Death Drive Radio

What explains the "madness" of Race? Its excessive and violent intensities? Its tenacious persistence beyond the economic interests of the ruling class? Any serious analysis of Race must take into account its contradictory, libidinal, and bodily aspects (in addition to discursive and economic analysis). To this end, Dr. Hook takes his readers and us on a body-horroresque journey through the nightm...

In this episode we offer an introduction to the Death Drive, starting from Freud's coining of the term, Lacan's contribution to the idea, and ending with its effects on society. The Death Drive is a fundamental psychoanalytic concept that informs so much of our worldview, how lack and excess constitutes us as subjects and our world as we experience it. This concept defines much of what it means to...

In this episode, we’ve invited Dr. Gerald Horne to speak about how the violent domination and exploitation of our colonial past impacts our politics and culture today. Through a discussion of whiteness, colonial history, and capitalist exploitation, we highlight the connections between the 15th century and our present reality. Dr. Horne thoughtfully answers our questions on the history of settler...

In this video we have on Harsha Walia, renown Author, Activist, and Scholar to discuss pertinent issues regarding immigration, borders, and imperialism. Harsha has dedicated her studies and activism to justice for migrants and displaced peoples across the globe. In this interview, she offers invaluable insight into how borders are engineered as a fundamental and necessary feature of capitalism. Bo...

Using Marx's concept, Commodity Fetishism, we aim to answer these questions: Why are we increasingly isolated from each other, only able to relate through markets, objects? Why is production so disconnected from human needs despite our immense production capacity? What is the true cost of “freedom”? Can we be ethical consumers? How does ideology function? In this video, we give an introductory ove...

Our second video on Michel Foucault offers an overview of Michel Foucault's Biopower and Biopolitics. We discuss how, with the rise of capitalism and the state, Biopolitics is employed to control and manage populations. We outline a genealogy of Biopolitics from slavery, settler colonialism, imperialism, and apartheid. Finally, we imagine what a leftist biopolitics would look like.

In this video, we provide an overview of the current conflict in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. We begin with the historical development of the Congolese State and the institutionalization of graft and corruption. We analyze the far-reaching consequences of colonialism and imperialism, chronically ineffective governance, ethnic divides, and the role resources play in the DRC’s devel...

In this video, we speak to Vijay Prashad about the changing material conditions of contemporary imperialism. Vijay sheds light on a number of topics, including Palestine, Donald Trump, NATO, and Ukraine, elaborating on his theory of Hyperimperialism to help us better understand the political economy of the 2020s, obscene military spending, the US-dominated world order, the successes of the right,...

This is a brief introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s notoriously fuzzy concept, the Body Without Organs. We first discuss D&G's unique version of materialism founded on desire and reproduction. We then outline what the Body without Organs is not: Organism, Signification, and Subjectification. To further elucidate the concept, we provide some helpful examples like Genetic Mutation, the Egg, C...

In this video, we will challenge Deleuze and Guattari's theories of Schizophrenia and the Body without Organs using Baudrillard theories of hyperreality and the code to cultivate a better understanding of the system that David occupies in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners . We highlight how cybernetic integration and hyperreality condition David’s schizophrenic process, how David’s acceleration towards cyber...

The anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (2022), directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi, and the broader Cyberpunk universe, created by Mike Pondsmith, is a prime specimen of the cyberpunk genre. Paying close attention to David, the protagonist, we use Cyberpunk to synthesize the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Lacan into a theory of the present moment. This series e...

If you want to understand how witch-hunting and patriarchy contribute to the stratification and repression of the working class, listen to this interview where we speak with feminist historian and philosopher, Silvia Federici, focusing on her book, Caliban and The Witch. Her work focuses on witch-hunting and primitive accumulation as processes that are integral to Capitalism’s historical and conti...

