Emancipations Podcast

We are joined by philosopher Terry Pinkard to discuss Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, his second major philosophical work next to Being and Nothingness. Dr. Pinkard is one of the foremost Hegel scholars in the world and he has recently written a book on Sartre's Critique entitled Practice, Power, and Forms of Life: Sartre’s Appropriation of Hegel and Marx. In this discussion, we review th...

Palestine and the Actuality of Struggle: A Forum with the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis & Research (BICAR) Featuring presentations from Nadia Bou Ali, Ray Brassier, Sami Khatib and Maya Andrea Gonzalez. Panel moderated by Daniel Tutt Read the BICAR statement on Palestine: https://bicarlebanon.org

Our guest Mohammed Sulaiman was raised in the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza strip. He has survived multiple Israeli bombings of Gaza over the last two decades, including a 2013 shelling of his home while he was conducting an interview with CNN . Currently, his entire family is in Gaza as Israel continues to unleash a brutal massacre and bombardment campaign on the people of Gaza, which has alre...

The purpose of Marxist theory is not only to diagnose the negative forces and effects of capitalist society; emphasis must also be placed on the need for social transformation that would enhance human progress at the social and individual level. But the trends of current critical and Marxist theory have turned away from a more positive vision of critique. In his later work with the Budapest School...

We are joined by philosopher Anita Zsurzsán and Jamil Khader, the Dean of Research at Bethlehem University in Palestine for a roundtable on the war on Gaza, otherwise known as the "2023 Hamas-Israel war". We discuss the politics of the current war, the status of Islamist politics in Palestine and the region, the role of the media, Islamophobia and Antisemitism, Arab Marxism and the meaning of Pale...

We welcome Tijana Okić back to the show for a discussion on the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch's idea of the warm and cold stream in Marxism. How are we to understand this distinction and which Marxist thinkers fit into these two streams? Can the cold and the warm streams be synthesized?   Tijana Okić is a philosopher, feminist and translator. She completed her Ph. D. in philosophy at the Scuola...

What are the best theoretical frameworks for understanding class politics? Marx offers an understanding of class as tied to relations of productive labor and property ownership in capitalist society. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu offers an understanding of class which goes beyond Marx in many ways, offering a richer and more varied idea of class as a cultural formation that generates a fi...

We are joined by socialist author Darren Roso to discuss his forthcoming book  Daniel Bensaid: From the Actuality of Revolution to the Melancholic Wager which is the first major study of Bensaïd's thought. Daniel Bensaïd completed his Ph. D. on Lenin right as May 68 took off and his work has contributed to contemporary Marxist philosophy and practice in important ways. In this fascinating intervie...

Slavoj Žižek is a provocative intellectual, constantly taking positions on social and political issues that upset convention and lead him to face derision from both the right and the left. Given the often erratic stances that he takes, from his support for the Ukraine war, to Donald Trump in 2016, some have wondered whether the Giant of Ljubljana has lost his way in recent times. We are joined by...

We continue our conversation on the meaning of revolution with C. Derick Varn, by turning to the theoretical basis of "post" Marxist thinkers from the Althusserian school, Laclau and Mouffe, Hardt and Negri and Alain Badiou. We discuss some of the pitfalls of these contemporary Marxist theorists and the basis by which they revise core tenets from Marx. We also discuss new class theories on today's...

Is revolution dead? The left is divided over how to make revolution, and many Marxist and post-Marxist theorists have developed radically new conceptions of revolution that are often highly divergent from how Marx, Engels and Second International Marxists dealt with revolution. Our age is notoriously known as post-revolutionary, and liberal realism has set in so deep that we have seemed to have lo...

Agnes Smedley is an American writer and socialist heroine born in 1892 in Missouri. Her family relocated all across the American west including near the Ludlow Massacre of coal mining workers. Smedley managed to escape the conditions of poverty she was born into and went on to become one of the most important personalities of revolutionary socialism in the first part of the 20th century. Smedley's...

We welcome the brilliant poet and thinker Ali Benziane. Dr. Benziane is an autodidactic philosopher currently working closely with friend of the show, the famous French actor and philosopher Mehdi Belhaj Kacem. We discuss some philosophical and metaphysical perspectives on the post-covid world, looking at Ali's notion of a new mechanism of global power that  he calls "psychopouvoir" (psycho-power)...

