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Welcome to The Archimedean Point, a new series on the current political situation from a Marxist perspective. In our second episode, Daniel Tutt and Conrad Hamilton discuss the inadequacies of left-liberal accounts of racism and bigotry and why only a Marxist analysis can address the ideology of the far right. We also discuss new work by Daniel on Michel Clouscard and his book Neo-Fascism and the Ideology of Desire and Conrad's new essay in the book After Speculative Realism.

Episode One of The Archimedean Point can be found here (https://youtu.be/kTjaIm0XmZU?si=5cHD0k4gjnMsMGPT)

The Archimedean Point is a reference to a concept from Lukács's History and Class Consciousness that refers to "the point from which the whole of reality can be overthrown."

SHOWNOTES:

• The Social Formation of the Far Right https://bit.ly/3XSpR0B
• Neo-Fascism and the Ideology of Desire https://bit.ly/41jfkfL
• After Speculative Realism https://bit.ly/4ckRup4

Welcome to a special crossover podcast discussion on Michael Mann's first major feature film Thief (1981). While Michael Mann is best known for films like HEAT and Last of the Mohicans, Thief is by far his most political film. The film explores themes of labor, exploitation, class and the inner lives of criminals and convicts. We discuss the Marxist and Freudian undertones in this great masterpiece of cinema.

This conversation is hosted by Mtume Gant, filmmaker, professor and host of Within Our Gates podcast and Daniel Tutt, philosopher and host of the Emancipations podcast. 

Please support us at https://www.patreon.com/c/emancipations

Please support Within Our Gates at https://www.patreon.com/c/Tumes/home 

I am joined by K. Daniel Cho to discuss his provocative new book Genius After Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan which argues that genius is not exceptional talent or intelligence but is related to and illuminated by the psychological concept of sublimation. Beginning with a close examination of Freud's work on Leonardo da Vinci, Cho analyzes film, art, our relationship to nature, politics, group psychology, love, and philosophy to demonstrate that genius, far from an elitist notion, is universally available through a different approach to ideas of imperfection, disappointment, and failure. Learn more about the book.

K. Daniel Cho is Professor of Education at Otterbein University in Columbus, USA. He works on psychoanalysis in a variety of disciplinary contexts. He is the author of Psychopedagogy: Freud, Lacan, and the Psychoanalytic Theory of Education and coeditor of Marcuse’s Challenge to Education.

My guest is Dr. Immanuel Ness, one of the foremost scholars of contemporary imperialism, workers’ social organization, Global South political economy, socialism and migration. We discuss the concept of economic imperialism in today's time and how the theory of imperialism has changed since the time of Lenin. We also discuss the theory of the labor aristocracy in Marxist thought, whether China is truly a socialist country and the status of working class struggles in China compared to America.

Immanuel Ness is an American academic, and Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York, Brooklyn, School of Humanities and Social Sciences. His academic focus is on workers' organization, migration, mobilization and politics. His latest book is entitled Migration as Economic Imperialism: How International Labour Mobility Undermines Economic Development in Poor Countries and is published with Polity Press. Learn more about our work and join our community at https://www.patreon.com/c/torsiongroups

I am joined by the philosopher Mladen Dolar, one of the most important Lacanian philosophers working today. A founder of the Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis, Mladen Dolar has written important works on Hegel, Marx and numerous works on Lacanian thought. In this podcast, we discuss his experience studying with Lacan in Paris and the legacy of the 1960s on today's politics. We then turn to a discussion of Dolar's new book Rumors, a philosophical essay on the persistent problem of rumors from the time of Socrates to the present.

We examine how Socrates, Rousseau, Kafka and Kierkegaard each faced the problem of rumors and sought to overcome the stain of rumors on philosophy. Dolar writes that “rumors present another face of the big other, not the face of knowledge and truth but something that nobody quite believes to be true yet it unfailingly works and is given a questionable credence and general currency.” Learn more about Mladen Dolar's new book https://amzn.to/4b7WlJJ

I am joined by political theorist Jodi Dean to discuss her provocative new book Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle. Jodi Dean is one of the most vocal proponents of the "neofeudal thesis", the idea that capitalism has regressed to a neofeudal arrangement characterized by the delinking of capitalist accumulation from production, the end of competition, rent-seeking, predation and plunder. No longer can Marxists rely on a developmentalist theory of capitalism and a proletariat tied to productive labor as the means to abolishing capitalism. Dean argues that we must completely re-think the proletariat and that the global service sector points the way to a renewal of working class agitaiton and revolutionary activity.

Jodi Dean is a political theorist and professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York state. Her books include The Communist Horizon, Crowds and Party, Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging , Blog Theory and several others. Please check out Capital's Grave and order a copy here.

