Explore every episode of the podcast PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

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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 the scapegoat mechanism from Violence and the Sacred (https://link.amazon/B0aOFZum7).

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

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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

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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-palantir.html
Adorno and the Palantir Manifesto https://smtsmtpostmodern.substack.com/p/palantir-flunks-out-of-the-frankfurt
Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School https://www.boundary2.org/2020/07/moira-weigel-palantir-goes-to-the-frankfurt-school/

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

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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 rob civilized people on their way home from church.

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/ZFOSdqhpuaI?si=86JJOjAuxQl7lrhv
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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 by Leif Weatherby (https://amzn.to/4bipjYu)

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.

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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/S0004370207001452

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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/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html

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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  
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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.


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This week we inspect the latest form of anthropotechnics, its surrounding moral panic, and American Psycho comparisons (Baudrillard was right about everything).

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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. 

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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Everyone is talking about Canada leading the charge into the New World Order. Are we excited yet? Watch the glorious father of our nation deliver the goods at Davos, or not.

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Stoicism is on its comeback among dumb 20 year olds, which is too bad because Epicureanism is the superior Athenian philosophy. We discuss hedonism, happiness, and the Swerve™. 

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The history of Stoicism is long and complicated, and we didn't want to end with AI alpha male YouTube channels, so here is a rundown focused on Greek Stoicism, some comparisons to Buddhism, and whether or not this philosophy could help in 2026. 

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From Zero to hero: Samantha Fulnecky has been honoured by the Oklahoma government and named "an American hero" for her paper submission to her Psych course in which she claimed it is demonic to believe in more than one gender. Still, the Pill Pod heats up over whether she deserved the grade she received…

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Read Samantha's essay and the instructors' comments here:
https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/education/2025/11/25/ou-oklahoma-samantha-fulnecky-read-essay-gender-bible/87463858007/

It's the bi-yearly event in the ongoing race war between analytic and continental philosophy. Philosophers of all stripes invited themselves to partake in the latest and stupidest skirmish, and so we have undertaken a reading of the match that lit the powder keg: How Continental Philosophers "Argue": On the Unseriousness of the Discipline (https://benthams.substack.com/p/how-continental-philosophers-argue)

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A Signifying Chain (or symbolic chain, or signifying web) is a structuralist concept developed by Jacques Lacan and others ("The Agency of the Letter"; https://amzn.to/4p6wx6l).

Signifying chains structure discourses and we believe, explain the growing rift in conservative politics.

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The Pill Pod reads Daniel Kolitz' anthropology of the gooners in Harper's Magazine https://harpers.org/archive/2025/11/the-goon-squad-daniel-kolitz-porn-masturbation-loneliness/ and we find it's all connected man

Other sources cited included Lacan Seminar X, Freud Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Baudrillard Transparency of Evil

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We conclude our Lacan series with what Fink says is the desired end of Lacanian psychoanalysis. And, the ends of psychoanalysis coincide with some valuable insights for Lacan's theorizing beyond psychoanalysis. 
Works cited are Fink's Lacanian Subject (ch. 5; https://amzn.to/4qz1Fgx) and A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis (ch. 10; https://amzn.to/4hAIKh5).

Richard Ledes, director of the films Adieu Lacan and V13, explains his process, namely, adapting French plays about psychoanalysis into English-language films. He connects the seduction of nascent fascism in 1913 Vienna to the present moment a century later.


Find V13 on AppleTV, Prime Video

Find Ledes' catalogue at https://www.richardledes.com/

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The Pill Pod looks at the structure of the perverts in Episode 5 of our series on Lacan. Find the other episodes at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

Sources:
Jacques Lacan - Seminar X, "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious", Ecrits
Bruce Fink - Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis

The Pill Pod looks at the chatbot psychosis phenomenon and compares it to Lacan's clinical structure of psychosis.


