Episoder
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In this episode we take up the question: what is the State? With 1978’s State, Power, Socialism by Nicos Poulantzas as our guide, we talk about what it means to grasp the state as a historically specific form inseparable from the economy, find ourselves torn between the mutual dissatisfactions of Althusser and Foucault, and ask whether it is even possible to conceptualize ‘the capitalist state’ as such. Doing so might be necessary for political strategic reasons, but O, abstraction! Along the way we give some of our favorite French thinkers a bit of a hard time. It’s meant with love. Mostly.
patreon.com/leftofphilosophy
References:
Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, trans. Patrick Camiller, with an introduction by Stuart Hall (New York: Verso, 2014)
Music:
“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN -
In this episode we talk about the weird little unfinished utopian novel The New Atlantis, written by founding enlightenment figure Francis Bacon. We talk about his fetish for differential novelty, his understanding and valorization of knowledge production, and his ambivalent status as a pivotal figure between medieval and modern science. He’s right that European rationality is sickly, but what can orgiastic science deliver for utopian consciousness? Not clear! But it definitely would be cool to be able to make meteors and multiply natural forms.
This is just a short clip from the full episode, which is available to our subscribers on Patreon:
patreon.com/leftofphilosophy
References:
Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis, in Bacon et. al., Three Early Modern Utopias (New York: Oxford, 2009)
Music:
“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN -
Manglende episoder?
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In this episode, we discuss the educational philosophy of the American pragmatist John Dewey. Focusing on his 1938 treatise Experience & Education we explore questions concerning the ends of education, what it means to be an effective educator, and the relationship between experience and history. Dewey advocates for a form of education that focuses less on knowledge accumulation and more on cultivating the capacities of students for freedom through the enrichment of their experience. Other topics include Dewey’s controversial naturalism, the tension between Deweyan pragmatism and Marxist social theory, and finally why the traditional lecture still has a lot to recommend it!
patreon.com/leftofphilosophy | @leftofphil
References:
John Dewey, Experience & Education (New York: Free Press, 2015)
John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin Books, 2005)
Music:
“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN -
In this episode, we discuss the contributions of political theorist Norman Geras to socialist debates about revolutionary ethics, movement democracy, and justice. He argues for a right to revolution, but that there’s a difference between political and social revolution, and that this difference tells us something about which ends justify which means. Other topics include state theory, dual power, and the role that Marxism can play in social movements today.
patreon.com/leftofphilosophy
References:
Norman Geras, “Our Morals: The Ethics of Revolution,” Socialist Register 25(1989): 185-211.
Norman Geras, “Democracy and the Ends of Marxism,” New Left Review 1(203)(1994): 92-106.
Norman Geras, “Human Nature and Progress,” New Left Review 1(213): 151-160.
Music:
“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN -
In this episode, we talk about the late, great Charles Mills and his landmark book The Racial Contract. Forcefully arguing that the modern discourse of egalitarianism and freedom is underwritten by a tacit commitment to global white supremacy, Mills develops an immanent criticism of liberalism that remains faithful to many of its core values. We discuss the limits and promises of liberal universalism, the potential reform of contractarian logic, and whether white people really mean it when they say they want to abolish whiteness. Rest in peace to a really real one.
This is just a short clip from the full episode, which is available to our subscribers on Patreon:
patreon.com/leftofphilosophy
References:
Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
Music:
“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN -
In this episode, we discuss Robert Nozick’s libertarian political philosophy as presented in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. We consider his challenges to leftist thought, especially the sort of left liberalism championed by the likes of John Rawls. We take seriously his demand for an argument for egalitarianism and his critique of patterned accounts of distributive justice. But we also give him a hard time for some of his more absurd arguments, from those about swimming pools to those concerning wealthy basketball players and the all-important human need to feel like a very special boy. When it comes to libertarianism, this is in fact them sending their best.
leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil
References:
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).
Music:
“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN -
In this episode, we tackle the concept of violence as it appears in the revolutionary and anticolonial work of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Throughout the episode we link together Fanon’s endorsement of revolutionary violence against colonial domination with his work as a psychiatrist. How could Fanon argue for the necessity of violence while bearing witness to its regressive effects on both those who suffer violence and those who deploy it? What makes the revolutionary violence of the colonized qualitatively distinct from the violence of colonizers? Finally, what can Fanon's dialectic of violence tell us today? This episode casts Fanon as both revolutionary and care worker and explores the tensions and resonances between the need for freedom and the costs of struggle.
leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil
References:
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004).
Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1965).
Frantz Fanon, Œuvres (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2011).
Frantz Fanon, Alienation and Freedom, eds. Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).