Join our Patreon to gain access to our interviews before they go live to the public and become a member of our study group collective where we read important books in Marxist thought and philosophy https://www.patreon.com/c/torsiongroups 

My guest Russell Jacoby is credited with coining the concept "public intellectual." He has written extensively on socialism in America, western Marxism and Freudian Marxism. We begin with a discussion of his criticism of Domenico Losurdo's recently translated work Western Marxism, we then discuss his recent Jacobin article "American Marxism Got Lost on Campus", the work of Christopher Lasch (Jacoby's Ph.D. advisor) and how Marxism can become "plain" again. Jacoby offers advice for Marxist scholars and writer to better reach the public and transcend academic specialization.

Russell Jacoby is the author of seven books including The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, Dogmatic Wisdom: How the Culture Wars Divert Education and Distract America and Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism. He is Emeritus professor of History at UCLA.

We welcome socialist thinker and writer Nicolas D. Villarreal for a discussion on the thought of Louis Althusser, and how to navigate the political and ideological problems of the petty bourgeoisie. We begin with a discussion into whether professionals qualify as a class and what their precise function is for the perpetuation of the bourgeois state. Villarreal takes the view that professionals do not constitute a class but that they rather play an ideological function. This conversation clarifies many outstanding debates on today's left around how to understand the PMC, the working class, the function of the state, and how the state controls and represses the citizenry.

Nicolas D. Villarreal is the founder of the CASPER Forum, Palladium Magazine contributor, a contributor to Cosmonaut Magazine and he is the author of the novel “Caeruleus”, two time winner of the Howard Scammon Drama Prize. He is a graduate of the College of William and Mary specializing in Government and Economics. Subscribe to Nicolas' Substack A Pre-History of an Encounter at (https://nicolasdvillarreal.substack.com).

My guest Michael A. McCarthy joins me to discuss his critique of "class abstractionism" or the tendency to theorize the working class in ways that result in vulgar and reductive conclusions. While McCarthy directs his critique to Vivek Chibber and his work The Class Matrix, we also discuss class abstractionism more broadly and how it appears on today's left. We speculate on ways to better theorize class while remaining critical of left-liberal identity politics. McCarthy, along with co-author Mathieu Hikaru Desan published their critique of class abstractionism in Sociological Theory, “The Problem of Class Abstractionism" in 2023. McCarthy is a critical sociologist and his work is on class structure and class formation. He explores the past and possible futures of radical economic democracy. McCarthy is faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz and he is the author, most recently of The Master’s Tools published January 2025 with Verso Books. Learn more about the book here.

I have invited Chris Cutrone onto the show for a critical debate and discussion on our differences regarding Marxism in America, imperialism, interpretations of Nietzsche and the meaning of the left. Chris Cutrone is not someone that I agree with in matters of Marxism, but we have talked past each other for several years now and we have decided to talk out our differences directly, without a third party mediator.

One of my objectives in this discussion is to model the type of public debate that I think we need more of on the left. While Chris Cutrone is not someone that I agree with on hardly anything, his presence on the Marxist left is inescapable and it is important that we have the chance to confront our differences in the open air of the public, without control or censor.

Chris Cutrone is a college educator, writer, and media artist, committed to critical thinking and artistic practice and the politics of social emancipation. He is the original lead organizer and chief pedagogue of the Platypus Affiliated Society.

Please welcome Jacques Rancière to the Emancipations podcast. In the unlikely event you are not aware of the work of Jacques Rancière, he is seemingly impossible to classify as a thinker. He emerges from the May 68 moment, a student of Althusser who broke from his teacher and went on to develop some of the most uniquely inspiring works on emancipatory politics, aesthetics and most interestingly, he wrote a series of works on proletarian intellectuals in the 19th century.

I ask Jacques Rancière whether the seeming decline in ‘master philosophers’ from the time of French Theory is a good thing, and what a master philosopher is for him. I ask him what he thinks of the working-class today and its fragmented status. I ask him how we should assess the defeat of left-populism and what he thinks of Laclau and Mouffe and Hardt and Negri and other post-Marxist theorists of “radical democracy.”

I ask him if he thinks our time resembles the pre-1848 period wherein class antagonisms were rampant but the working-class was unorganized. Read this interview on my Substack (https://danieltutt.substack.com).

Please support my efforts to bring you these discussions by becoming a Patron on Patreon. As a Patron you will receive early access to all of my interviews and public seminars (https://www.patreon.com/c/torsiongroups). 

