5 Star Tossers

Jake can't stop cursing in this episode. We discuss the terribly obnoxious, punch-deserving, smirk that refuses to listen to the Other. Though prevalent especially in the world of Maga punditry, whether it be Zionists smirking at the word genocide, or Michael Knowles donning smarm as his personality, the shit-eating grin is a weaponized rejection of thought. It also reveals the shame and guilt of the would be cocky grinner. Andy thinks about how despairing it is to see this contagious proliferation overtake our culture, especially with the crying laughing emoji face. Sagi sees it has an abuse of shifting contexts, a way to escape any contextuality, and retreat into a hollow shell of superiority. We also took this opportunity to introduce Freud's idea of the defense mechanism, specifically the conversion symptoms of hysterics.

Audient!

This episode imposes upon us (well Jake mostly) the horrors of shoddy writing and bad aesthetics. And yet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creation seems to be very much alive. How is that? Why?

We get to touch on some long-neglected Star here, Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais, hearkening back to its post-structuralist origins.  We go back down memory lane to when me and Jake were reading this exact critique of that exact attitude, that time between Analytic philosopher John Searle and the evil Continentalist Jacques Derrida and his essay Signature, Event, Cuntext. There, Derrida shows how each utterance, of necessity, breaches whatever context is assigned to it, thus always opening the way for what Holmes keeps pretending to have had already hermetically closed: the other possibility. 

Sherlock Holmes is shown to play out a fantasy of control, one that professionalizes thinking in much the same way an AI does. Holmes' "method of logical deduction" is explored in this vein to reveal a logical abduction, where Truth is nowhere acknowledged, and the process simply arrives at the least improbable outcome. Alas, since the entire context, the full "One", will always be breachable - we were thinking also of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem here - the probability will forever be dangling, insecure; or worse, open to various biases of 'normativity.'

Jake, once again, recalls Jack Bauer, as a distilled version, a sublimated Sherlock Holmes; one that stopped bothering about that (quite flimsy) justification, along with the 'method' Holmes uses to construct it. If it was always bullshit, why not go right to the point?

Our perverts also hone in on the obvious closeted Homosexuality that emanates from this dynamic duo, and all the libidinal affirmations and denials that move this - many times unspoken, but always quite present - sexually-tense relationship. 'No Homo,' this time operating as a literary device...

Stars:

IL VAUT MIEUX LYOTARD QUE JAMAIS; Pervs 'R Us; Beast & Sovereign.

You gotta listen to it to believe it. Jake, Sagi, and Andy go Foucault, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lacan and Freud all over Nosferatu's Ass. There's demonic possessions, feminine jouissance, the Marquise de Sade shows up, Sagi defends masculine dignity, Andy introduces the Symbolic of Blood, Jake folds the text inside and out, Dracula is proclaimed the OG gooner, and we couldn't edit out all the laughter.

Greetings, audient!

David Lynch passed away, and Sagi insisted on embarrassing his memory and us by making a tribute pod.

Of course an oeuvre analysis is not Tossers style, but we found a nice angle in comparing his The Lost Highway with David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. 

Both movies deal in the impasses and monstrosities of masculine desire, a shared theme that reveals a deep, informative, difference between the two directors, each using the literary device of the double in his own film, but in each director's own unique way, unique language. 

Jake saw this difference in the light of Nietzsche's old distinction, from The Birth of Tragedy, between the Apollonian and the Dionysian; Sagi suggests that Lynch to Cronenberg is like dream to trauma.

We unpack this huge set of knots, and toss many more strands into the air besides.

And there's a beautiful Nietzsche quote at the end! So...

...have a listen.

Stars: Beast & Sovereign; Pervs 'R Us; Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais.

Welcome to a sad episode about the sad state of our world. If you thought the nerds taking over for the jocks was a sign of liberation, think again. The spiteful nature of the nerds knows no limits and certainly knows even less about care. Referring at times to the now canceled 1984 movie Revenge of the Nerds, we read this fantasy into the new conservative self-made man, the one who "does their own research," but never rereads. Are algorithims and social media inducing us all to live as socially awkward nerds? And what about Trump, the famous nerd hater? Why and how does he use the broligarch tech nerds to fuel his spiteful reign? From the appropriation of Black Liberation to the fantasy of a justified rape, the revenge of the nerd hits several pressure points of our culture today. Special thanks to Jack for recommending this topic!

Hello, audient,

We are discussing the NBA's crisis of viewership these days, how to analyze it, where to approach it from, who to blame...

Jake takes the side of the NBA "worker"; a late-stage capitalism employee that has already fully adjusted to the true mentality of the sport - personal profit. He also raises the issue of homoeroticism, which becomes particularly resonant with the fantasies of the white man towards the black man's body - othered, mystified and "supercharged."
It's a fantasy with a long history.

