Blood Work – Details, episodes & analysis

We dive deep into German Walter Benjamin's seminal essay 'Towards A Critique of Violence' to try and understand violence not only as a phenomen, but also as a powerful force in society, politics, and everything around us.

You have been listening to Blood Work A Scam Goldin Production

Follow us on Bluesky, @bloodwork.show On Instagram, @bloodworkshow and on Twitter @bloodworkshow

Our theme song is Dream Weapon by Genghis Tron Artwork is provided courtesy of Kyle Kobel If you want to get in touch, email us at contact@bloodwork.show Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time

How did the American police get access to a nation's war chest? 

You have been listening to Blood Work A Scam Goldin Production

Follow us on Bluesky, @bloodwork.show On Instagram, @bloodworkshow and on Twitter @bloodworkshow

Our theme song is Dream Weapon by Genghis Tron Artwork is provided courtesy of Kyle Kobel If you want to get in touch, email us at contact@bloodwork.show Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time

What is Blood Work, and who profits from violence?

You have been listening to Blood Work A Scam Goldin Production

Follow us on Bluesky, @bloodwork.show On Instagram, @bloodworkshow and on Twitter @bloodworkshow

Our theme song is Dream Weapon by Genghis Tron Artwork is provided courtesy of Kyle Kobel If you want to get in touch, email us at contact@bloodwork.show Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time

A show examining the Economies of Violence. 

Episodes 1&2 coming 07/10/25

You have been listening to Blood Work A Scam Goldin Production

Follow us on Bluesky, @bloodwork.show On Instagram, @bloodworkshow and on Twitter @bloodworkshow

Our theme song is Dream Weapon by Genghis Tron Artwork is provided courtesy of Kyle Kobel If you want to get in touch, email us at contact@bloodwork.show Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time

What has 4 wheels, a steering wheel, and massive destructive potential?

You have been listening to Blood Work A Scam Goldin Production

Follow us on Bluesky, @bloodwork.show On Instagram, @bloodworkshow and on Twitter @bloodworkshow

Our theme song is Dream Weapon by Genghis Tron Artwork is provided courtesy of KT Kobel If you want to get in touch, email us at contact@bloodwork.show Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time

Come join us, won’t you, for a deep dive into one of the twentieth century’s biggest assholes. Say hello to Carl Schmitt: Jurist, legal scholar, political philosopher… Nazi? Look: We’re only showing you him so you know how to get away from him.

Support the show on Patreon

You have been listening to Blood Work A Scam Goldin Production

Follow us on Bluesky, @bloodwork.show On Instagram, @bloodworkshow and on Twitter @bloodworkshow

Our theme song is Dream Weapon by Genghis Tron Artwork is provided courtesy of KT Kobel

Sources:

Gopal Balakrishan – The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt

Angus Brown – ‘The Left Should Have Nothing to Do with Carl Schmitt’, Jacobin

Stuart Elden – ‘Reading Schmitt Geopolitically: Nomos, territory and Großraum’, Radical Philosophy

Carl Schmitt – Dictatorship

Carl Schmitt – The Concept of the Political

Carl Schmitt – The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum

Carl Schmitt – Political Theology

(Image: Carl Schmitt’s grave in Plettenberg, Germany. The Greek inscription reads, “KAI NOMON EGNŌ” / “And I Know the Law”) If you want to get in touch, email us at contact@bloodwork.show Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time

We take a break from scheduled programming to commemorate the passing of one of the greatest monsters of the early 21st century, looking back at some of his greatest hits of being a rancid asshole and how they show our exceptional times might not be all that exceptional.

This episode is a little thing we've been calling internally, "The Gregk Directive", for when the news simply is too good to resist.

Support the show on Patreon

You have been listening to Blood Work A Scam Goldin Production

Follow us on Bluesky, @bloodwork.show On Instagram, @bloodworkshow and on Twitter @bloodworkshow

Our theme song is Dream Weapon by Genghis Tron Artwork is provided courtesy of KT Kobel If you want to get in touch, email us at contact@bloodwork.show Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time

In the mid-1990s, the political philosopher Giorgio Agamben began a 20-year project exploring the origin of what Michel Foucault called biopolitics – the governance of populations through technocratic management of aspects of their biological lives and the conditions intended to make live, or let die. Performing an archaeology of politics tracing back to the Greeks, Agamben identified a number of governmental apparatuses through which our world is both split, and bound, in two, between the included and the excluded; the inside and the outside; the human and the not-quite-yet.

In this episode, we talk to Serene Richards, a Lecturer in Law at New York University London, and author of the book Biopolitics as a System of Thought. During our conversation, we discuss the origins of two of Agamben’s most famous political concepts: Homo Sacer, the sacred man or ‘bare life’; and the State of Exception, the mechanism by which Law establishes its own ‘inside’ through the creation of an ‘outside’ that lies beyond it, and yet which must be included. Later we discuss Serene’s book, her concept of Smart Being, and how our techno-capitalist moment has seen biopolitical logics extend beyond the political realm, penetrating even how we think, perceive and understand our own lives.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/biopolitics-as-a-system-of-thought-9781350412095/

You have been listening to Blood Work A Scam Goldin Production

Follow us on Bluesky, @bloodwork.show On Instagram, @bloodworkshow and on Twitter @bloodworkshow

Our theme song is Dream Weapon by Genghis Tron Artwork is provided courtesy of KT Kobel If you want to get in touch, email us at contact@bloodwork.show Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time

With the quotidian workhorse of urban terror now well on its way, we round out our story by looking at how the car bomb became conscious of the city as its object, target and victim, its proliferation during the Iraq War years, and its seeming culmination as both a herald and producer of escalatory political nihilism.

You have been listening to Blood Work A Scam Goldin Production

Follow us on Bluesky, @bloodwork.show On Instagram, @bloodworkshow and on Twitter @bloodworkshow

Our theme song is Dream Weapon by Genghis Tron Artwork is provided courtesy of KT Kobel If you want to get in touch, email us at contact@bloodwork.show Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time

For their first ever Christmas episode, Gregk and producer Thomas get together for a casual fireside chat, discussing some of the key questions animating Blood Work, reflecting on the project’s progress so far, where they’d like to take it next year, and offer some perspectives on how this thing that we call violence connects to that other thing that we call politics.

And then, as a little Christmas Treat, Gregk tells Thomas about the history of one of the worst hangovers of ‘90s counter-consumer culture jamming, and how it’s connected to some of the worst people in US culture today. New Yorkers, you knew it was bad, but if only you knew how bad it really is.

If you enjoyed this episode:

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Blood Work is a Scam Goldin Production This episode was produced by Thomas O’Mahony Our theme song is ‘Dream Weapon’ by Genghis Tron Our artwork is provided courtesy of KT Kobel

THIS WEEK IN VIOLENCE – AUMF LAMF

The US’ Authorisation for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) 2001 is an authorisation so broad and loosely defined that it renders the problem of the square peg and the round hole moot; the hole’s aperture can always be widened, and virtually any peg can be hammered through. This week, I’ve picked three articles which demonstrate how its passage inaugurated a permanent, global State of Exception for US warmaking, how recklessly this aperture has been exploited, and how dangerous that is for global governance.

Available now, exclusive to Patreon supporters.

Image: Cover artwork from the 1985 The Christmas issue of An Phoblacht/Republican News.

Source: The Irish Republican Digital Archive