Music:
“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN
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In this episode, we are joined by Jeff Diamanti to discuss what it looks like to watch the climate change. Our conversation shifts from analytical, aesthetic, and political perspectives, as we turn our attention from critical raw materials to the future cartographies already being carved out. We explore Jeff’s notion of the terminal as the kind of space where capitalism abstracts matter and value becomes concrete. As it turns out, there’s more to see in the logistics than philosophers might think, from indigenous resistance and sabotage to a possible world of sustainable provision.
leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil
References:
Jeff Diamanti, “Critical Raw Materials,” in Worlding Ecologies (2024), 135-43.
Jeff Diamanti, Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum (Bloomsbury, 2021).
Charmaine Chua, Martin Danyluk, Deborah Cohen, and Laleh Khalili, “Turbulent Circulation: Building a Critical Circulation with Logistics,” Society and Space 36(4)(2018): 617-629.
Music:
“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN -
In this episode, we discuss essays from throughout G.A. Cohen’s philosophical career. Cohen is known as one of the founders of Analytical Marxism, so we talk about what this tradition in Marxist thinking is about and how it handles the problems of political let-down and disillusionment that affect us all. We also get into his polemics against the libertarians and John Rawls in his essays on exploitation, freedom, and justice.
This is just a short clip from the full episode, which is available to our subscribers on Patreon:
patreon.com/leftofphilosophy
References:
G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
G.A. Cohen, “The Labor Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 8(4)(1979): 338-360.
G.A. Cohen, “The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 12(1)(1983): 3-33.
G.A. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
Nicholas Vrousalis, The Political Philosophy of G.A. Cohen (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
Music:
“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN -
In this episode, we are joined by Alberto Toscano to talk about his analysis of contemporary far-right movement and ideology. We discuss his new book Late Fascism and consider the strategic and rhetorical downsides of analogizing the present moment to past instantiations of fascist politics in Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. We try to get a grip on what distinguishes contemporary fascism, why liberal discourse’s fixation on ‘totalitarianism’ fails to grasp the specificity of fascism, and ask what Black and third-world scholars can teach us on this score.
leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil
References:
Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (New York: Verso, 2023).
Music:
“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN -
In this episode, we are joined by Ajay Chaudhary to discuss his book The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World and the political, economic, and affective sites of exhaustion reproduced through climate degradation. We examine the expanding colonial relations of what Chaudhary calls the “extractive circuit” between the both the Global South and Global North as well as widening segments of the working classes in the Global North. We dispel fantasies of both the hope that climate change will automatically unify a coherent politics for a just transition and the fear of a human apocalypse. Given this, what would a left-wing climate realism look like as opposed to burgeoning forms of right-wing climate realism that aims to extract and protect as much wealth as possible for a vanishingly small minority? Much of our conversation concerns the role of temporality in our politics and the imperative not to wait for the future to solve our climate crises. Turns out waiting for Greta Thunberg to solve all our problems is a poor strategy!
leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil
thebrooklyninstitute.com | @materialist_jew
References:
Ajay Singh Chaudhary, “We’re Not in This Together,” The Baffler (2020) https://thebaffler.com/salvos/were-not-in-this-together-chaudhary
Ajay Singh Chaudhary, The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World (London: Repeater Books, 2024).
Music:
“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN -
In this episode, we are joined by Matt McManus to discuss his research into the history and philosophy of right-wing politics in his book The Political Right and Equality. We discuss the nature of conservatism as an irrationalist reaction to modernist ideas about human egalitarianism, the rhetorical strategies of the right, and the historical conditions under which moderate conservatism turns over into extremist fascist reaction. We pay special attention to Edmund Burke’s aestheticization of politics and Joseph De Maistre’s formula for presenting conservative ideology as punk-rock counterculture rather than the argumentatively weak status-quo apologia it really is. It pays to know your enemy, comrades.
leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil
References:
Matt McManus, The Political Right and Equality: Turning Back the Tide of Egalitarian Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2023).
Matt McManus, “Liberal Socialism Now,” Aeon (2024). https://aeon.co/essays/the-case-for-liberal-socialism-in-the-21st-century
Music:
“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN -
In this episode we delve into Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself, an illuminating book from 2005 that examines subject-formation and the relationship between the self, other people, and the normative social order. We reconstruct Butler’s efforts to ground a philosophical ethics with positive claims in the insights of three theoretical traditions that have generally been understood to frustrate moral philosophy: post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. Our core focus is the question of whether Butler’s conceptions of the ‘relationality’ and ‘opacity’ of the human self can do the kind of ethical heavy lifting that they claim.
This is just a short clip from the full episode, which is available to our subscribers on Patreon:
patreon.com/leftofphilosophy
References:
Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).
Music:
“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN -
In this episode, we talk with Manon Garcia about the problem of women’s submissiveness in feminist philosophy. Then we discuss longstanding feminist criticisms of the concept of consent, what we want from consent in the first place, and what it could mean in the future. And we wonder if the reason it’s so hard to talk about sex in philosophy is that we don’t really think about it philosophically enough, which is too bad, since as it turns out, good sex is an integral part of the good life.
leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil
References:
Manon Garcia, We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women’s Lives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021).
