PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

René Girard is known mainly as someone Peter Thiel mentions in between deranged analogies, but he also wrote some books on some typically French topics such as desire, the symbolic, and anthropological historiography. This is his take on sacrifice from Violence and the Sacred (https://link.amazon/B0aOFZum7).

We ask Cahal Moran what leftists need to get straight on economics, talking through "orthodox" vs. "heterodox" economics, the labour theory of value, Mark Carney, and the AI Bubble.  Visit Unlearning Economics on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4V_jMdRbbTrmBVJB6FDzgw Cahal's Book: https://link.amazon/B0aL5NcCd All podcast episodes at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

Another discourse has hit the timeline. Find all episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills Is health fascism? Is Ozempic Zyklon-B? Should Gabriel Rockhill have to approve every leftist monograph prior to publication? All this and more, in what what was supposed to be the intro to our episode on collective violence

Find all episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills The business press has pushed the "leftist-outsider-dishevelled-genius" about Palantir's CEO Alex Karp for a decade. This episode we explore Karp's relationship with critical theory and the mythmaking that has produced his significance.   NYT pushes the mythology of Alex Karp https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/17/style/alex-karp-palant...

The Pill Pod debates the academic and ethics perspectives' following the terminal end of the Jason Arday plagiarism scandal. 

Ad-free listens (even with no subscription) at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills Stephen Miller and Marco Rubio are calling The Left strange combinatory insults, such as ugly-terrorists and dark-cancers. We review these old signifying chains and Erik introduces Stuart Hall's explanation from last time this happened, when back in the 60s when they said The Left were all gay muggers planning to r...

Socialist are to blame for the Forest Fires. Antifa caused Algae to take over the reflecting pool. Conservatives believe that nature has allied with their enemies to undermine their authority and Western vicilization. We discuss many instances of the opposition of culture/nature in recent news, political theory, and most importantly Twitter discourse. Video essay referenced: https://youtu.be/ZFOSd...

Join for ad-free and more episodes https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills There's only been about a century of structuralism. It had a day, then in the 80s haters celebrated its falloff. But today, the LLMs designed according to the precepts of structuralist linguistics have proven Saussure's intuitions were more accurate than even he could have suspected. We read the argument from Language Machines...

This week we evaluate a paper written by a Google DeepMind engineer which, in effect updates the Chinese Room Thought Experiment (Searle, 1980) to modern LLMs. Get this episode and hundreds more https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

Join for ad-free and more episodes https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills Hubert Dreyfus loved recounting how he was maligned for his AI skepticism, which was informed by applications of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and turned out to be correct as of 2007. Is he still correct in the age of LLMs and self-driving cars? Link to article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S...

All episodes are ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills While many had hoped for a Butlerian Crusade against the thinking machines, the Pope has instead released a lukewarm encyclical asking the mean machine men making automated murder drones to please be nice to us. This episode we evaluate whether Christian Humanism has any juice left. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclica...

More where this came from at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills People have not always had a self, our selves were invented. According to Foucault, our concept of self emerged from religious technologies, genres of writing, and the institutions that perpetuated them. https://amzn.to/4uWyVAg  

Hear our Lasch series at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills After three episodes reading  Culture of Narcissism we conclude that despite a unique perspective, it's way overrated.

jk it's just fake news that duped conservatives yet again. This viral lie claimed that a remote Amazon tribe fell apart the instant they discovered internet pornography, but in the end it says a lot more about us than it does about the Marubos. go to patreon to never miss an episode https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

This week we inspect the latest form of anthropotechnics, its surrounding moral panic, and American Psycho comparisons (Baudrillard was right about everything). Get hundreds of hours more at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

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Find all episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills This week we read Sloterdijk's 1999 "Rules for the Human Zoo" (https://web.stanford.edu/~mvr2j/docs/Elmauer.pdf) which was the source of immediate controversy and accusations of fascism and eugenics. We see what the hype was about. 

Find All Episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/c/plasticpills. We read the eminent  The Gift (https://amzn.to/3NAenx3) by Marcel Mauss which is important to later theorists including Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Derrida. (originally recorded 08/24)

Find All Episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/c/plasticpills. We read Durkheim's Elementary forms of Religious Life (https://amzn.to/4c1ubkB) and try to get a hold on a primordial concept, what for Claude Levi-Strauss exemplifies the floating signifier: it's MANA (originally recorded 08/24).

This is a preview but you can find all our episodes and other work ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills . In this episode we read Sloterdijk's proposal for how to fix Philosophy from The Critique of Cynical Reason.

This is a preview, find all our episodes and other work ad-free at  https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills . In this episode we cover Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason and why Philosophy needs to incorporate disrespect, sacrilege, and fart jokes if it is ever going to be relevant again.

Find all our episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/c/plasticpills Peter Sloterdijk wrote a philosophy bestseller in 1983 called The Critique of Cynical Reason . In this episode, we try to communicate what he means by cynical reason.  https://monoskop.org/images/7/7b/Sloterdijk_Peter_Critique_of_Cynical_Reason.pdf

This is a preview but you can find all our episodes and other work ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills . In this episode we cover the Cynical school of Diogenes and contemporary philosophers in his lineage.

We discuss the proposition of hyperreal fascism as presented in this video essay (https://youtu.be/R9fpm-lorIU) and its relationship to current events and the Trump Administration

Jeffrey Epstein is not primarily known as a philosopher, but his emails illustrate that he had higher ambitions than pedophilia. We explore both the latent and manifest content of Jeffrey Epstein's theorizing, as well as who enabled him, and come to realize that he was the victim of a rare psychotic illness.  Join our patreon to get the epsidoes not posted here https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills