The emergence of large language models and generative AI has revived fundamental questions that occupied structuralist and post-structuralist thought throughout the twentieth century. Long before artificial intelligence became a practical reality, thinkers such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard challenged traditional assumptions about language, authorship, subjectivity, meaning, and knowledge. Today, AI systems capable of generating coherent texts, simulating dialogue, and participating in cultural production invite renewed examination of these theoretical traditions.

This seminar explores the relevance of structuralism and post-structuralism for understanding contemporary AI. Do large language models reveal language to be a self-organizing system of differences, as structuralists suggested? Does AI challenge humanist assumptions about agency and creativity, echoing Barthes's "death of the author" and Foucault's "author function"? How do AI systems reshape discourse, power, and subject formation in ways that extend or complicate post-structuralist theories? Conversely, do generative models expose limitations in structuralist and post-structuralist accounts of language, interpretation, and social meaning?

We invite papers that engage structuralist and post-structuralist theory in relation to AI, machine learning, algorithmic culture, digital media, and computational language. We welcome both theoretical and applied approaches, including contributions from comparative literature, philosophy, anthropology, media studies, science and technology studies, sociology, linguistics, rhetoric, communication, and related fields.

Possible topics include:

• Structuralism and the architecture of large language models

• Saussure, signs, and computational language

• Lévi-Strauss, classification, and machine cognition

• Barthes, authorship, and AI-generated texts

• Foucault, discourse, and algorithmic governance

• Derrida, différance, iteration, and machine writing

• Lacan, subjectivity, desire, and conversational AI

• Deleuze and Guattari on assemblages, networks, and artificial intelligence

• Posthumanism and the critique of human exceptionalism

• AI and the future of literary interpretation

• AI, ideology, and critical theory

• Algorithmic discourse and power

• Generative AI and the politics of knowledge production

• Structuralism, post-structuralism, and digital humanities

This seminar seeks to foster interdisciplinary dialogue about how twentieth-century theories of language and culture can illuminate contemporary AI, while also considering how AI may require us to rethink the legacy of structuralism and post-structuralism themselves.