Manon Garcia, The Joy of Consent: A Philosophy of Good Sex (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2023).
Music:
“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN -
In this episode, we return to the work of Ernst Bloch and his theory concerning “aesthetic genius” and the possibility of the red sublime. Bloch attempts to construct a Marxist account of art that can explain how it is possible for aesthetic objects to provoke experiences of beauty and sublimity long after the historical conditions of their genesis have passed. Bloch thinks certain artworks contain a utopian surplus that beckons for a not-yet existing classless society. In other words, Bloch thinks we can inherit the knowledge of the real possibility of communism from the history of class domination and catastrophe. Join us as we try to make sense of these claims, dunk on the idea of art as “resistance,” and even try (in vain) to get Gil to experience the sublime!
leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil
References:
Ernst Bloch, “Ideas as Transformed Material in Human Minds, or Problems of an Ideological Superstructure (Cultural Heritage) (1972)” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988), 18-71.
Filippo Menozzi, "Inheriting Marx: Daniel Bensaïd, Ernst Bloch and the Discordance of Time” in Historical Materialism 28, 1 (2020): 147-182.
Stuart Hall, “Marx’s Notes on Method: A ‘Reading’ of the ‘1857 Introduction’ [1974]” in Selected Writings on Marxism, ed. Gregor McLennan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 19-62.
Music:
“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN -
In this episode, we dig into the Doctrine of Right in Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals to see what he has to say about the state. Turns out he’s a fan, because the state is what guarantees the possibility of justice and perpetual peace. Nice! But he also thinks that the state should be authorized to kill you. And that you don’t have the right to rebel even if the sovereign is abusing their power. And that you shouldn’t think too hard about the origin of the state. And that human beings are transcendentally disposed to malevolent violence toward each other? So let’s call this a mixed bag, maybe.
leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil
References:
Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Music:
“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN -
In this episode, we talk about David Harvey’s analysis of the urbanization process as a form of accumulated surplus capital expenditure and consider the built environment as a crucial site of class struggle. The physical constitution of the built environment in which we live mediates our forms of sociality and political dispositions, not to mention how important it is for making mass action and organization possible. So it sure sucks that the shape of its development has been determined by the needs of capital rather than those of human flourishing for a few hundred years now! Oh, and we’re really mean to the suburbs, too.
This is just a short clip from the full episode, which is available to our subscribers on Patreon:
patreon.com/leftofphilosophy
References:
David Harvey, “The urban process under capitalism: a framework for analysis.” In Urbanization and Urban Planning in Capitalist Society, eds. Michael Dear and Allen Scott (London: Routledge, 1981).
David Harvey, “The Right to the City.” New Left Review 53 (Sept/Oct 2008). https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii53/articles/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city
Music:
“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN -
In this nonstandard episode, Gil and Owen are joined by Michael Peterson to talk about how dreadful utilitarianism is, consider some of the offers that folks have made to come guest on the show, and reflect on how deeply unimpressive LLMs are when it comes to actually taking a position. Just having some fun with it! Video of the recording is available to our supporters on Patreon.
leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil
References:
National Council on Disability, Response to Singer
https://ncd.gov/newsroom/04232015
münecat, "Sovereign Citizens: Pseudolaw & Disorder":
https://youtu.be/KcxZFmKrxR8?si=s3Xu_nH7dS6NkrWd
music:
Vintage Memories by Schematist | https//schematist.bandcamp.com
Connect by Astrale | https://go-stream.link/sp-astrale
START OVER by HYMN | https://get.slip.stream/g3FFTJ
My Space by Overu | https://go-stream.link/sp-overu -
In this episode, we are joined by George Washington University Associate Professor Vanessa Wills to discuss her article “What Could It Mean to Say, ‘Capitalism Causes Sexism and Racism’?” We try to figure out why critics badly understand the Marxist concept of causation as it concerns identity-based oppression, why labor and production provide the conditions of possibility for science, and whether the abolition of capitalism would automatically mean the end of racism and sexism (no, but it sure would help!). And as a treat, Hegel shows up to school us on the appearance/essence distinction!
leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil
References:
Vanessa Wills, “What Could It Mean to Say, ‘Capitalism Causes Sexism and Racism?’” Philosophical Topics 46 no. 2 (2018): 229-246.
Music:
Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com -
In this episode we get the Perry Anderson treatment and ask if we philosophers are the problem with how Western Marxism has evolved over time. We discuss what Anderson calls the formal and thematic shifts that happened within this theoretical tradition once the philosophers got in the driver’s seat. Partly ethnographic, partly analytical, and a little more meta-philosophical than usual. We hope you’ll indulge us this once as we ask ourselves what the hell we’re doing.
leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil
References:
Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso Books, 1979).
Music:
Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com - Vis mere