We are joined by Marxist philosophers Vanessa Wills and Daniel Tutt for a discussion moderated by Sam Greenhouse. This in-person podcast event delves into the philosophy of Marx and how Marx's thought relates to the ongoing quest for freedom in today’s world. We discuss Marx's Ethical Vision, Vanessa's important new book on Marx.

Please join us on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/c/torsiongroups) to support our efforts.

We welcome Branko Milanović for a discussion on inequality and Marxism and his latest book Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War. A sweeping and original history of how economists across two centuries have thought about inequality, told through portraits of six key figures.

Branko Milanovic obtained his Ph.D. in economics (1987) from the University of Belgrade with a dissertation on income inequality in Yugoslavia. He served as lead economist in the World Bank’s Research Department for almost 20 years, leaving to write his book on global income inequality, Worlds Apart (2005). He was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington (2003-2005) and has held teaching appointments at the University of Maryland (2007-2013) and at Johns Hopkins University (1997- 2007). He was a visiting scholar at All Souls College in Oxford, and Universidad Carlos III in Madrid (2010-11). His book The Haves and the Have-nots (2011) was selected by The Globalist as the 2011 Book of the Year. Global Inequality (2016) was awarded the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the best political book of 2016 and the Hans Matthöfer Prize in 2018, and was translated into 16 languages. It addresses economic and political effects of globalization and introduces the concept of successive “Kuznets waves” of inequality. His most recent books are Capitalism, Alone, published in 2019, and Visions of Inequality, published in 2023

We are joined by Dr. Gerald Horne for a discussion on the meaning of the American Revolution and his extensive scholarship on re-assessing 1776 as a "counterrevoluton." At the heart of this discussion is the political and practical question for socialist politics in our time, namely: what is salvageable from 1776, and what is not? How do we read history from a materialist point of view?

Dr. Horne's scholarship traces the social forces that brought about the rebellion of 1776 back farther than most historians of the American Revolution have done, by showing how the international forces went to shape the early settlers in relationship to the threat of slave rebellions and resistance. Horne's work also sheds light on a far more extensive network of resistance and rebellion amongst enslaved Africans that has largely gone ignored by historians and he reveals how central the slavery question was to the wider movements of 1776.

Chapters

• Opening and Intro to Dr. Horne
• Is the American revolution a purely bourgeois revolution?
• Can we salvage the optimism of 1776?
• Is there a revolutionary tradition in America?
• Understanding slave rebellions and resistance pre-1776
• How can history help the "class vs. race" debate that often divides the left?
• How is "counterrevolution" related to Trump? Is Trump Bonapartist or Fascist?
• How can socialists contest the two capitalist parties in America?
• Closing and future of Dr. Horne's scholarship and work

Please join our Patreon to support us and get early access to all of our interviews, seminars and videos (https://www.patreon.com/c/torsiongroups). 

Dr. Gerald Horne holds the Moores Professorship of History and African American Studies. His research has addressed issues of racism in a variety of relations involving labor, politics, civil rights, international relations and war. He has also written extensively about the film industry. Dr. Horne is the author of more than thirty books and one hundred scholarly articles and reviews. His current research includes two forthcoming books: The Counter-Revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery, Jim Crow and the Roots of U.S. Fascism and Revolting Capital: Racism and Radicalism in Washington, D.C., 1918-1968. His other projects include a study of U.S. imperialism in Northeast Africa, principally Egypt and Ethiopia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and a similar study concerning U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia during the same period. He won the American Book Award for The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century in 2021.

We turn to a study group on Domenico Losurdo's Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History, a crucial text for understanding class struggle within Marx and Engels’ thought that challenges populist understandings of class struggle and seriously incorporates gender, race, and post-colonial thought within the framework of class struggle. If you are interested in joining, we encourage you to support our efforts by becoming a paid patron if you can swing it, although that is not required (https://www.patreon.com/c/torsiongroups). 

READING SCHEDULE:

Nov 12 - Read to page 52

Nov 26 - Read to page 120

Dec 10 - Read to page 198

Jan 7 - Finish book, final session (link will be provided for final session)

A new interview with Henry Holland from Nietzsche POParts, a recently-founded Swiss magazine dedicated to debating Nietzsche's relevance today—essayistic yet grounded in the latest scholarship. Henry interviewed me on my book How to Read Like a Parasite (https://a.co/d/3RxOrXO). A meticulous reader and a careful scholar, Henry asks very intelligent questions that reflect a deep immersion into my book. It's clear that he had not only read the book but he was challenged by it.