We welcome writer and Marxist thinker Richard Seymour back onto the show for a spirited discussion on new currents in Marxist thinking. In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss the contradictions and tensions between the concept of "degrowth communism", coined by eco-socialist thinker Kohei Saito, to another trend in Marxist and socialist thinking which is encapsulated by the name of "neo-Kau...

We are joined by Mary L. Edwards to discuss her new book Sartre's Existential Psychoanalysis: Knowing Others. We discuss Sartre's concept of bad faith, the in-itself and the for-itself and the challenge that his philosophy poses to psychoanalysis. We also discuss Sartre's psychobiographies on Jean Genet and Gustave Flaubert and what these works have to offer to psychoanalytic practice and theory....

In this episode, I expound on Lukács's later work and the meaning of irrationalism. I analyze Marxist reason in contradistinction to neo-Kantian thought and touch on what is most distinctive about philosophy for Marx and Engels and how Marx breaks with both Kant and Hegel. From a Marxist point of view, the practical aim of philosophy is to bring about human freedom and human freedom in capitalist...

We sit down with Doug Greene to discuss his latest work on Stalinism. In this interview, Greene describes who Stalin was, what his role in the Bolshevik movement was and how he came to power. Greene then provides a compelling analysis of different paradigms of how Stalinism has been conceptualized by intellectuals from Arthur Koestler, Jean-Paul Sartre, Antonio Gramsci, to heads of states such as...

We are back! And we changed our podcast name to Emancipations Podcast! In this episode, we are pleased to welcome Marxist thinker John Bellamy Foster to discuss his recent article The New Irrationalism in the Monthly Review ( https://monthlyreview.org/2023/02/01/...) . This article started a conversation on the legacy of Lukács's Destruction of Reason and the role of philosophy in times of imperia...

We are joined by literary critic and actor Christian Lorentzen to discuss the legacy and thought of Christopher Lasch. In this wide-ranging conversation, Lorentzen and host Daniel Tutt discuss Lasch's socialist politics, why he's so often misunderstood by the contemporary left and how he read literature. We assess the reasons why Lasch remains so popular and we touch on the politics of American no...

In 1954 Adorno wrote, "if one were to condense what the ideology of mass culture comes down to into a single sentence, one would have to represent it with the parodic statement: “become what you are.” Adorno offered a series of important lectures on the concept of ideology with Max Horkheimer in the wake of the Second World War. They argued against the liberal sociologists such as Mannheim and Web...

We sit down with philosopher Jensen Suther for a conversation on Lacanian Marxism on today's left.  Jensen Suther earned his PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University and was recently elected as a Junior Fellow to the Harvard Society of Fellows. His forthcoming book, Spirit Disfigured: The Persistence of Freedom in the Modernist Novel, argues against the “lacanian turn” in Marxist theory...

Our final episode for the year! Thank you all for your support this year. In this episode, we sit down with the philosopher Sjoerd van Tuinen to discuss the concept of ressentiment and the politics of resentment. Dr. van Tuinen has many essays on ressentiment and a forthcoming book on the topic. Please pitch in to support us at https://www.patreon.com/torsiongroups  

Kojin Karatani is one of the most interesting and important Marxist philosophers working today. Listen to our conversation about his main ideas...featuring Daniel Tutt and Gabriel Tupinambá. The workshop we held on Karatani's The Structure of World History can be found here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE03jn2k3GYDWu4I9kdRXvq-FXy1vPVkO Support us by joining our Patreon https://www.patreon.c...

What is the Marxist theory of class? Did Marx have a mature class theory in Capital or is Marx's theory of class unfinished and ultimately unclear? Many scholars contend that Marx does not have a clear class theory. But too often Marxists do not offer any alternative to the theory of class, so Marxism ends up with very little to say about class. Our guest in this episode, Raju Das, disagrees with...

We are joined by writer and Marxist thinker Bruno Bosteels to discuss Léon Rozitchner’s Freud and the Limits of Bourgeois Individualism, which Bosteels has recently translated. In this conversation, we discuss Rozitchner's biography, his place within South American Marxism, the key concepts and approach of the text and we end with a consideration of Alain Badiou's thought. Bosteels is the translat...