Contemporary life is saturated with exercises, even if we rarely name them as such. Practices of self-formation organize wide stretches of aesthetic, therapeutic, technical, and economic life: disciplined cultivation of body and image, routines of productivity and self-tracking, mindfulness and journaling, algorithmic self-presentation, gestures of digital withdrawal, and training regimes accompanying AI and cognitive automation. However heterogeneous, these practices share common structures: repetition, training, monitoring, habituation, and deliberate self-modification.

Important traditions have formalized parts of this terrain: Hadot's spiritual exercises; Bourdieu's habitus; Foucault's doubled legacy of discipline and technologies of the self; Sloterdijk's anthropotechnics; recent work in media theory on habit, cultural techniques, and computational subject formation (e.g., Chun, Siegert, Pedwell, Airoldi, Romele). These are powerful accounts, but they have not yet yielded a shared frame for understanding exercise as a creative way of engaging with cultural forms and reshaping aesthetic and ethical life.

This seminar proposes askesis—in the ancient Greek sense of exercise, training, and practiced self-formation—as that frame. Askesis names the operations through which subjects shape their capacities by repetition, attention, restraint, and deliberate modification of conduct, perception, embodiment, or thought; ascetic renunciation appears here as one technique of formation among others. The task is to think askesis systematically: What does a given exercise train? What repetitions structure ascetic engagements? What capacities does it cultivate, and what subjectivities does it produce? Does it stabilize and optimize, or expose subjects to risk, difficulty, and transformation? How can texts, media, aesthetic experiences, knowledge practices, and technical interfaces become exercises?

We invite papers that engage with this framework—for example: 

• histories that treat the past and heterogeneous cultural traditions as an archive of exercises and regimes of cultivation; 
• formal characterizations of contemporary practices (optimization routines, platform habits, therapeutic disciplines, AI-assisted cognition, artistic regimens) or updatings of classical exercises for the present; 
• readings of thinkers, artists, or traditions (e.g., Bruno, Schelling, Whitehead, Wynter, Deleuze) as proposing distinctive regimes of exercise;
• literary texts or creative work in other media from heterogeneous traditions as aesthetic exercises;
• creative or speculative thought experiments on how objects can be grasped through exercise values; theorizations of askesis as a mode of reception or scholarly methodology.