If you feel so inclined or even challenged, be sure to pick up the book, available in Audible and in paperback (https://a.co/d/3RxOrXO). Read more from Nietzsche POParts and the text version of the interview will be published here (https://www.nietzsche-poparts.ch). Nietzsche POParts is set to expand to include English-language articles from 2025; until then browser translation extensions guarantee fascinating reads for those of you who don't read German!

We are joined by philosopher and Marxist intellectual Gabriel Rockhill to discuss the relevance and importance of the recently translated work, Western Marxism (Monthly Review Press, 2024) by Domenico Losurdo. In this discussion, we analyze Losurdo's book with a focus on extracting the most seminal insights and lessons from the text. We discuss the various Western Marxist thinkers that are critiqued in the text, from Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Max Horkheimer, to Theodor Adorno and others. We discuss how this text can promote a shift in the western Marxist left in today's time and why it is hitting a nerve. Learn more about Western Marxism by Losurdo please visit (https://monthlyreview.org/product/western-marxism/). 

Dr. Gabriel Rockhill is the Founding Director of the Critical Theory Workshop / Atelier de Théorie Critique, Professor of Philosophy and Global Interdisciplinary Studies at Villanova University, and the author or editor of ten books, as well as numerous scholarly and general public articles. He is also the Associate Director of Cultural Studies at Villanova University, Research Associate at the Laboratoire d’anthropologie politique – LAP (EHESS, Paris), one of the editors-in-chief of the World Marxist Review, and co-editor of the book series AIM–Anti-Imperialist Marxism.

We welcome Lacanian philosopher Samo Tomšič for a presentation and discussion on Lacan's relationship to structuralism and politics. We center this discussion around Seminar XVI, "From an Other to the Other" where we witness a shift in Lacan’s structuralism, indicated in the very seminar title: from an Other (symbolic order) to the other (enjoyment). It is not unimportant that Lacan's sole thorough engagement with Marx appears precisely in this context, an engagement that can, and probably should, be read together with the shift from the indefinite to the definite article in the Seminar’s title: “an” Other (language) is abstract, unspecified, and therefore detached from historicity; “the” other is specific and historically contextualized (surplus-value).

In this talk, Samo revisits this and other open issues regarding the transformation of Lacanian structuralism, initiated in this ground-breaking Seminar. Above all, he argues for a “partisan reading” of Lacan’s references to Marx. Although these may have been circumstantial (May ‘68) and perhaps even opportunistic (pleasing the radical students), they nevertheless open the horizon of a consistently left Lacanianism.

Please support our work to bring these presentations and new research to a public audience by joining and contributing to our Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/c/torsiongroups). 

We welcome philosopher Christopher Satoor for a discussion on the philosophy of Schelling, the great German idealist. We will focus our conversation on two Marxist critiques of Schelling in Lukács' The Destruction of Reason, to Engels' critique of Schelling from his notes on attending Schelling's lectures as a younger student.

Christopher Satoor is an expert in German idealism and a strident Schellingian, so this conversation is sure to be of interest! Get access to the readings for this discussion and seminar with Dr. Satoor by joining our Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/posts/schelling-with-109208386). 

2011 witnessed a resurgence of protest movements from the Movement of the Squares, Occupy Wall Street, to the Arab Spring. These events propelled Marxist intellectuals Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou into the limelight, resulting in a surge in their popularity. But was the precondition of their popularity based on the absence of anti-imperialism in their work? In this study group, we examine Losurdo's criticism of Žižek and Badiou regarding how they understand existing state socialism, how they theorize liberation, freedom and justice. We debrief on the text and we discuss how Western Marxism can be reborn.

We discuss Part IV: "The Triumph and Death of Western Marxism" with particular focus on the work of Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism and On Revolution. We discuss Losurdo's analysis of "recognition" from Hegel and how revolution is theorized as recognition in Marx and Engels and how subsequent liberal theories of revolution in Arendt and Nietzschean theories of Foucault promote what Losurdo sees as the "death" of Western Marxism.

We welcome Lacanian scholar Robert Beshara back to the show to discuss his new book A Psychoanalytic Biography of Ye: The Legacy of Unconditional Love. It particularly focuses on the 5-year period from 2016 to 2021 (the Shaky-Ass Years) in an effort to think psychoanalytically about Ye's complex subjectivity, his struggle with manic-depression, the thin line between the personal and the political when it comes to celebrity culture, and, of course, his aesthetic productions – be they in the form of music, video, or fashion – which the author regards as also being ethical and political projects/objects. The book takes what Ye says seriously, as opposed to dismissing him through the use of stigmatizing terms. Beshara specifically aligned his desire with Donda’s in an attempt to see him from her point of view – that is, through the legacy of unconditional love.

Buy the book from the publishers website with the following discount code PROMO25 https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-2886-4

Learn more about Robert Beshara's work at https://sites.google.com/site/robertkbeshara. 

We examine Losurdo's criticism of western Marxism in relation to anticolonial revolution following the Second World War. We discuss Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Max Horkheimer's Authoritarian State, Althusser's antihumanist turn, Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, Adorno's Nietzschean pessimism, and Tronti's workerism. We discuss how Losurdo pinpoints an aversion to the anticolonial revolution in the Marxist theories that are generated by these thinkers. We discuss the merits of Losurdo's polemic, where it hits the mark and where it falls short.

Please join us at https://www.patreon.com/torsiongroups. 

In our second session, we discuss Domenico Losurdo's theory of the birth of Western Marxism as a response to the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. We begin with a few remarks on the Marxist theory of intellectuals and power, particularly how imperialism fragments the intellectual in relationship to the working class. We then discuss Losurdo's arguments about how western and eastern Marxism begin to take form and contrast one another in terms of the national struggle, state theory, messianism, and priorities of emancipation.

We discuss Losurdo's theory that, at least in practice, western Marxists develop an anarchist political practice. Our aim in this study group is to learn the practical challenges facing Marxist politics in our time. Please join our Patreon to study this text with us: https://www.patreon.com/torsiongroups 

We are discussing Domenico Losurdo's newly translated work, Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, How It Can Be Reborn in a public study group. Our aim is to learn the practical challenges facing Marxist politics in our time through a close reading method. Each session begins with a brief talk on the salient themes and concepts and then proceeds to group discussion. Order the book from the Monthly Review. Learn more about how to get involved and support us at (https://www.patreon.com/torsiongroups). 

We are joined by Aymeric Monville, author of Neocapitalism According to Michel Clouscard and publisher of Delga Editions to discuss the work of French Marxist philosopher Michel Clouscard. In this interview, we discuss Clouscard's thought, his major works, concepts and ideas. Michel Clouscard was a prominent French Marxist philosopher whose work aimed to reveal the collusion between capitalism and French theory, represented by thinkers ranging from Lévi-Strauss, Lacan to Deleuze, constructing his own concept of neo-Kantianism to describe these thinkers. Clouscard developed a philosophical approach around the idea of the social contract and was highly influenced by the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx, he postulated that "the constitutive principle of any society is the relation between production and consumption".

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Chapters:

• Clouscard's Critique of French Theory
• Clouscard's Dissertation Being and the Code (L'Etre et le Code)
• Clouscard's Concept of Bourgeois Ideology and Neo-Kantianism
• Neo-fascism and the Ideology of Desire
• Clouscard's Theory of the Middle Strata & Neo-fascism
• Clouscard's Style
• The Capitalism of Seduction: Key Ideas
• Clouscard's Method
• The Paths of Praxis (Clouscard's later work)

Please join our Patreon to support us and get early access to all of our interviews, seminars and videos.

We are joined by philosopher Stuart Blaney to discuss the thought of Jacques Rancière, his work on 19th century worker autodidacts and his theories of emancipation, aesthetics and equality. This conversation is based around a forthcoming book by Stuart Blaney that is entitled, Equality and Freedom in Rancière and Foucault with Bloomsbury Books.

Please join our Patreon community to get early access to our interviews and seminars (https://www.patreon.com/torsiongroups).

We explore the big philosophical questions at the heart of Marxism. Does Marxism require a supplementary philosophy such as Nietzscheanism or Freudianism to properly ground its practice? How have the changing material conditions post-2008 shaped Marxist thought and practice? What is the best Marxist response to speculative realism, a major movement in contemporary philosophy? To explore these questions we are joined by Marxist scholar and writer Conrad Hamilton who is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at East China Normal University.

Hamilton is the author of the forthcoming book, Marxism Contra Subjectivity (forthcoming from Brill) which looks at the philosophical impasses facing Marxism in a post-2008 conjuncture, with a particular focus on speculative realism, Althusserianism and different strains of French Marxism. We begin our discussion with Hamilton's analysis of Nietzsche's place in Marxism after World War II. We focus on Hamilton's recent essay on Nietzsche and French thought and his review of my book How to Read Like a Parasite. We then discuss some of the ideas in his forthcoming book on Marxism, philosophy and epistemology. Stay tuned for a symposium on Hamilton's book hosted by our study collective when it comes out.

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Chapters:

0:00 - Introduction to Conrad Hamilton

4:11 - Recurrent Reaction: Nietzsche and the Thought of the French Middle Strata

21:10 - Nietzschean Appropriations and Marxism after World War II

30:17 - The Problems with the Nietzschean "extra class" left

48:30 - Does Marxism require a comprehensive philosophy?

1:12:10 - Speculative Realism, Real Abstraction and Marxism post-2008

1:22:20 - Where is the subject of the proletariat today?

1:43:50 - Why does philosophy matter to political Marxism?

Show Notes:

"The Monsters We Become" by Conrad Hamilton (https://cosmonautmag.com/2024/05/the-monsters-we-become-on-how-to-read-like-a-parasite)

"Recurrent Reaction: Nietzsche and the Thought of the French Middle Strata" by Conrad Hamilton (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-13635-1)

We welcome Marxist philosopher John McClendon to the show for an in-depth conversation on his philosophical outlook, his work on African American philosophy, and the role of philosophy in Marxist thought and practice. We then discuss McClendon's important book on C.L.R. James's Notes on Dialectics and its implications for Marxist philosophy in our time. If you found this conversation valuable please consider supporting us on a monthly basis at our Patreon.

The postwar period witnessed a renaissance in Nietzschean thought and interpretation, most notably with the French postmodernist readings generated by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. But what drove the French Nietzschean renaissance was in many ways supported by the work of two Italian philologists Giorgio Colli and his former student Mazzino Montinari, and their lifelong translation of Nietzsche's unpublished material and key main works. To tell this story, we are joined by German Cultural Historian Philipp Felsch to discuss his newly translated book How Nietzsche Came in from the Cold: Tale of a Redemption, published by Polity Press in June 2024.

In this newly translated book, Felsch retraces the journey of two Italian editors, Giorgio Colli and his former student Mazzino Montinari and their efforts to translate the unpublished material of Nietzsche. Felsch tells a gripping and unlikely story of how one of Europe’s most controversial philosophers was resurrected from the baleful clutch of the and transformed into an icon of postmodern thought. Order How Nietzsche Came in from the Cold.

We are joined by scholar and socialist thinker Tony, creator of ‪@1Dimee‬, an important YouTube channel that offers educational videos for a mass popular audience. In this discussion, Tony and host Daniel Tutt discuss his research, writing and video work around The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China from 1966 - 67. We examine what gave rise to the Cultural Revolution, what it tells us about class struggle and class as a political category vs. an economic category. We also broach how the Cultural Revolution has seeped into Europe, America and beyond.

For background, watch Tony's documentary on "The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" ‪and the second video "Why the Cultural Revolution Failed: Lessons for Leftists."

We welcome the poet laureate of Vermont, Bianca Stone to the show for a conversation on poetry and psychoanalysis. In recent years, Bianca has turned to psychoanalysis as a way to teach poetry and as a method to better understand the process of writing poetry. In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss how poetry relates to philosophy and politics, how to interpret poems, what the process of writing a poem is for Bianca, and much more!

John Ashbery has said that Bianca Stone is "a brilliant transcriber of her generation’s emerging pathology and sensibility" and her work has been featured in numerous publications, from the New Yorker to Poetry Magazine, and her poems have been featured in numerous literary magazines. She is the Director of the Ruth Stone House up in Vermont, check it out: https://ruthstonehouse.org.

We are joined by political theorist Benjamin Studebaker to discuss his book, The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way Is Shut, a sharp and accessible work on the political deadlocks of our present. The American economic system is slowly subjecting Americans to enormous amounts of stress, and the United States lacks the state capacity required to alleviate this stress. The elites and oligarchs have created a system that encourages citizens to blame each other. The crisis cannot be solved, the economy cannot be set right, and democracy cannot be saved. But American democracy cannot be killed, either.

In this conversation, we discuss how professionals can incorporate political rhetoric that does not alienate workers or pander to them as they seek to develop practical strategies for political change. We discuss the idea of the revolutionary subject and its viability today; why economic egalitarianism is seemingly impossible to advocate in the current system; the meaning of the subaltern (in Gramsci's sense) and how we can understand the disempowering effects of our system as one in which more and more people are made into subalterns and deprived of full citizenship. We also debate the role of the Gaza conflict and the student protests.

We are joined by writer and literary scholar Tyler Austin Harper, whose writing in The Atlantic and New York Times has raised debates on class, race and the meaning of the left in ideologically turbulent times.

In this conversation, we discuss the meaning of the left, how Marxism is to be interpreted in terms of class analysis, the merits of different interpretive models of class power and ideology, the professional or "New Class" problem which arose after the Second World War, and what is now referred to as the "PMC problem." We also discuss psychoanalysis and the theme of subjective limits and why Freud and Lacan are important for politics. To learn more about Tyler's work, please visit (https://www.bates.edu/faculty-expertise/profile/tyler-a-harper/). 

