Episoder
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In this episode, we discuss Theodor Adorno’s essay “Free Time”, in which the critical theorist really lets his cantankerous old man flag fly. He argues that how our subjectivities are shaped by capitalist culture and work discipline makes it very difficult—maybe even impossible—to use our time off the clock in genuinely meaningful ways. Certainly we waste a lot of our precious hours consuming pointless, artless slop and participating in activities just because we feel like we’re supposed to, but is it really the case that everything we do is just unfree pseudo-activity, at best blowing off steam before helplessly getting back to work? We broadly come down on the side of low culture and hobbies, but Marvel movies and Disney adults are definitely cause for concern.
References:
Theodor Adorno, “Free Time”, trans. Gordon Finlayson and Nicholas Walker, in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J.M. Bernstein (New York: Routledge, 2001).
leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil
music:
“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN -
For this very special 100th episode of the show, we set aside a few hours to answer questions submitted by listeners! We livestreamed the session on our YouTube channel, and this is the audio from that recording.
Thanks so much to everyone who submitted questions, to everyone who came to the livestream, and really to any and everyone who’s ever supported the show. We really love doing this, and are so so grateful.
Here’s to 100 more!
leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil
music:
“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN -
Mangler du episoder?
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Some news! We are going to livestream our 100th episode recording session at 1pm Eastern / 12 noon central standard time on our YouTube channel on Sunday October 27th.
We will be answering questions! There's a form on our website's home page where you can submit yours. Tell us what you want to hear about!
We're really looking forward to it. See you soon.
https://www.leftofphilosophy.com
https://www.youtube.com/@whatsleftofphilosophy
Music: Smoke by SoulProdMusic -
In this episode, we discuss the philosopher of science Roy Bhaskar and his essays in Reclaiming Reality. We discuss whether it is possible for the human sciences to overcome the fact/value distinction, what role knowledge has in self-emancipation, and what to do about middle-class surburbanites who would rather watch the world burn than take a hit on their property values. Some highlights include the pod disagreeing on Althusser, Spinoza’s joy saving the day, and settling accounts with the role of the activist-intellectual in contemporary times.
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References:
Roy Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality: A Critical Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2011).
Music:
“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN -
In this episode we take on a Marxist classic, Rosa Luxemburg’s “Reform or Revolution,” in which she skewers Eduard Bernstein for being a feckless opportunist and for relinquishing the goal of socialism. Luxemburg takes on his argument that it’s possible for socialists to take increasing control of the capitalist state and progressively implement reforms that socialize the economy. Best diss track of all time. But don’t worry, we take Bernstein seriously, too. A ghost is haunting twenty-first century socialism, and it may very well be his – To rupture, or not to rupture? That is the question.
This is just a short clip from the full episode, which is available to our subscribers on Patreon:
patreon.com/leftofphilosophy
References:
Rosa Luxemburg, “Reform or Revolution,” in The Essential Rosa Luxemburg (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2007), 41-104.
Music:
“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN -
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.
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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 -
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.
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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 - Se mer
