Acid Horizon

Members and friends of Acid Horizon meet with Stuart Kendall to discuss the work of 20th century writer Georges Bataille. Bataille is a unique figure in French thought whose work spans various milieus from literature to politics. As an opponent of fascism, liberalism, and the real-existing communism of his day, he and his associates endeavored to found a new politics which drew together disparate...

On this episode Craig, Will, Matt, and Adam take a close look at Gilles Deleuze's essay "Immanence: A Life", one of his final writings in which he describes immanence as a 'transcendental field'. Deleuze makes use of a lesser known work by Charles Dickens entitled “The Same Respected Friend in More Aspects Than One", casting the events of the story as a paradigmatic e...

On this episode we're going to be looking at the work of Aime Césaire, focusing on his 1950 work Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire was a Martinician poet and communist politician who was one of the leading figures in the emancipatory movements of the French-speaking colonial sphere, as well as a poetic voice central to the cultivation of contemporary forms of radical political blackness. In t...

In this episode, the cast is joined by Noah, patron and reading group participant. Together we unpack Deleuze and Guattari's concept of 'nomadology' or 'nomadism' as it is laid out in A Thousand Plateaus and in other areas of their work. We invite you to join our future discussions! To become a member of the A Thousand Plateaus  reading group, simply navigate to our Patreo...

Terms like 'simulation' and 'hyperreal' are sometimes bandied about with respect to our experience of media--but what is the structure of these concepts as Baudrillard lays them out? Moreover, how can we use these concepts to make sense of the present global crises? Craig, Will, and Adam are joined by Cooper from Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour to tackle these questions. Machin...

On today’s episode of Acid Horizon, we are joined by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Rae Armantrout to discuss her most recent collection of poetry entitled Finalists . We discussed the often explicitly philosophical dimension of Rae’s writing, particularly as it relates to notions of consciousness, cybernetics, and psychoanalysis. Finalists is now out from Wesleyan press. You can purchase the book us...

In this episode, we close out our set of engagements on pedagogy and the contemporary student experience. This time, we are joined by Vernon Cisney, a professor and the author and editor of several books on Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, and others, and his student, Ryder. Of course, each of them provides an account of the various encounters that led them to philosophical work – but this discussion r...

This is your Inner Experience, and today we’re joined by Eden, editor-in-chief over at the HeavyBlogisHeavy and cohost of the Death//Sentence Podcast to discuss the theory, phenomenology, and fictional contours of Magic Realism as an abundance of everyday meaning. For this we read Eden’s essay 'On The Radical Escapism of Magic Realism, or, How to Become a God in Late Capitalism', looking...

Acid Horizon and Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour team up for a Q&A. Subscribe to Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/muhh Subscribe to Acid Horizon on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/acidhorizonpodcast Merch: http://www.crit-drip.com Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/169wvvhi Zer0 Books YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/Zer0Books H...

On this episode, we wrap up on our first A Thousand Plateaus reading group by discussing The Rhizome with Sam, one of attendees. We talk about the perspectives of rhizomatic vs tree-like forms of connective and semiotic structures, using paradigmatic examples from Chomskyan linguistics, Frank Herbert's Dune, and the dynamics of music and genre formation. We explain what Deleuze and Guattari m...

On this episode, the gang takes a look at Antonio Negri’s and Felix Guattari’s 1985 cowritten essay, “Communists Like US”. Guattari and Negri take a look at the state of socialist governmentality and examine the causes of the failure of the worker movement in Italy in the late seventies. The outlook seems bleak, but in these developments Negri and Guattari identify various communist potentialities...

On this episode of Inner Experience we welcome in 2022 with our friend Chuck LeBlanc, a psychotherapist based in Canada and host of the Couch to Couch podcast, to talk about his therapeutic practice. Chuck takes us through his influences from the Positive Psychologist Carl Rogers to Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead, and explains the methods of an inclusive and empathetic therapeutic appro...

On this episode, we are joined by listener and philosophy student Rique to discuss his academic experience. We follow Rique through his intellectual and personal development as a student of philosophy. He discusses the importance of the relationships he’s developed with faculty and the process of applying to graduate programs. Also on the docket for this discussion are student life in philosophy a...