This leads to a discussion of the meaning of competition and team efforts, as well as more homoerotic identifications that, unlike the repressed, kept coming back(!)
Sagi will call it all a Protestant conspiracy, a fracking-hollow of the competition signifier. But it might be another homophobic deflection...

We left a couple of spicy nuggets in there as well.
Can you find them?

Stars: Marx Grudge; Pervs 'R Us; WWJD; Beast & Sovereign

Sagi and Jake take on the toxic political masculinity of Jack Bauer on their own. They speak about how the State of Emergency places Jack in a position outside the law, both beast (criminal) and sovereign. In this state Jack finds a Christian faith that ensures that every extra-legal decision he makes will save the lives of  pure innocent and good Americans, specifically his erotic yet virginal daughter.

Dear, stubborn, listener,
Are you still there?

For our weirdly unlikely 50th Episode -- mine and Jake's Gold Anniversary or something(?) -- we went populist. Donald Trump's re-election is now fact, but the meaning of that fact remains to be articulated, engaged-with.
We seem to be in agreement that more than Trump's winning the elections, the Democratic party lost it. Jake calls it 'libtardation;' we think it is a new socio-political category.
 
Were they ever an alternative? Trump's campaign (among others) exposed long-standing hypocrisies surrounding all the things they care about. The people of America were faced with an alternative between a fake solution that has proven itself to be ineffectual, and a visceral expression of rage that had not been seen before.

Woke leftism plays a role we will discuss at length in this episode; both an agent and a symptom of said hypocrisies. A kind of Wittgensteinian language game, as Jack puts it, which rewards further vivisections of ressentiment in the 'soul' of the individual, as Sagi sees it. We show this in cancel culture and how social media discourses become toxic and destructive to discourse (where words and signs of value are being cancelled left and right, pun intended). Not to mention stuff like 'DEI'  and its policing of "diversity" "equity" and "inclusion" -- three values abused by the left, mined hollow by woke discourse until it is too toxic to consider, and left ripe for the Bannons of America to prove that these values were always inherently empty.

This emptiness, of course, is the point of the Democratic-Republican dance in a United States that has never seriously dealt with its 'spirit', that is, the contradictions that are haunting this 'manifest destiny' crowd form the first. One says 'Justice' and the other says 'Power'; and so long as Justice keeps ridiculing and denying the role of power in Justice -- what Derrida called the force of Law -- they leave the values to rot from within until it's the other partner's turn to say "hey this value is defunct, so let's give up on it altogether."
As Andy put it, Americans were given a choice between two right wing parties...

There's a lot more we talked about there.
Have a listen, dear audient (and despair..)

Stars: WWJD; Beast & Sovereign; Marx Grudge....

*Thumbnail courtesy of Arash Akhgari (and Sagi).

In this episode we discuss the absurdity of the taboo against cultural appropriation. Introducing specific examples like which Halloween costumes to wear, or which recipes you can and cannot cook, the Tossers argue that culture is itself appropriation, and thus the taboo attempts to inhibit something that can never be inhibited.

To emphasize this universal necessity of cultural appropriation, we introduce theories of language.

Jack introduces Wittgenstein's theory of language games and the impossibility of a private language.

Jake introduces Derrida's theory of language in Monolingualism of the Other and the Prosthesis of Origin.

Sagi makes sure that we do not simply define the ubiquity of cultural appropriation but study exactly why there is an attempt at re-appropriation that then bans certain people (always the original colonizer) from taking back again. By now, we hope you know what would Sagi do.

We read some gorgeous passages by Jacques Derrida, and discuss why the N-word and blackness are limit cases, especially in America, for thinking about cultural appropriation.

We all loved a movie, oh, actually Jack hated it.

This is a perfect episode, you should listen to it. Aside from withering take downs of the myriad misreadings of Coralie Fargeat's new movie The Substance, we introduce you to the narcissistic split of the melancholic subject. Beginning with Freud and moving to Melanie Klein, we read this movie as a visceral portrayal of the infantile position that clamors for the good breast while being persecuted by the bad one. 

Andy discusses the metonymic qualities of the beautiful ideal object, the way the body tries to merge with the sign itself. 

Sagi, on his new "tender is the heart" kick, speaks about how the absence of the mother or motherhood creates a lack that explains the monstrous psychic desires and impersonality that destroys Elizabeth and Sue.

Jake works with Andy on the Pervs R' Us ride, and then ends with a hypothesis via Marx Grudge that the Young Beautiful Woman is an ideal object that stalks us all.

Enjoy.