We are joined by historian Gabriel Raeburn to discuss the thought of Eugene Genovese, a firebrand Marxist historian who fundamentally transformed the academic study of slavery in the United States and who, with Christopher Lasch, attempted to launch Marxist Perspectives, a serious Marxist-centered journal that brought together the entirety of the global intellectual literati and leading Marxist scholars of the time.

With the backing of the most prominent Marxists of the time, from E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Frederic Jameson and with support from young scholars such as Barbara Fields, the journal promised to usher in a new era of Marxist intellectual output that aimed to crossover to the public. But the journal soon dissolved after only two years.

With C. Derick Varn of @VarnVlog we discuss the dynamics of what led to the dissolution of this journal and what these lessons can teach us today as we aim to infuse Marxist thinking and scholarship beyond the academy. We also discuss the thought of Eugene Genovese and Christopher Lasch, the two primary scholars behind Marxist Perspectives. To learn more about Gabriel Raeburn and to be in touch with him should you have access to any letters of Genovese for his ongoing research, please find his bio here.

We are pleased to welcome longtime friend of the show Scribe Wolf, aka A. H. Ra. In this discussion we focus on the book Noise: The Political Economy of Music by theorist Jacques Attali, a highly influential work that crosses disciplinary borders from history, music, to critical theory and Marxism. This is a wide-ranging and improvisational conversation. Definitely not to be missed. Includes a surprise new song! 

Scribe Wolf is an Appalachia-based alt-country musician who describes his project as a "folk-form residing in the punctuated stitching-through of classical technique in avant-garde substrates." Along with his musical work—which additionally spans industrial roles as a classically trained composer and an audio engineer—​Ra comes to the program with a background in Marxist, psychoanalytic, and medievalist scholarship, as well as a history of Leninist organizing. 

His new avant-metal band Lunafaction is a collaboration with Portland-based Jacob Schulte of black metal project Yfelsian; their debut single The Augury will be out on Bandcamp Friday, April 5, 2024: https://lunafaction.bandcamp.com/ 

Music video for "Possible Steps through a Moribund Arbor": https://youtu.be/i81XBcJJrpE?si=zYwi7-Qc3llELIQk 

We welcome Dr. Mohammed Sulaiman for a follow-up interview on the situation in Gaza where as of the time of recording (March 13, 2024) Israel has killed over 30,000 Palestinians. Building off our first discussion, this interview explores a number of questions listeners have wanted to raise with Mohammed about the war on Gaza. We discuss the legacy of Mohammed's teacher, Dr. Refaat Alareer who was murdered on December 6, 2023, what the future may hold for Hamas and the role of secularism in Palestinian struggle for freedom. Please join our Patreon if you enjoyed this conversation to help support us https://www.patreon.com/torsiongroups

We welcome Marxist scholars Sara Nadal-Melsió & Eduardo Cadava for a discussion on their new book "Politically Red". If as Brecht said "reading is class struggle" what does that mean for us as Marxists? How are we to orient ourselves in reading groups? How is reading political? Politically Red focuses on the work of Walter Benjamin, Frederic Jameson, Rosa Luxembourg, W.E.B. DuBois and we discuss some of the key ideas of this new book. Check it Politically Red here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262047807/politically-red 

We welcome philosopher Carlos Garrido for a conversation on the theoretical and practical challenges facing the left in America. Garrido is the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism and he specializes in Marxist theory, the history of socialism in America and pragmatist philosophy. He is a director and philosopher at the @MidwesternMarx think tank and media organization.

In this conversation we discuss the concept of the purity fetish, the variations within Western Marxism and we move to discuss the practical challenges facing the American left. We also analyze the best accounts of why socialism has never happened in America. Please check out Carlos's work https://www.midwesternmarx.com

I'm joined by Sudip Bhattacharya for a discussion on how to navigate debates on identity politics and class on the left. What are the best ways for socialists to engage in these debates without risking they end up in unproductive division and hostility? This is a productive conversation full of helpful social and political analysis. Sudip Bhattacharya is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at Rutgers University. You can find his work at outlets like Protean magazine, Jacobin, Current Affairs, Black Agenda Report, among others.

We are joined by scholar Benjamin Fong to discuss his excellent new book Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge. We discuss the history of drug policy, the role of the state in enforcing and distributing drugs, and we focus on the history of alcohol, opioids, psychedelics and marijuana. We conclude with a conversation on how psychoanalytic theory can help explain drug use.

Benjamin Y. Fong is Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett, the Honors College and Associate Director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University. He is the author of Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge (Verso 2023). He is also the co-editor (with Craig Calhoun) of The Green New Deal and the Future of Work (Columbia, 2022) and the author of Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism (Columbia, 2016).