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Sources:
Jacques Lacan - Seminar III

Bruce Fink - Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis

"People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies" Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/

"They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent them Spiraling" New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/technology/chatgpt-ai-chatbots-conspiracies.html

1Dime joins Erik and Victor to discuss Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism. We cover the popularity of the book, the term, and then wonder whether left-populist electoral campaigns perform the same cathartic function as anti-capitalist TV shows.

See more from 1Dime: https://www.youtube.com/@1Dimee
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We wanted to review some Lacan because everybody's still desiring, and Bruce Fink's Lacanian Subject (1995) is quite often touted as the best unofficial intro, and we can see why.

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This is the book: https://amzn.to/4oubPxQ

In a recent interview with the New York Times Peter Thiel, one of the world's most powerful men, gave ample evidence that he should be institutionalized before he hurts anyone else.

Link to the full interview https://youtu.be/vV7YgnPUxcU?si=qSLrUmKeEblb4jYS

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Pill pod discuss the public media representations of Epstein and Gaza before a seamless transition into a discussion of Giorgio Agamben's concepts of 1) Sovereignty 2) Bare Life and 3) States of Exception.

The FULL OMNIBUS edition of homo sacer is here, but the sections are also available separately.

Pills is away, so 1Dime Tony came present a thesis he's working at. Tony rejoins the pill pod to excavate the terms "woke right" and the semiotics of "woke" more broadly. We don't always agree, but we attempt to deduce which conservative faction is accusing which other of wokeness, although it is sometimes tough going figuring what they mean by the term. Articles:

• https://americanreformer.org/2024/05/is-there-a-woke-right/
• https://reason.com/2025/06/11/the-rise-of-the-woke-right/
• https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/woke-right/681716/
• https://www.theamericanconservative.com/is-woke-right-a-useful-term/

If you enjoyed this education, 1Dime has a YouTube channel, a podcast called 1Dime Radio, and a patreon page (https://www.patreon.com/OneDime) that are easily accessible if you're looking for more insights.

According to Derrida, metaphysicians have spent 2000 years conceptually boxing-in metaphor because they don't want to admit their dependence on figurative language. This has allowed them to trick themselves into believing that fiction and non-fiction are fundamentally different; that one can be true and the other cannot. In White Mythology, Derrida discovers the metaphors buried in philosophy from Plato to Hegel, even as they try to hide them.

We spent three weeks reading this text, you can find the episodes at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

We go deeper into Maurice Merleau-Ponty's insights in The Visible and The Invisible, e.g. The Flesh of the World, the Chiasm, and the Intertwining and what these mean for a meditative experience on the daily. 

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This week we looked into OG critic of fascism Wilhelm Reich, who wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascism right after the Nazis were elected in 1933. Reich was among the first "neomarxists", and believed that Marxists need to understand psychoanalysis to understand Fascism.

Link to text

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We compare Maurice Merleau-Ponty's insights in an unfinished work he wrote before his death to the meditations of Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna 18 centuries prior.

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The New York Times has claimed that three "fascism experts" are fleeing Trump and "going abroad". In truth, these are not (all) fascism experts, and they did not flee, in fact they have been in Canada for almost a year because they got jobs at the University of Toronto. We looked into their research, which is the same tired, lib, horseshoe theory bullshit that Nazism and Communism are the same thing.  

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We catch you up on Canadian politics by introducing you to our new Prime Minister via his book VALUE(S): Building A Better World For All (https://amzn.to/4dj1oYJ).  

Bono called it ‘A radical book that speaks out accessibly' (lol)

Yea we missed a lot of news, but we wanted to cover the Trump regime's war on higher education. As a group with a lot of university affiliations, we hate universities too, but here we try to diagnose the reasons for the recent clashes.

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After a long hiatus, Pills returns to the main show with some new musings over The Last Samurai, Buddhism and the phenomenology of religion. The Kyoto School and Nagarjuna were mentioned in the episode, but we didn't get into much depth this time round. 

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