technology"? For Guéroult, a philosophy is a rigorously constructed architecture of concepts. Philosophers are technologists of thought, building internal structures and rational systems that make possible new forms of intelligibility.

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This course explores how modern philosophy reshaped thinking about art, technology, and science through what can be called a technology of difference. Difference is no longer understood as a secondary relation between pre-given terms. It becomes a productive, unilateral force - an energetic strike that generates variation, novelty, and new forms of experience. This shift reconfigured how knowledge, artistic practice, and technical activity are conceived.

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Throughout the course, we will trace how the concept of difference came to structure much of twentieth-century continental thought, informing the work of thinkers like Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze. However, we will see that this fascination with difference is not strictly a twentieth-century phenomenon. It is rooted in the history of philosophy, with its modern iteration beginning with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, continues through Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the post-Kantian tradition, and reaches a new intensity with Henri Bergson in the early 20th century.​

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Across these figures, a new configuration emerges. Art appears as a site of production rather than representation; science as a historically situated practice; and technology as a practical apparatus that inserts indeterminacy into matter, rather than a neutral instrument. This course invites participants to step into the architecture of these systems, experiencing philosophy as an active force that continues to reshape how we understand change, creativity, and modern life.