Jacques Lacan frequently discusses religious themes in his work, from rethinking the concept of belief, to the meaning of the return to religion in modern life. In this episode, we are joined by scholar Mark Gerard Murphy to discuss his work on Lacan and theology and to introduce some salient ideas that Lacan introduces in the field of theology and religion. Mark brings both a humility and a love for spirituality to his scholarship on Lacan and I think this conversation really brings that out. We also discuss Dr. Murphy's new book on Lacan and Spiritual Direction. Hope you enjoy it!

Is liberal socialism a contradiction in terms? An oxymoron? Or are liberalism and socialism necessary for the realization of the political objectives that each share and profess? We are joined by Matt McManus, author of the forthcoming book, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism to make the case for his vision of a renewed liberal socialism for our time.

What is the legacy of the Enlightenment in political struggles today and how are socialists and Marxists to relate to the Enlightenment? Must we rely on first principles and an a priori theory of knowledge in our understanding of capitalism and exploitation? Or must we proceed on the basis of an appeal to empiricism and experience primarily in our understanding of social struggles? What is the role of philosophy in our political practice? How do we know that the political causes we champion are just or right?

We welcome Marxist thinkers Landon Frim and Max Tomba for a debate on Marxism and the Radical Enlightenment to help us get at the heart of these questions, and much more! For background reading, please see Max Tomba's Introduction to his book Insurgent Universality (download here) and Landon Frim's "Reason is Red" essay (download here).

Max Tomba is Chair and Professor of at the History of Consciousness in the Politics Department at UC Santa Cruz. His research examines time and temporalities, Marxism, critical theory (especially the first generation of the Frankfurt School), and modern and contemporary political thought. He is the author of several books, and most recently Insurgent Universality. An Alternative Legacy of Modernity, with Oxford University Press, published in 2019, which was the co-winner of the 2021 David and Elaine Spitz Prize for the best book in liberal and/or democratic theory published in 2019. 

Landon Frim is Associate Professor in Philosophy at Florida Gulf Coast University and he is a specialist in Spinoza, enlightenment rationalism and he has written in popular outlets including Jacobin Magazine, The New Republic, Salvage Magazine, and Inside Higher Ed. With Harrison Fluss, Landon wrote Prometheus and Gaia: Technology, Ecology and Anti-Humanism which is an examination of the ideological positions of Futurism and Eco-Pessimism. You can catch a great interview I conducted with Landon and Harrison Fluss on the Zer0 Books YouTube channel and on the 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 the main concepts developed in the Critique and we ask what this work offers to contemporary politics on the left and how Sartre understands Marx and Hegel. As a special gift to supporters of our program, you can download an unauthorized translation provided by Prof. Pinkard of Sartre's lecture on "The Roots of Ethics" from 1964 at the Gramsci Institute by going here https://www.patreon.com/posts/sartres-marxist-93945414. 

The thumbnail image incorporates Alexander Calder's famous painting of Sartre from 1947.

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 already resulted in the killing of over 10,000 Gazans, including 4,000 children.

In this conversation, we discuss the rise of Hamas, how Hamas fits within the wider phenomenon of political Islam and we analyze the brutal genocidal bombardment of Israel on the Gaza strip in response to the Hamas attacks into Israel in October 7th. Mohammed earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of South Australia on political Islam.

If you enjoyed this conversation, please support our work by becoming a Patron at https://www.patreon.com/torsiongroups. 

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, Lukács argued that Marxism must develop a comprehensive social ontology to understand how power relations within the society also shape and organize the social totality itself. A social ontology seeks to comprehend the ways that social relations, structures, processes and purposes are shaped or possibly contested.

We welcome Marxist scholar, thinker and writer Michael J. Thompson. Thompson teaches at William Patterson University and is the author of The Domestication of Critical Theory, Twilight of the Self: The Decline of the Individual in Late Capitalism and several other important works. In this interview we discuss the legacy of western Marxism, the neo-idealist turn in the Frankfurt School, how to think the return of class in out time, and the work of the later Lukács and the project on critical social being. Please join us on Patreon for as much as $1.50 per month to help us continue to bring you interviews and seminars: https://www.patreon.com/torsiongroups 

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 Palestine liberation today.

Please read Jamil's latest article on Truthout "Media’s Selective Moral Outrage Manufactures Consent for Palestinian Genocide"

https://truthout.org/articles/medias-selective-moral-outrage-manufactures-consent-for-palestinian-genocide/ 

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 Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. She is one of the editors of the volume The Lost Revolution: AFŽ between Myth and Forgetting (Sarajevo, 2016).