In this interview, we speak with feminist philosopher and psychoanalytic theorist, Alenka Zupančič, focusing on important ideas from her book, What is Sex? Zupančič theorizes about sexual difference and the social construction of sex using the Lacanian psychoanalytic lens to highlight the complex, always unsettled dimensions of sex and sexual difference. She discussed the dialectical relationship...

With Death Drive and Dialectics as our starting point, Zizek takes us on a journey through Hegel, Lacan, Ideology, US Politics, Climate Change, the failures of liberal democracy, leftist politics, data capitalism, neoliberalism, fascism, sexuality and so much more, in classic Zizek fashion

In this video we discuss one of Lacan's most significant contributions to psychoanalysis and the study of ideology: Objet a. Objet a, or the Object Cause of Desire, forces us to rethink the formal status of desire not only as it pertains to our personal lives, but also to those systems of control which have developed to manipulate and exploit our relationship to desire. Understanding Objet a can h...

In this video, we bring on Professor Todd McGowan, Host of Why Theory podcast with Ryan Engley, and author of many excellent books, including his most recent one: Enjoyment Right and Left. During the interview, we discuss his new book and theorize with Professor McGowan on contemporary US politics. We touch on events such as the January 6th Insurrection, George Floyd Protests, mass shootings and g...

In this video, we discuss Hegel’s philosophy of dialectics, common misconceptions, and how Hegel’s dialectic can help leftists systemically critique ideology and power. If you learn one thing from this fucking video it is that dialectics is not thesis, antithesis, and synthesis!!!!!

Part of our series on psychoanalytic concepts, this video outlines the basics of the unconscious, briefly examining Freud and Lacan's contributions to its definition. Short, but sweet.

Theses: Pure Good and Pure Evil are, in a sense, interchangeable. The "Law" needs its violation as much as the violation needs the "Law". The usual, dualistic interpretation (Good and Evil) sees Batman and the Joker (Kant and Sade) as opposites whose ethical incompatibility brings them into conflict. However, Lacan wants us to think about the relation between Kant and Sade dialectically. We use a...

We recording this during Trump's first term in office intrigued by Trump's immunity to the vicissitudes of scandal and unsatisfied with the liberal "Trump Bad" critique. While in ways out of date, our analysis still contains plenty of insights into the hyperreal political machine that created and nurtured Donald Trump. "In this video, we go beyond mainstream liberal critiques of Trump using Jean B...

Our first video with visuals! Sit down, get some popcorn, and watch this feature-length deep dive into US history that lays out the essential function of policing: To Serve and Protect Property. In this video, we critique police reform from an abolitionist standpoint using a critical history of the police and which explores the police's development within capitalism and the nation-state. We trace...

In this video, we contextualize some of Gilles Deleuze’s most important ideas from “Postscripts on the Societies of Control”: Financialization, Corporatization, Digitalization, Consumerism, and the Internet. Thirty years have passed since its publication, yet its predictions and insights remain incredibly relevant and demand to be read by anyone wanting to understand our current moment. However, n...

What is the looting of a store compared to generations of corporate plunder and systemic looting brought to bear on black communities? Slavoj Zizek's Violence is a lesson in framing and the reactionary moralization that relies on poor framing. In this video, we use Slavoj Zizek’s book Violence to analyze and debunk the widely circulated, reactionary discourse on the George Floyd protest. We highli...

The taker of many a undergrad's Critical Theory virginity, Michel Foucault has armed countless sons and daughters with the intellectual alibi needed to be all the more insufferable at Thanksgiving. Jokes aside, reading Foucault and understanding his definition of power, its history, relations, and technologies, are essential for developing a systemic critique of modern society. His framework allow...

Behold! The first video we ever shared. No visuals. No edits. Audio that sounds like it was recorded at the bottom of a well. Still great content and it only gets better. We analyze Luis Althusser’s magnum opus, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, giving biographical and philosophical context to Althusser’s important contributions to the study of ideology. We give a few examples of how Alt...