On this episode of Acid Horizon we are joined by Jason Read, a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern Maine, to discuss one of his essays on Spinoza and Marx. The title is 'The Order and Connection of Ideology Is the Same as the Order and Connection of Exploitation', and will appear in his forthcoming book Double Shift. In it, Read assesses two contemporary French theorist...

On this episode of Acid Horizon, we're joined by Professor Gary Genosko to discuss essays from Machinic Eros, a collection of Felix Guattari's writings and interviews from this cultural exchange trips to Japan. We explore notions of machinic value and machinic enslavement, as well as control societies and Guattari's enthusiasm for the Free Radio Movement. We also go into some of Gua...

Fresh back from a brief hiatus last month, the Acid Horizon crew kick things off with the latest edition of Answers without Organs. In this episode Craig, Will, Matt, and Adam answer queries from patrons and twitter followers on such topics as: the use of psychoanalysis in political thought today, the meaning of philosophizing, getting critical theory work out there, Hardt and Negri on the Multitu...

In this short episode, Adam reads his text "Demos, Kratos, Autos, Nomos: A Fragmentary Expenditure" in which he ruminates on the etymological origins of democracy, law, and of the power of people, distinct from its reification as 'The People', which grounds the notion of representative political institutions. Adam invites us to consider the distinction between the power of peop...

On this Halloween episode of Inner Experience, Craig, Will, and Adam are joined by Ted Hand ( @t3dy ), a researcher in and practitioner of the Tarot and related Esoteric matters of theory who hosts the series Tarot for the Soulless Materialist and Esoteric Beat. Ted joins the Inner Experience crew to explain the history of the tarot, its philosophical implications as a system of symbolism and  int...

Today we’re joined by Dr Terry D. Thomson to discuss his work on Kant’s final, most esoteric, and most understudied philosophical work—his “chief achievement” as he called it—the Opus Postumum. This text is Kant’s attempt to radicalize his own philosophical process, rending the project of his three critiques from their ossifications as dogmas, and opening up a new space for the philosophy of exper...

On this special Halloween episode of Acid Horizon, we're joined by Dr Jonathan Greenaway, whom you may know as the Youtube Video Essayist The Lit Crit Guy. Jon is also the cohost of the Horror Vanguard Podcast, and recent author of  the text Theology, Horror and Fiction out on Bloomsbury press. Today, Jon joins us to discuss the prospects for a 'Gothic' Marxism, one that recognizes...

In this episode, Craig, Will, Matt, and Adam are joined by University of Vermont Professor Todd McGowan to discuss Hegel's concept of contradiction as he lays it out in his book, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution. Throughout the latter part of the 20th century, Hegel's philosophy came to bear the stigma of a totalizing system responsible for seeing an era of...

On this episode of Acid Horizon, Craig, Will, and Adam have the privilege of being joined by Jules Joanne Gleeson, a theorist, comedian, historian, and contributor to recent Transgender Marxism collection, which she co-edited with fellow theorist and political economist Elle O’Rourke. Jules joins us today not only to discuss the project of a Transgender Marxism, as well as her essay in the collect...

In this episode, Will and Adam are joined by Sasha Warren from unsoundmind.org to discuss the work of critical psychiatrist R.D. Laing, focusing on the first part of his book "The Divided Self" and its notion of the ontological insecurity of the schizophrenic mode of experience. We explore Laing's phenomenological method, his formulations of the self's anxiety about its being,...

On this episode, Craig and Will are joined by John Protevi to discuss his latest book, Edges of the State . Protevi challenges dominant notions in anthropological research and other human sciences with anarchic perspective informed by theorists such as Pierre Clastres, Gilles Deleuze, James C. Scott, and others. Central to our discussion is the question of how our historical understanding of human...

This is your Inner Experience. On this episode we’re finally going through the text that inspired the origin of this show; George Bataille’s Torture, from his book ‘Inner Experience’. Craig, Will, and Adam sketch out the terminological landscape of Bataille’s project, tackling such concepts as ‘Salvation’ ‘Impossibility’, ‘Divinity’, ‘Sacrifice’, ‘Non-Knowledge’, ‘Ecstasy’, ‘Anguish’, and much mor...